How Minewell estimates, ranks and labels

Minewell's band

Every number our estimator produces is captioned “Our heuristic, not an offer”. It starts from a band set by desk headcount, anchored on the ranges buyers publish (small closed startups in the tens of thousands of dollars, mid-size companies in the low hundreds of thousands, large companies at $1M or more). We then multiply by four factors, cap the result at a $5M ceiling and round to the nearest $5K.

Years of records

• under 2 years ×0.6
• 2 to 4 years ×1
• 5 to 9 years ×1.25
• 10 or more years ×1.5

Region

• United States ×1
• United Kingdom ×0.8
• European Union ×0.7
• Canada ×0.8
• Australia ×0.8
• Other ×0.5

Status

• Operating ×1
• Winding down ×0.8
• Shut down ×0.6

Industry

• Accounting / tax ×1.25
• Legal ×1.25
• Finance / insurance ×1.25
• Healthcare administration ×1.15
• Engineering / architecture ×1.1
• Software / SaaS ×1.1
• Construction trades ×1
• Logistics / freight ×1
• Distribution / wholesale ×1
• Manufacturing ×1
• Agency / consulting ×1
• E-commerce / retail ×1
• Real estate / property ×1
• Education / training ×1
• Nonprofit ×1
• Hospitality / travel ×1
• Media / publishing ×1
• Staffing / recruiting ×1
• Energy / utilities ×1
• Other ×1

This is our own heuristic. It is not any buyer's formula and no buyer is bound by it.

Buyers' numbers

When a buyer publishes a calculator or a worked example, we show what it returned for the same reference company (100 desk staff · 10 years of records · US), with the date we captured it and a link to the source. We show it exactly as captured. We never extrapolate a buyer's number to other inputs, and a number captured for different inputs is marked as not the reference company.

Directory order

The directory sorts by the highest payout a buyer publishes, then by name. Buyers that do not publish a ceiling come last. Buyers we have a referral relationship with are not pinned: they appear first only inside the strip headed “Featured partners · paid placement”. See the disclosure.

Eligibility

We match your answers against what each buyer says it accepts: minimum desk headcount, minimum years of records, region and company status. Your region is the one with the largest share of the people who produced the records. A company in insolvency counts as closed. We check the number of systems and the records' language only when both you and the buyer have stated them.

Compare weighting

The compare page can weight a comparison by one published field at a time. A weighting is enabled only when at least two of the compared buyers publish that field. “Best on published terms” is a statement about that one field, not a verdict on the whole offer.

• Highest published ceiling needs a published payout range. 13 of 29 buyers publish it.
• Fastest cash needs published payment timing in days. 4 of 29 buyers publish it.
• Least exclusivity needs a published exclusivity term. 7 of 29 buyers publish it.
• Third-party de-identification needs a published de-identification owner. 12 of 29 buyers publish it.

Sources and dates

Every fact on a buyer's page links to that buyer's own page or to press coverage, and each buyer shows the date we last verified it. Right now those dates run from 2026-10-15 to 2026-10-16. Where public statements disagree, we show both. Every change we notice is recorded, with the old value, the new value and the source, in the change log.

What we do not do

• We do not accept raw data, ever.
• We do not guess a buyer's terms: anything unpublished is shown as “Not published”.
• We do not copy other directories' tables. Each number comes from the buyer or its press.