What PitchBook costs, and the cheaper routes to one answer

PitchBook does not publish a price. The clearest public evidence is US federal purchase orders. In September 2026 the Department of Energy ordered 12 PitchBook licences at $8,000 per user for a year, and for August 2026 to July 2027 the Justice Department’s National Security Division ordered 15 users for $157,500, or $10,500 each. Morningstar, which owns PitchBook, reported $664.5 million of PitchBook licence revenue in 2025 across 113,451 licensed users, an average of about $5,900 per user. These are negotiated orders of 12 or more seats and an average across all clients, not list prices. Your quote depends on your firm type, the number of seats and any add-ons, and one or two seats can cost more per seat.

PitchBook’s own pricing page

PitchBook’s pricing page has a “Request Pricing” form and no figures. Its FAQ says “Pricing options vary depending on how many seats you need and your firm type”, and that add-ons such as Direct Data (the API and data feeds) and CRM integration change the price. On free trials it says: “Fill out a form and we’ll see if a free trial might be right for you.” The form asks whether you are a student.

PitchBook price per user in public purchase orders

US federal orders are public on USAspending.gov. These are the PitchBook orders there that state a user count, read on 27 October 2026, plus one UK order form.

Buyer	Period	What the order says	Price per user
Department of Energy	Sep 2026 to Sep 2027	“12 users at $8,000 ea”, $96,000, under a PitchBook blanket purchase agreement (award)	$8,000
Justice Department, National Security Division	Aug 2026 to Jul 2027	Standard Platform Subscription, 15 authorized users, $157,500 (award)	$10,500
FBI	Sep 2024 to Sep 2025 (older than two years)	Standard Platform Subscription, 21 authorized users, including Emerging Technology Research, Morningstar equity research and the CRM plugin, $168,000 (award)	$8,000
UK Department for International Trade, North America	Jan 2022 order form	14 authorized users, $98,000 annual contract value; extra users “at an annualized cost of $7,000 per seat” (order form)	$7,000

The Department of Energy order states $8,000 each. The other per-user figures are the order total divided by the stated number of users; the FBI total also covers the research and CRM add-ons it lists.

Every order here is for 12 to 21 users. We found no public order for one or two seats, so these figures do not tell you what a single seat costs on its own.

The UK order form is from 2022, older than the rest, but it is the only one that shows PitchBook’s own seat language and its export limits: 1,000 rows of company, deal or fund data per user per day and 2,000 per month. Larger federal orders, such as a Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency licence at about $2.0 million over two years, state no user count, so they tell you nothing per seat.

Government pricing is negotiated and may not match what a fund or a corporate team pays. It is still the clearest public record of what a seat sells for.

What Morningstar’s annual report says about PitchBook revenue per user

Morningstar’s 10-K for 2025, filed 13 February 2026, gives the inputs:

• PitchBook revenue: $671.8 million, of which $664.5 million was license-based.
• About 10,200 client accounts and 113,451 licensed users at 31 December 2025.
• Pricing “is primarily based on the number of licensed users, with customized pricing available for large enterprises, boutique firms, and startup clients.” APIs and data feeds are priced separately, by data volume.

The arithmetic:

• $664.5 million of license revenue / 113,451 users = about $5,860 per user per year.
• $671.8 million / 10,200 accounts = about $65,900 per account, with about 11 users per account on average.

The average sits below the federal orders. It mixes every kind of client, and the filing says large enterprises, boutiques and startups get custom pricing, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not a quote. In its second-quarter 2026 release, Morningstar said PitchBook’s “licensed user counts were relatively flat” against a year earlier.

How much a Gartner subscription costs

Gartner also quotes privately, but its US government price list is public. Gartner’s GSA schedule price list (contract 47QTCA18D008L, effective 30 January 2026) prices one year at:

Gartner licence (GSA list)	Annual price
IT Leaders Individual Access Reference, single licence	$33,346
IT Leaders Individual Access Advisor, single licence	$49,576
IT Leaders Essentials Team Member	$11,287
Gartner for Technical Professionals team (1 leader, up to 4 members)	$69,424

The same list prices Executive Programs v2 Guided Individual Access at $148,400 a year, and a two-year order of the IT Leaders Individual Access Advisor at $96,673 in total. Orders land near the list. The Government Accountability Office bought one IT Leaders Individual Access Advisor user licence for $97,708 covering September 2025 to August 2027. The Federal Aviation Administration bought four Gartner for Finance Leaders Individual Access Advisor subscriptions for $146,524 in September 2025, about $36,600 each, a little under the list’s $37,730 multi-licence price.

