Small businesses need to check vendor creditworthiness before signing contracts, but services like Dun & Bradstreet are too expensive for occasional use and lock users into long-term contracts.
A lightweight platform aggregating public business records, state filings, court records, and UCC filings into a simple vendor risk score. Pay per report instead of annual subscriptions. No long-term contracts.
Pay-per-report ($5-25 per lookup) with optional monthly plan for higher-volume users
The pain is real but episodic. SMBs feel it sharply when signing a big contract with an unknown vendor, but it's not a daily burning problem. Most SMBs currently just Google the vendor or ask for references—they don't know formal credit checks exist for businesses. The Reddit signal confirms price pain for D&B users, but the broader market needs education that this solution category exists.
There are ~33M small businesses in the US. If even 5% need occasional vendor checks (1.65M) at $15 average per report and 4 reports/year, that's ~$100M addressable. The adjacent market (ongoing monitoring, compliance) expands this significantly. Not a massive TAM but very healthy for a bootstrapped SaaS.
SMBs already pay $20-100 per business credit report from existing providers, so the price anchor exists. At $5-25 per report, you're significantly undercutting the market—willingness to pay at this price point is high. The risk is that many SMBs currently pay $0 (they just wing it), so you're competing with 'do nothing' as much as with D&B. The conversion challenge is real but the price point is right.
A solo dev can build the MVP in 6-8 weeks. Public business records (Secretary of State filings, UCC filings, court records) are available but fragmented across 50 states with inconsistent APIs and formats. PACER (federal court records) charges per page. The data aggregation is the hard part—not algorithmically complex, but tedious scraping/normalization work. A simple risk score algorithm is straightforward. The risk scoring model doesn't need to be perfect for MVP, just better than nothing. Consider starting with 5-10 key states.
This is the strongest signal. The gap between enterprise solutions ($5K+/year) and 'just Google it' is enormous. Cortera is the closest competitor with per-report pricing, but they're poorly marketed, their UX is dated, and they're not purpose-built for the occasional-use SMB. Nobody owns the 'Stripe of business credit checks' positioning—simple, transparent, pay-as-you-go. The incumbents are structurally incentivized to protect their subscription revenue and won't chase this downmarket segment aggressively.
This is the biggest weakness. The core use case is transactional (pay-per-report), which makes revenue lumpy. Monthly plans for higher-volume users help, but most SMBs won't need enough reports to justify a subscription. You can build recurring revenue through: (1) ongoing vendor monitoring alerts, (2) portfolio risk dashboards for companies with 20+ vendors, (3) compliance/audit trail features. But the natural motion of the product is transactional, not recurring. Investors will flag this.
- +Clear, validated pricing pain against incumbent (D&B) with direct user complaints as evidence
- +Large underserved market gap between enterprise tools and 'do nothing'—no one owns the affordable SMB tier
- +Low price point ($5-25) reduces purchase friction and enables viral word-of-mouth in SMB communities
- +Data moat potential: once you aggregate and normalize public records across states, that's a defensible asset
- +Adjacent expansion opportunities: own credit monitoring, trade credit scoring, compliance tools
- !Data acquisition is the real moat AND the real bottleneck—scraping 50 state databases is brittle, legally gray in some jurisdictions, and maintenance-heavy
- !Transactional revenue model makes growth metrics unattractive to investors and revenue unpredictable
- !Competing with 'do nothing'—most SMBs currently skip vendor credit checks entirely, so you need to create the behavior, not just win the market
- !Accuracy liability: if your risk score gives a vendor a clean bill and they default, SMBs will blame you. Even with disclaimers, reputation risk is real
- !D&B or Creditsafe could launch a lightweight tier and crush you with their existing data advantage if you prove the market
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Start with 5-10 high-business-density states (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL). Aggregate Secretary of State filings, UCC liens, and federal court records (PACER) into a single-page vendor report with a simple red/yellow/green risk indicator. No fancy scoring model—just surface the raw signals clearly. Charge $9.99 per report. Build a clean, modern UI that makes the user feel like they're using Stripe, not a government database. Add a free 'preview' that shows basic entity info (registered agent, filing date, status) to hook users before they pay for the full report.
Free preview (basic entity lookup) -> Pay-per-report at $9.99-24.99 -> Monthly plan at $49-99/mo for 10-25 reports -> API access for platforms/fintechs at usage-based pricing -> White-label vendor risk module for accounting/procurement software -> Ongoing monitoring subscriptions ($19/mo per watched vendor portfolio)
8-12 weeks. 6-8 weeks to build MVP covering 5 states with basic report generation. 2-4 weeks to get first paying customers via targeted Reddit/SMB forum marketing, LinkedIn outreach to procurement managers, and SEO content targeting 'D&B alternatives' and 'cheap business credit check' keywords. First $1K MRR likely within 3-4 months.
- “didn't make too much sense to keep the contract long-term, a bit too expensive for us atm”
- “signed up for Dun & Bradstreet to track my company's credit profile and check vendors before working with them”
- “Pretty useful at first”