Flat-Fee Asset Search Services: No Contracts, No Subscriptions

What Does The Model: Aligned Incentives, Published Numbers Mean?

A flat fee asset search means the published price is the price. Most of this industry prices research one of three ways: hourly billing, where the client bears the risk of a slow search; consultation-gated quotes, where the price appears only after a sales call; or subscriptions, where access fees run whether you search or not. Each model contains a quiet conflict with the client’s interest. Hourly billing rewards slow work. Gated quotes let the price flex to the client. Subscriptions monetize the months you did not need research. Fees and procedures described on this page are current as of August 8, 2026. A flat fee asset search means the published price is the price, with no contracts and no scope creep.

Flat, published fees remove all three conflicts at once. The number is on the order page before any conversation happens, it is the same number for every client, and it does not grow with the hours the search consumes. That alignment, more than any slogan, is what no contracts and flat fee asset search pricing means here, and it has been the model since 2018 without exception. Our market pricing guide shows how the whole industry prices; this page explains why we price the way we do.

What the Flat Fee Actually Includes

Each fee is all-inclusive for its report. The $195 Asset Profile Report covers the full nationwide scope: real property across 3,250+ counties, business interests through all 50 Secretary of State registries, vehicles, vessels, and aircraft through their federal and state systems, UCC filings, and recorded judgments and liens, all cross-referenced against associated parties. It includes the analyst layer, name standardization, entity connection, live-versus-satisfied lien classification, source attribution on every finding, the delivered PDF, and a follow-up consultation to walk through what the findings mean.

Just as important is what never appears: per-state surcharges when the subject turns out to own property in six states, database access fees, report reissue charges, or an invoice line you did not see coming. If the search takes our analysts fourteen hours instead of four, that is our problem by design. The fee you saw is the fee you pay, which is the entire point of publishing it.

No Contracts, No Subscriptions, No Minimums

Volume clients are where no contracts stops being a slogan and becomes a stance. Collection agencies running dozens of account-prioritization searches monthly, and law firms ordering pre-suit evaluations on every significant case, get volume attention, batch handling, and a direct analyst relationship, and they sign nothing to get it. If our reports stop earning the next order, the next order should go elsewhere; that pressure is a feature of the model, not a bug.

The same goes for subscriptions and minimums: there are none. A solo practitioner ordering one search this year and an agency ordering two hundred receive the identical product at the identical published price. Access to professional records research should not require a platform fee for the privilege of being a customer.

The Three Tiers, and Which One You Need

The $95 Skip Trace locates a subject and confirms identifiers: current address, aliases, and the foundation for service of process or further research. The $195 Asset Profile Report is the core product and the right answer for most matters, from divorce and probate to due diligence and collectibility evaluation: the full nationwide asset picture, source-attributed. The $295 Creditor-Status Profile adds the FCRA-permissible depth reserved for legitimate collection of an existing judgment, the tier enforcement-stage creditors order.

Choosing is usually simple: if you hold a judgment and are enforcing it, the $295 tier exists for you; if you need to know what someone owns for any other legitimate purpose, the $195 report answers it; if you only need to find the person, start at $95. When a matter genuinely does not fit the tiers, we say so before taking the order rather than after.

The Arithmetic, Worked

Put numbers on the comparison. A competent hourly investigator at $75-$150/hr running a genuine multi-jurisdiction records search, county indexes in three states, entity work in two registries, lien classification, write-up, plausibly bills eight to fifteen hours: $600 to $2,250 for work our model prices at $195 flat, with the total unknown until the invoice lands. The hourly client is not paying for better research; they are paying for a pricing model that transfers efficiency risk onto them.

Now run the triage math that agencies live by. A $195 report against a $30,000 judgment is 0.65 percent of the amount at stake, purchased to decide whether the other 99.35 percent is pursuable at all. Across a portfolio, that fixed cost turns collection strategy into arithmetic: order the report, read the reachable-asset picture, deploy enforcement dollars only where the documented equity supports them. Predictability is what makes the math run, and predictability is precisely what hourly and gated models cannot sell.

