QualifyDataQualifyDataGoing direct to one AI buyer gets you one number — that buyer's number, take it or leave it. A broker puts the same archive in front of 15 AI companies, lets them bid, and submits the best offer to you. The records are the same either way. Who prices your archive, and who does the work, is not.
Both routes end in the same place: you license a cleaned copy of your records to an AI company, you keep your originals, and the AI company pays you. The routes are not different products. They are different ways of arriving at a price — and a price named by one buyer, with nobody else in the room, is a different thing from a price that 15 buyers had to compete for.
This page walks through the difference plainly: what happens on each route, who does the work, who picks the offer, and what you sign. If you already know which route you want, the check takes five minutes either way.
Five minutes. See if your archive qualifies.No cost. No commitment. No logins, no records handed over — just a few questions about the size of your archive.
Five things: how many buyers see your archive, who does the work, who picks the offer, how many times you run the process, and what you sign. Here they are side by side.
| Going direct to one buyer | Working with QualifyData | |
|---|---|---|
| Buyers who see your archive | One — the buyer you found, or the one that found you. | 15 AI companies, reached through our broker network. |
| Who does the work | You do — the calls, the intake, the follow-up, the paperwork. | We do — one intake with us, then we shop the archive and compare the bids. |
| Who picks the offer | The buyer picks the number. You take it or leave it. | We compare the bids and submit the best one to you in writing. You decide whether to sign. |
| How many times you run the process | Once per buyer. A second price means starting over with a second company. | One time. One intro call and one intake call reach all 15 companies. |
| What you sign, and with whom | A license with that one buyer. | A services agreement with us, so we can represent you — then the license itself, signed directly with the AI company behind the best offer. |
| How the price gets set | Against that buyer's own price list, with no other buyer in the room. | By buyers bidding against each other for the same archive. |
You find a buyer — or one finds you — and you run that buyer's process: an intro call, an intake where your records get sized up system by system, a review, and then an offer.
The offer is one number, set against that buyer's own needs and that buyer's own price list. No other buyer has seen your archive, so nothing has tested the number. If you want a second number, you start again with a second buyer — another round of calls, another intake, another review, another wait.
None of that makes the direct route wrong. It makes it a single quote. Owners get single quotes on everything from roofing to payroll software, and few of them sign the first one without finding out what the work goes for elsewhere. An archive is harder to check than a roof, because there is no published rate card — every archive is different, and every price is set in private. Competing bids are how a price like that gets tested.
A broker represents your archive to many buyers at once, does the shopping legwork, and brings you the best offer in writing. At QualifyData, it looks like this:
A client services agreement lets us represent you. It doesn't commit you to a deal, and your attorney is welcome on a call first.
60 to 90 minutes, system by system — how far back, how much. Counts and sizes only. No records, and nobody gets a login.
That list — with no actual records in it — goes through our broker network to 15 AI companies. They bid.
We compare the bids and submit the best one to you, in writing — the number and the terms in one document.
You and your attorney review the terms, and you sign directly with the AI company behind that offer. Your team exports, the buyer reviews the export, and the AI company pays you directly.
QualifyData does high volume, and we have negotiated excellent rates with the top AI labs. That volume — archives arriving through one door, week after week — is what a broker brings to the table. And through all of it, we never touch your data: the intake is counts and sizes, and your records move only from your systems to the AI company you sign with.
Five minutes. See if your archive qualifies.A broker changes the market your archive is sold into. It does not change the archive, the privacy process, or your control over either one.
How many buyers price your archive: one, or 15.
Who runs the process: you, once per buyer — or us, one time through.
Who sorts the offers: nobody, because there is only one — or us, comparing bids and bringing you the best.
Your records. The same archive, worth what buyers will pay for it, on either route.
The privacy process. Identifiers come out before any AI developer sees a line, and you can ask to see a cleaned sample first.
Your control. You pick which systems and which years go, your attorney reviews the terms, and you sign — or you don't.
We pick from the bids. You decide on the deal. Those are two different jobs, and they sit with two different parties.
When the bids come in, we compare them and submit the best one to you. You do not get a pile of competing offers to sort through, and you are never asked to weigh one lab's terms against another's on your own. The offer arrives in writing — the number and the terms in one document, ready for you and your attorney to read.
Signing is your call, and it stays your call. The services agreement lets us represent you; it does not commit you to a deal. If the written offer is not right, you do not sign it.
One. From us, after the bidding is done, with the best bid. Not one call per buyer, not a week of pitches — one call, from the one company you chose to work with.
That is the difference between a broker and a lead list. A lead-generation company sells your name to every buyer who will pay for it, and your phone lights up. We never sell or share your name. The labs bid through us, the best bid comes back through us, and the only voice you ever hear is ours.
Going direct, yes — once for every buyer you approach. With us, no. You go through it one time, and it reaches 15 companies.
If you try to shop an archive yourself, you run the whole process again for every lab — the calls, the data intake, the sorting through bids — once per company. Three buyers means three intakes and three reviews, each with your team's time in it. Owners of closed companies feel that repetition twice over: the archive sits in accounts that lapse and storage that gets cleared, and a process run three times takes three times as long to finish.
Through QualifyData the sequence runs once: one 30-minute intro call, one intake call, one round of bids, one written offer.
Nothing. Your business never pays anything — not for the five-minute check, not for the intake, not at any step after that. When a license closes, the AI company pays you the license fee directly.
You can start down either route — and most owners look at both before they sign anything. What you cannot do is sign two agreements that promise the same records to two different parties.
Your archive can only be licensed under the terms you actually sign. Some agreements include exclusivity language: a promise that the same records will not be offered or licensed anywhere else for a set period. That language — not the route you picked — is what decides what else you can do with your records. So read the exclusivity section of any agreement before you sign it, ours or a buyer's or anyone's, and have your own attorney read it with you.
If you have already signed an agreement with a buyer, its terms govern where you stand. Your attorney can tell you in one reading. If you have not signed anything yet, both routes are open, and the choice is the one this page lays out: one buyer and one number, or 15 buyers and a bid.
Yes. Owners do it every day, and nothing about this page changes that. Going direct means one buyer sees your archive, that buyer sets the number, and the process runs once per buyer you approach. A broker exists for owners who would rather have 15 buyers price the same archive, with someone else running the process.
The AI company behind the best offer — you sign the license directly with them. With QualifyData, you first sign a services agreement, which lets us represent your archive to buyers. That agreement does not commit you to a deal.
No. Comparing the bids is our job. We submit the best one to you in writing — the number and the terms in one document — and you and your attorney decide whether to sign.
Your records are the same records on either route. What changes is how many buyers get to price them, and who does the work of getting those prices. Your actual number only exists as a written offer after the intake call — nobody can quote it before that, on either route.
A list: the systems, the years, the counts and the sizes from your intake call. No records, no names, no logins. Only after you sign a license does the buyer's cleaning process see a raw copy, and identifiers are removed before any AI developer sees a line.
Then the agreement you signed governs what you can do with those records, including any exclusivity language it carries. Have your attorney review it before you offer the same records anywhere else. If you have not signed anything, both routes are still open to you.
We never touch or access your data. Not during the intake, not during the export, not ever. Your records go straight from your systems to the AI company you sign with — we are never in that chain.
And your business never pays anything.