What industry research subscriptions cost, and the cheaper routes

A single IBISWorld industry report costs $2,850. Statista’s individual plans are $199 or $649 a month, billed for a year. The Mintel reports we checked were $2,995 to $4,995. Gartner, PitchBook, AlphaSense and CB Insights publish no price at all and quote on a sales call. If you need one answer for one client, you can often get it for less: from a library, from a Small Business Development Center, or from the public tables these reports are built on. If you use the database every week, the subscription is usually the better buy.

Published prices, read on 2026-09-27

Every figure below was read on the vendor’s own page on that date, or in a parent company’s annual report where the vendor publishes nothing. We used no third-party price estimates.

Vendor	What you can buy without a sales call	Subscription price	Source
IBISWorld	One US Industry Research Report, $2,850. One Industry Spotlight Report (10 to 20 pages), $800	Not published. Memberships are quoted by a representative	IBISWorld help: cost of one report
Statista	Basic account, free, with free statistics	Starter $199 a month, Personal $649 a month, both billed annually. Professional by quote	Statista plans
Mintel	Single reports by card or purchase order. Of eight we checked, the US and Canadian reports were $4,995 and the rest $2,995, before tax	Not published. On-Demand subscriptions are quoted	Mintel pricing, Mintel store
First Research	Single industry profiles	We could not read a price: the site was unreachable on 2026-09-24 and 2026-09-27	firstresearch.com, unreachable when checked
Gartner	Nothing listed	Not published	Gartner 10-K, FY2025
PitchBook	Nothing listed	Not published. Priced “primarily based on the number of licensed users”	Morningstar 10-K, FY2025
AlphaSense	Nothing listed	Not published: “Connect with our sales team for scalable pricing”	AlphaSense pricing
CB Insights	Nothing listed	Not published: every product reads “Request pricing”	CB Insights pricing

What the annual reports imply for Gartner and PitchBook

These are rough averages, not quotes.

Gartner reported $5.2 billion of research contract value at the end of 2025, defined as the annualized value of all subscription contracts in effect. It also says it works with more than 13,000 client enterprises. Divide one by the other and you get under $400,000 per enterprise a year. That average spans contracts of every size, from one seat to a whole company, so it tells you nothing about what one seat costs you.

PitchBook took $671.8 million of revenue in 2025 across 113,451 licensed users, according to Morningstar’s annual report. That is roughly $5,900 per user. The revenue includes data feeds and APIs, which are priced separately, and the filing says large enterprises, boutique firms and startups get custom pricing. Treat the $5,900 as the order of magnitude, nothing more.

What each one sells

The prices differ because the products differ.

• Industry reports (IBISWorld, First Research). A written profile of one industry: size, structure, cost lines, outlook, often a benchmark table. Analysts build it from government data, company filings and their own models.
• Statistics portal (Statista). A searchable library of charts drawn from outside sources, plus Statista’s own surveys and forecasts. The paid tiers add downloads, reports and, at Professional, publication rights. Our Statista reliability guide traces 13 of its figures back to their originals.
• Consumer research (Mintel). Reports on consumer behaviour and product launches, built on Mintel’s own fieldwork. No public dataset replaces that fieldwork.
• Analyst access (Gartner). Research documents, peer benchmarks and time with an analyst on your decision. Most buyers are paying for the analyst.
• Deal and company databases (PitchBook, CB Insights). Private-company records: funding rounds, investors, valuations, deal comparables, and in CB Insights’ case scoring and market maps. These took years to assemble and most of them have no public substitute.
• Search over licensed content (AlphaSense). Its pricing page lists equity research from more than 1,000 sell-side and independent firms, an expert-call transcript library, filings and news, with AI search on top.

Cheaper routes to the same answer

A library card. Many public libraries license these databases, on very different terms. The New York Public Library offers IBISWorld “on library computers only at SIBL, not through Wi-Fi”, with no downloads, though you can print sections. Brooklyn Public Library lists Statista as requiring a library card. University licences usually cover students and staff only, so ask whether walk-in visitors can use them on campus. Check your own library’s database list first. If it has the report, the report costs you a trip.

Your Small Business Development Center. The SBA says its partners, SBDCs among them, offer “free or low-cost counseling and training”. America’s SBDC describes market research reports as a popular service at its centres. Not every centre licenses the same databases. Call yours and ask which ones it can pull reports from.

The government tables underneath. Much of what an industry report states comes from public data you can read yourself: the Economic Census and County Business Patterns for establishments and revenue, Nonemployer Statistics for one-person firms, BLS for wages and employment, and SEC filings for what public competitors say about the market. Our market sizing guide works through one industry using only those tables, with every file linked. EDGAR full-text search is free and covers the text of electronic filings since 2001.

One report instead of a seat. For one industry, one IBISWorld report or Spotlight, or one Mintel report, costs a fraction of a membership. Statista’s monthly plans are billed for a full year, so a one-off need usually costs less elsewhere.

Where a $9 or $49 Hyperresearch report fits

Hyperresearch takes one question and returns a long, cited report built from what is publicly readable: government statistics, company websites, SEC filings, open-access papers and trade press. Light is $9 (about 20 to 50 sources, about 2,500 to 4,000 words, about 30 to 40 minutes). Deep is $49 (about 150 to 200 sources across 3 to 5 chapters, 3 to 5 hours). Those are targets, not measurements. A Light report’s cited claims are checked against their sources and corrected before it ships; a Deep report’s citations are checked against the sources they cite, and the verification receipt records the result for each one. Sign-ups are open, and the first two Light runs need no card.

It is a fair substitute when you need an industry overview, a market size or a competitor map once, for one deck or one client memo, and a seat would sit idle afterwards. It also fits a question narrower than a standard profile, such as residential HVAC in the Mountain West from 2020 to 2026 and who is consolidating it, and work where someone will ask where each number came from.

Buy the subscription or the report instead in these cases:

• You need deal, funding or cap-table data. Hyperresearch has no private-company, deal or cap-table data. A run does not read PitchBook, Crunchbase, CB Insights or any other private-company database; we have no licence for them. It reads what companies publish on the open web and in SEC filings, which covers public companies well and private ones thinly. The sources page lists what a run reads and what it does not.
• You need broker research or expert-call transcripts. Those sit behind a login, and a run never logs in anywhere.
• You need an analyst on the phone. A report does not replace someone who has advised fifty companies on the same purchase.
• Your lender or client requires a named source. If the credit memo template asks for an IBISWorld or First Research citation, buy that report or use the library copy.
• You open the database every day. A seat you use daily is cheaper per answer than any stack of single purchases.

If you hold a licence to one of these databases, you can upload records you are entitled to use, and those uploads stay in your workspace.

Choosing, in order

1. Write down the exact output you owe: a market size, an industry section, a list of comparable deals, a vendor shortlist.
2. If it needs private deal or company data, you need a database seat or a library that has one.
3. If a library or SBDC near you has the report, use it.
4. If the numbers live in government tables and filings, build it yourself from the worked example or pay for a cited report that does the assembly (Light or Deep).
5. If you will need the same kind of answer every week, price the subscription against a year of single reports and take the cheaper one.