There are many factors that need to be considered when choosing this or that VDR vendor for your business. If you consider using a VDR for your next M&A deal or some other transaction, it is critical to consider many factors before choosing a particular provider. Are their products easy to use? How secure are their VDRs? Answering these questions is definitely important. However, it is just as important to consider one more crucial factor – the pricing. Let’s examine the key factors that influence the data room pricing and make certain VDRs more affordable than others.
Key Data Room Pricing Factors
There is a great number of factors to take into consideration when being faced with the need to choose a particular VDR pricing plan and find the best solution for your individual requirements. This is important because it will give you a chance to get the greatest value for your money. What to look for when comparing different pricing plans? Here is a list of basic points to consider:
- Price by page or by the data room volume. If your documents contain lots of graphical images and schemes, it is better to choose the data room with a price per page. However, if your data comprise simple text, it will be best to choose the pricing per volume in megabytes;
- Period of use. When selecting a virtual data room pricing plan, it is also important to answer the question of how long you are going to use the platform. You may launch a VDR for some short-term project and pay a bit more than you would if you decided to cooperate with the provider on a regular basis. In fact, the annual pricing translates into lower payment per month which is especially beneficial if you require using VDR services regularly;
- The number of features covered by the pricing plan. It is quite obvious that the more complex the VDR is, the higher the price will be. When we are talking about features, the two major points here are security and ease of access. If the data room lacks some protection instruments or if it offers only restricted access to data, it can be expected that the price of such a room will be quite affordable. However, it is not always reasonable to use a limited choice of benefits for the sake of saving costs because the major goal here is to make your business environment more comfortable;
- People responsible for uploading new files. If the data room provider is supposed to upload all files by themselves, the chances are that such services will be associated with additional costs. However, if it is you and your personnel who will perform this duty, it is likely that you’ll be offered a VDR at a reduced price with consideration to your budget;
- The number of people who can gain access to files. It is also important to have full control over user access and their activity within the data room. However, this factor is also among those points that influence VDR pricing. Some providers give unlimited user access, while others impose restrictions and charge extra fees per person. If your personnel is not too numerous, it might be better to choose the per-person fee rather than buy a more expensive unlimited access option.
Choose the Best for Your Business
In many cases, the pricing of virtual data room services depends on how many features and privileges you’ll have access to. For this reason, it may be difficult to make a direct comparison but in general, everything depends on the characteristics of a VDR and the aspects of its future use for your business. When comparing VDR vendors and selecting the best option for your business, it is necessary to examine the following factors:
- Security of a data room including the level of encryption, ability to use watermarks, and availability of a 2-factor authentication process;
- Document management such as the ease of downloading and uploading data, editing and search tools as well as other useful instruments;
- User access which includes the way of how users are going to access the information by means of special permissions or passwords;
- Customization of services which is not provided by all VDR vendors but is still a useful feature that may influence how expensive the price of their service will be;
- Report monitoring which allows tracking who accessed some files and when it happened;
- Ease of access such as the ability to enter the VDR from different browsers and OS;
- Collaboration tools that allow users to ask questions or add comments as well as send notifications about future events;
- Integration with other solutions such as Microsoft Office or Google software.
Obviously, all these points are likely to influence the way how costly the service or product of a particular data room vendor will be. The presence of all these features makes VDR services more expensive, but if your business does not require some of them, it is better not to overpay for the services. Instead, you may select only what suits your business needs the most to be sure that the chosen data room is suitable for your budget and allows you to save costs.
Some vendors require monthly fees while others provide their services on an annual basis. In most cases, it is more preferable and cost-efficient to choose the annual way of payment. Besides, it is important to pay attention to the following points before you select a specific pricing plan:
- The volume of storage required for your business;
- Number of VDRs you need;
- Number of VDR administrators who are granted the right to upload files, give permissions and keep track of user activity;
- Number of users who will be using the data room;
- Level of safety and presence of extra protection tools;
- Instruments for handling documents;
- Level of customer support including extra training that users might need to undergo;
- Level of service customization according to your individual needs.
In this way, the above-mentioned factors may affect the price you will pay for the virtual data room solution of your choice. Be that as it may, the most important thing is to choose only what meets your business requirements the most.