Firmographic data providers

Firmographics are to companies what demographics are to people: the basic facts that let you sort a market into segments. They don't say who works somewhere or what a company is researching; that is contact data and intent data.

They say what a company is, how big it is and where it operates. That makes them the base layer under nearly every account list, territory plan and market-sizing model.

The pattern is clear: anything a company must file is dependable, and anything estimated for private companies is a model. Ask any provider which of its fields are observed and which are inferred.

The Census Bureau publishes County Business Patterns as free downloads and an API back to 1986, with establishment counts by NAICS industry and size band.

It won't name individual companies, but it tells you how many firms of a type exist in each county, which is often all a market-sizing exercise needs. Reports appear roughly 18 months after the reference year, so it trails the market.

What paid providers add

Paid providers add named records, more current data, corporate hierarchies, and modelled size and revenue for private companies. Prices are mostly quoted per contract. As one reference point, Vendr reports a median yearly contract of $20,000 for Crunchbase across 71 purchases, ranging from $4,440 to $51,377; its company data is sold through API packages scoped by depth.

• Coverage of your segment: providers built for venture-backed tech are thin on family-owned manufacturers, and the reverse.
• Country depth: a provider strong in the US may rely on a partner file elsewhere.
• Taxonomy: check whether it uses NAICS, SIC or its own industry labels, and how it maps between them.
• Refresh rate: monthly refresh matters for headcount and funding fields; legal names change rarely.
• Licence: can records be stored in your CRM after the contract ends?

Pure company facts usually aren't personal data, which is why firmographic licensing carries less privacy risk than contact or consumer data. Two exceptions: sole traders and small partnerships, where the business record is effectively about a person, and datasets that attach named executives. Once people are named, privacy and outreach laws apply as they would to any contact list.

To avoid confusion: DataBroker isn't one of these providers. We teach brokering through a paid course and give brokers tools to source, value and close dataset deals between companies.

Firmographic deals that suit a broker are usually niche: an industry association's member directory, a regulator's licence list cleaned and enriched, or a trade software company's aggregated view of its market, licensed to the providers above or to research firms.