IRBsearch publishes its pricing structure and not its prices. Its pricing page, read on 23 September 2026, names three plans — Transactional, Per-Seat Pricing and Flat Rate Pricing — and carries no dollar figure against any of them. That is more than most of the category gives you, and it is worth reading closely, because the shape of a plan tells a buyer something a headline rate never does: what the vendor thinks you are, and which of your constraints it expects to be binding.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product and we sell homeowner phone files to call centers. IRBsearch sells investigative searches, so we overlap at the edges rather than head on. Treat that entry as a maker’s pitch and the rest as our honest read of IRBsearch’s public pages. We did not open an account or request a quote.
The three plans, as published
| Plan | What IRBsearch publishes | Who the shape is built for |
|---|---|---|
| Transactional | A monthly minimum fee, then searches as you run them | Low or unpredictable volume — the minimum, not the rate, is what you are agreeing to |
| Per-Seat Pricing | “Pricing plans range from 1-30+ seats”, “full scalability — add seats as needed” | A team of named researchers whose throughput is the constraint |
| Flat Rate Pricing | “Packages available ranging from 500 to 100,000+ minimum transactions per month” | Committed volume, bought in advance, in exchange for a lower unit rate |
Plan names and terms are quoted as publicly advertised on 23 September 2026; no price appears on the vendor’s page and none is invented here. Confirm current pricing with the vendor, and with our sales team for Scout Data.
The minimum is the price, for most buyers
On the transactional plan the published term is a monthly minimum fee. That phrase deserves more attention than a per-search rate would, because a minimum is the number you pay in the months when nothing happens. For an investigator whose casework arrives unevenly, that is a modest cost of readiness. For a seasonal operation — a roofing office that runs hot after storms and quiet in February, an HVAC floor whose volume triples in July — a minimum charged twelve times a year against volume earned in five is a different purchase than it looks like in month one.
The practical move is to ask for the annual figure before the unit figure. Minimum times twelve, plus the seats, is your floor; the per-search rate only starts to matter above it. That is the same arithmetic that makes credentialed platforms expensive for lumpy buyers generally, and it is laid out for the neighbouring vendors in TLOxp pricing.
Read the volume tier before the rate
The flat-rate packages are published as running “from 500 to 100,000+ minimum transactions per month”. A hundred thousand transactions a month sounds like enough for anything, and for the audience IRBsearch serves it is an enormous amount of investigative work. Put the same number against a dialing floor and it reads differently. One Bay Area solar floor Scout Data works with placed 348,858 dials on 74,913 records in the three weeks to 18 September 2026. The top published tier is not sized for that, because it was never meant to be: the tier ceiling is a statement about who the product is for.
There is a second, quieter point in the same sentence. Those are minimum transactions per month — volume you commit to, not volume you may use. Committed volume is how unit rates come down everywhere in this category, and it is also how a buyer ends up paying for a quiet quarter. Ask what happens to unused transactions at the month boundary before you compare two vendors’ per-unit numbers, because that answer can be worth more than the difference between them.
What the free trial can and cannot settle
IRBsearch advertises a free trial for new customers — “free credits and a week”, in the words on its application page — with the published caveat that it “may exclude certain searches and/or services”. Use it for the questions a week can actually answer: which fields come back on which search, whether the export format fits how you work, how the Compliance Center handles your industry and state. Those are real questions and a week settles them.
What a week of credits cannot settle is yield. Connect rate, wrong-party rate and right-party contact rate are measured on a real file, over real dial hours, against a control — and a trial sized in credits is too small to produce any of them. That is not a criticism of IRBsearch; it is true of every sample offer in the category, and it is why the sample should be spent on the columns rather than on the conversion. How to test a vendor with a free sample sets out what a small sample can and cannot prove.
Access is priced separately, and it is priced in your industry
Two published facts sit together here. IRBsearch says most accounts are “activated in a day or less” once verification documents are uploaded — fast by the standards of credentialed data. And its help desk says the Compliance Center exists because “each state has requirements, based on industry, to allow you to access our data.” Speed and gating are not in tension: the application is quick, and what you can see at the end of it depends on what business you are in and where you operate.
For a home-services call center that matters more than any line on the quote, because the six industries IRBsearch builds pages for are private investigators, process servers, legal professionals, repossession agents, bail bondsmen and collections. Establish where an outbound sales operation lands in that verification before you budget anything. The same question, asked of the other credentialed platforms, is in Tracers pricing and idiCORE pricing.
Where Scout Data fits
Scout Data does not sell searches and does not compete with IRBsearch on investigative depth. It sells the other unit: a built homeowner file. List Builder assembles audiences from live property signals — roof and system age, permit activity, storm exposure, ownership change — and ships them with phones matched by name to the owner on title, scrubbed against the federal do-not-call registry before delivery, with dead numbers replaced. There is no transaction minimum and no seat licence, because the thing being sold is the row rather than the lookup. The same graph is available per record through the API. Which of the two shapes your operation actually needs is argued in IRBsearch alternatives, and the whole category is mapped in best skip tracing software.
Dial-volume figures are Scout Data’s own, quoted with their sample and window and listed on our benchmarks page. IRBsearch plan names and terms are quotations from its public pages, read 23 September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How much does IRBsearch cost?
IRBsearch publishes its plan structure but no prices. As of 23 September 2026 its pricing page names three plans — Transactional, Per-Seat and Flat Rate — and prints no dollar figure against any of them. What it does print: the transactional plan carries a monthly minimum fee, seat plans “range from 1-30+ seats”, and flat-rate packages run “from 500 to 100,000+ minimum transactions per month”. A number arrives from sales, against your industry, your state and your committed volume.
Does IRBsearch have a free trial?
Yes. IRBsearch advertises a free trial for new customers, described on its application page as “free credits and a week”, with the published caveat that the offer “is for new customers only and may exclude certain searches and/or services, and subject to additional Terms and Conditions.” Read 23 September 2026. A week of credits is enough to judge what a report contains; it is not enough to judge a connect rate, which needs a real file and real dial hours.
What is an IRBsearch transaction?
A transaction is a search or report you run — the unit the flat-rate packages are counted in, from 500 to 100,000+ per month as published on 23 September 2026. It is not a delivered contact. That distinction is the whole budgeting problem for anyone buying at volume: the count on the contract is what you submit, while the number that decides your cost per appointment is what comes back reachable. Scout Data covers the conversion in homeowner data cost per record.
How long does it take to get an IRBsearch account?
IRBsearch says on its application page that “most accounts are activated in a day or less”, after you “upload your account verification documents online”. Its help desk describes a Compliance Center as “your one-stop center for verification of your business and account” and notes that “each state has requirements, based on industry, to allow you to access our data.” Read 23 September 2026. Activation is fast; the verification is real, and it is keyed to your industry.