Gartner’s 10-K for 2025 reports $5.155 billion of Insights contract value, the annualized value of subscription contracts in effect, and “over 13,000 distinct client enterprises”. That is under $397,000 per enterprise a year, an average across buyers of every size. For one person, the price list is the better guide.

CB Insights pricing

CB Insights’ pricing page offers its terminal “with seat-based pricing” and its API, MCP and data feeds with “consumption-based pricing”. Both read “Request Pricing”, and the page has a “Start free trial” button. One public order: the National Science Foundation ordered CB Insights licences for $60,000 covering December 2024 to December 2025, after buying a “team license for CB Insights core platform analytics plan” the year before at the same price. Neither order states a user count. The Treasury’s Office of International Affairs pays $37,450 a year for an API access add-on on top of its subscription.

Free and cheaper PitchBook alternatives

None of these replaces PitchBook’s deal and valuation records. Each covers part of what people open PitchBook for.

• University access. Some universities license PitchBook for their students and staff, who sign in with a university account. UConn’s library describes a university-wide subscription with exports capped at 10 rows a day and 25 a month, and an add-on for faculty and doctoral students at “$2,500 per seat per year” for 10,000 rows a month (June 2025).
• Crunchbase Free. A free account sees company profiles, but search shows “Up to 5 results per search” against up to 1,000 on paid plans, per Crunchbase’s help article updated 5 October 2026. Pro has a free trial.
• SEC Form D. A company raising money under a Regulation D exemption files a Form D notice “within 15 days after the first sale of securities”. The form records the total offering amount, the amount sold so far, the industry and the executives and directors. It has no valuation field. Filings are free on EDGAR.
• EDGAR full-text search. Full-text search covers filings since 2001. A public acquirer’s 8-K or 10-K can name the private companies it bought and what it paid.
• State business filings. A state’s business entity search confirms that a company exists and who its registered agent is. Delaware’s free entity search shows the entity name, file number, formation date and registered agent; a certificate of status costs a fee. It does not show revenue.
• Vendor trials. CB Insights and Crunchbase Pro offer free trials. PitchBook takes trial requests and decides case by case.

When a PitchBook seat is worth it

A seat pays for itself when the work is the database:

• Deal sourcing at volume. Screening hundreds of private companies a week by sector, stage, investors and growth signals.
• Comps. Transaction and valuation comparables for private deals, where public filings give you little.
• Fund and LP work. Fund performance, commitments and LP contacts.
• Daily use. An analyst in it every day. At $8,000 a year and 230 working days, a seat costs about $35 a day.

If that describes the job, buy the seat, and get the per-user figures above in front of the rep.

What one question costs instead

Many people searching for PitchBook’s price have one question, not a daily workflow: who are the main private players in a niche, roughly how big are they, who funded them, which have been bought and by whom. For that, a year’s seat is a lot of money for one answer.

The cheaper sequence:

1. Check whether your school, employer or library already has PitchBook, CB Insights or Crunchbase.
2. Pull the free records yourself: Form D notices for funding amounts, acquirer filings on EDGAR, state filings for entity details, and company websites and press releases for the rest.
3. Pay for a cited report if you would rather not do the assembly. Market research reports lists single-report prices from $800, and research subscription costs compares IBISWorld, Statista, Mintel and others.

Where a Hyperresearch report fits, and where it does not

We make Hyperresearch, so weigh this section with that in mind. Hyperresearch turns one question into a cited report: $9 for Light (about 20 to 50 sources, about 2,500 to 4,000 words) or $49 for Deep (about 150 to 200 sources across 3 to 5 research chapters). Source counts are targets. Every cited claim is checked against its source, and the sources are kept in your workspace. Your first Deep run is free once you add a card. One $8,000 seat costs about the same as 163 Deep reports.

A run does not read PitchBook, Crunchbase, CB Insights or any other private-company database. There is no connector and no licence, and a run never logs in anywhere (what a run reads). So it cannot give you undisclosed valuations, private-deal multiples, cap tables, LP commitments or a screen of thousands of private companies.

What it can do is the public half of the work: read Form D notices and filings through SEC EDGAR, company websites, press releases, trade press and government statistics, and cite every figure to the page it came from. That fits a competitor map of a niche, a list of announced acquisitions with their public terms, or a market overview for one memo. For a worked example on a small deal, see commercial due diligence for a small acquisition. If you hold a PitchBook licence, you can upload records you are entitled to use, and they stay in your workspace.

If you have a question like that, run it as a report and see what the public record covers before you sign for a seat.