Property Data Pricing: Flat Per-Record vs Propwire and PropStream

If you've shopped for property data, you know the price is never the number on the pricing page. It's the subscription plus the export cap plus the overage rate plus the skip-tracing add-on plus the second seat. This post lays out how the common pricing models actually behave — Propwire and PropStream as the two most familiar examples — and how Acquired Data's model (a flat 1 credit per record, with free records on every subscription) compares. We describe competitor models qualitatively; their published prices change often, so always check their current pages before deciding.

The four ways property data gets priced

1. Platform subscription with an export cap. You pay a monthly fee for access to the database and filters; a set number of exported records is bundled in each month. This is PropStream's model and the most common one in the category. The access is the product; the exports are rationed.
2. Per-record overages. Once you pass the bundled exports, additional records are billed individually at a rate that is typically higher than the bundled effective rate. Heavy months get expensive in a way that's hard to predict from the headline price.
3. Freemium with paid exports. Propwire's approach: searching and viewing is free, and you pay when you want the data out — by export or by subscription tier. Great for scouting, but the moment you want a list to mail or trace, you're in a paid tier with its own limits.
4. Skip tracing as a separate meter. In almost every platform the owner phone numbers are an add-on billed per lookup, on top of the subscription and on top of the exports. The list and the contact data are two bills.

Where the real cost hides

None of these models is dishonest — they just make the all-in cost hard to see. Three places to look:

• Export caps you don't use, or blow through. A cap is a fixed cost whether you pull 500 records or 10,000. Under-use it and you're paying for records you never got; exceed it and the overage rate applies to every extra row. Very few investors land exactly on their cap.
• Add-on datasets. Some tools price the base record cheaply and charge more for valuation, liens, or ownership history. The record you compare on the pricing page isn't the record you need to underwrite.
• Re-pulling the same records. If your monthly list refresh re-exports last month's owners, you pay for them again. Most platforms don't dedupe against your previous exports.

How Acquired Data prices property data

Data Pulling runs on our own nationwide database — 130M+ properties covering every county, refreshed monthly — rather than on a vendor feed we re-bill per record. That lets us keep the model to three rules:

• 1 credit per record, flat. Every record includes address, owner and mailing address, property details, estimated value, equity, DTV, open liens and lender, deed and sale history, distress flags, quick-list flags, and a 0–100 motivation score. There are no datasets to add and no field-level upcharges.
• Free records with every subscription. Your plan's credit amount doubles as a free property-record allowance every 4-week cycle — a 30,000-credit plan pulls 30,000 records free, a 100,000-credit plan pulls 100,000. Beyond that, 1 credit per record. Unused free records reset each cycle. Pay-as-you-go credits don't include the allowance; on pay-as-you-go a record is simply 1 credit. (The full breakdown.)
• No export cap, no re-buying. Pull up to 25,000 records at a time, as often as you like. Exclude previously pulled drops anything you pulled in the last 30 days, so a weekly refresh returns only new matches. You're charged only for records actually delivered.

Skip tracing is the same balance, not a second bill: a pulled list goes into bulk tracing in one click at 1 credit per row (entity rows and add-ons price separately, shown before you run). The same pulls, at the same price with the same free allowance, are available through the property data API.

Comparing apples to apples

The honest way to compare is cost per usable record for your actual month — not headline price. Write down three numbers for each tool:

1. Records you'll actually export in a typical month, including refreshes.
2. All-in monthly cost for that volume: subscription + overages + any dataset add-ons + skip tracing for the rows you'll trace.
3. What a record includes at that price — can you underwrite from it (value, equity, liens, sale history) or do you need another source?

Divide cost by records and you have a real per-record number. Run that for a quiet month and a heavy month; the models behave very differently at the two ends. Export-capped subscriptions look cheap at the cap and expensive on either side of it. A flat per-record rate with a free allowance is linear: quiet months are free inside the allowance, heavy months are predictable.

When the other tools are the right call

Be honest about what you're buying. PropStream earns its subscription for investors who live in its comps, list automation, and marketing tools every day — the data export is one feature among many. Propwire is a genuinely good free scouting tool if you want to look, not pull. If those workflows are the core of your business, a dedicated data-and-tracing platform doesn't replace them; many investors run both, and use Acquired Data for the pulling and tracing because that's where per-record pricing matters most. Our PropStream alternatives post goes deeper on that split.

The short version

Subscription-plus-cap models charge for access and ration the data. Freemium models charge at the exit door. Skip tracing is almost always a second meter. Acquired Data charges a flat 1 credit per complete record, gives every subscriber their plan's credit amount back as free records each cycle, and runs tracing on the same balance — so the price you see on the pricing page is the price you pay. Compare on your real volume, not ours. Start with the Data Pulling guide or the credits and billing guide.