Flat-Fee Versus the Other Models, Honestly

Hourly investigators bill $75-$150/hr and are the right tool for fieldwork: surveillance, interviews, physical verification. For records research, hourly billing means a multi-jurisdiction search can cost several multiples of a flat fee with the total unknowable in advance, and the biller has no economic reason to be fast. Subscription data platforms invert the problem: low per-search cost, but access fees regardless of use, raw aggregator output with no analyst layer, and no accountability for what the data misses.

Consultation-gated pricing deserves its own mention because it is the industry default. A firm that will not publish its price is preserving the ability to size the fee to the client, and the sales call exists to do exactly that. Our buyer’s guide turns all of this into a checklist you can run against any vendor, including us; the pricing test is the fastest tell on the list.

Transparent Terms: What We Will Not Do

The flat-fee promise extends into how the engagement runs. No upsells mid-search: the report level you ordered is the report you receive, and if findings genuinely justify deeper work, that is a conversation with a new published price, never a unilateral charge. No pressure tactics tied to fabricated urgency. And no promises the law forbids: bank account information is protected by federal privacy law, so no tier of ours sells account or balance locates at any price, a line we state as plainly on our bank account guide as we do here.

The compliance architecture is part of the same transparency: FCRA governing the creditor tier, published by the Federal Trade Commission, and GLBA limits on financial records, with the FTC’s guidance public. A published price and a published set of limits come from the same instinct: clients should know exactly what they are buying before they buy it.

When Flat-Fee Is Not the Answer

Honesty about the model includes its edges. Genuinely custom engagements, multi-entity corporate unwinding, decades-deep historical research, unusually wide associated-party networks, do not fit a standard fee, and pretending they do would mean either padding the standard price for everyone or cutting corners on the complex matter. Those projects get a defined written scope and a quoted project price before work begins, which is flat-fee thinking applied at a larger size: the number still comes first.

Similarly, matters that need courtroom fieldwork, testimony, or surveillance belong with a licensed investigator, sometimes alongside our records work rather than instead of it. Sending a matter to the right tool, including when the right tool is not us, is the same discipline as publishing the price.

A Short History of the Model

The firm launched in 2018 with the flat-fee schedule published on day one, a decision made after watching too many clients arrive burned by open-ended engagements elsewhere. Since then the schedule has changed exactly twice, each time announced plainly on the site rather than discovered on an invoice, arriving at today’s $95, $195, and $295. Nothing else about the model has moved: no contracts then, none now; no subscriptions then, none now.

That stability is deliberate. A published price only builds trust if it stays published and stays honored, through busy seasons, complex subjects, and multi-state sprawl alike. Eight years in, the model has outlasted several rounds of competitors’ pricing experiments for a simple reason: clients who know exactly what research costs order research earlier, and research ordered earlier is worth more to the matter it serves.

One more piece of arithmetic belongs here because clients ask about it: the cost of the wrong model compounding. An agency running two hundred searches a year at gated or hourly pricing does not just pay more per report; it pays an unknowable amount, which means research gets rationed, which means enforcement dollars get deployed against undocumented debtors, which is where recoveries quietly die. Two hundred searches at a published $195 is a number a controller can approve in one meeting.

That is what a pricing model is actually for: not to look friendly on a website, but to let the people who need research order it without friction, every time the matter calls for it, at a cost the math already accounted for, on every matter, without a second thought.

Who the Model Serves Best

Law firms budget it as a predictable line item: a known research cost attached to every significant matter instead of an open-ended engagement. Collection agencies build it into account triage economics, where a fixed cost against a known recovery range makes the order decision arithmetic. Lenders and businesses slot it into due-diligence checklists. And individuals navigating a divorce, an estate, or an unpaid judgment get the same institutional product at the same published price, with no professional gatekeeping.

Every engagement, from the first to the five hundredth, runs the standard described across this site: primary sources, analyst review, source-attributed findings, 24 to 72 hour delivery. The pricing model is not separate from the quality standard; it is the mechanism that enforces it. Order through the order page and the published number is the last surprise you will encounter.

Flat-Fee Model: Frequently Asked Questions