Equidam Alternative: Equidam Pricing, Reviews, and Valuation Multiples Compared

Equidam optimizes for the raise: projection-driven models, a cap-table and dilution view, and an investor-ready report. Businessappraisal optimizes for the value of a going concern. It applies an EBITDA or SDE multiple to your normalized earnings, cross-checks it with a revenue multiple and a discounted cash flow, and benchmarks the result against comparable sales so the number is anchored to the market, not to a forecast.

Equidam publishes its pricing openly. As of July 2026 there are three tiers: Essential is free with no expiry and gives you the full five-method engine on screen but no downloadable report or benchmarks; Advanced is EUR 291.35 excluding VAT; Expert is EUR 742.35 excluding VAT and adds an analyst review, a written findings report, and a one-to-one call. Paid tiers run on a twelve-month valuation cycle with two months of active access and unlimited valuations inside that window. Businessappraisal is a self-serve subscription starting at $29 a month with transparent public pricing. Neither is a certified appraisal. Both are decision tools, aimed at different decisions: Equidam at the fundraise, Businessappraisal at the sale, purchase, or "what is this worth today" question for an operating business.

Equidam runs five methods: two qualitative ones that price risk (Scorecard and Checklist) and three financial ones that price return (DCF with Long-Term Growth, DCF with Multiple, and the Venture Capital method). Only one of those five, the Multiple method, applies an industry EBITDA or revenue multiple the way a business buyer would. The other four are built for companies whose value sits in a forecast rather than in trailing profit.

That structure explains why founders searching for Equidam EBITDA multiples or Equidam revenue multiples often find the output confusing when they run an established business through it. The Multiple method takes current EBITDA or revenue and applies an industry multiple drawn from public company comparables. Public multiples are systematically higher than what a small private business actually trades for, because listed companies carry size, liquidity, and governance premiums a $2M private company does not.

Neither approach is wrong. They answer different questions. If you are raising a seed round, an investor expects to see the risk-and-return framing Equidam produces. If you are selling to a buyer who will underwrite your cash flow, the number that matters is a multiple of normalized SDE or EBITDA benchmarked against businesses that actually sold, which is what our guide to sale multiples walks through.

Equidam publishes a set of EBITDA multiples by industry built on the TRBC industry classification and derived from listed company data. Those figures are useful for understanding relative sector strength, and they are consistently higher than what an equivalent private business in the same sector actually sells for. The gap is structural: a public company is liquid, audited, diversified, and governed, and a buyer pays for all four.

People searching for an Equidam industry multiple are almost always trying to answer a simpler question, which is what a company in their sector is worth. Below are the ranges US advisors and deal databases report for private lower middle market transactions in 2026, for the sectors people ask about most. They sit well below public sector multiples on purpose.

Sources: 2026 US lower middle market M&A reporting from CT Acquisitions, Auxo Capital, and Adastra Equity for staffing, The Law Practice Exchange and BizBuySell closed-sale data for legal, and advisor-reported ranges for the remaining sectors. Ranges are benchmarks for a size band, not quotes on a specific company.

Two things are worth taking from this. First, sector explains less than size does: a $2M EBITDA staffing firm and a $15M EBITDA staffing firm differ by roughly double the multiple in the same industry. Second, a public-comparables multiple is the wrong instrument for pricing a private sale in either direction. Our full breakdown of EBITDA multiples by industry puts the public sector figures and the private transaction ranges side by side so the gap is visible rather than assumed. Below roughly $1M of earnings neither table is the right one, because US buyers at that size quote seller discretionary earnings instead: the closed-transaction medians for more than 90 sectors are in SDE multiples by industry. And because Equidam publishes its sector benchmarks on a revenue basis as well as an earnings one, the companion table of revenue multiples by industry shows what the same sectors look like measured against sales, and the margin arithmetic that reconciles the two. That margin term is doing most of the work in any revenue-based benchmark, so it is worth checking your own against the profit margins by industry tables before you trust a revenue multiple at all. To apply any of those benchmarks to your own figures rather than read them in the abstract, the business valuation calculator runs the earnings multiple, the revenue multiple and a discounted cash flow together and reports the range they produce. Equidam leans harder on discounted cash flow than most self-service tools do, which makes the discount rate the single most consequential input in its output: our cost of capital by industry reference sets out what that rate is built from and what each component is worth in 2026. If the reason you are benchmarking at all is an exit in the next year or two, the sequence of work that actually moves the number is in how to prepare a business for sale.

• Choose Equidam if you are a startup founder raising capital and you need projection-based, investor-facing methods and a cap-table view for the round.
• Choose Businessappraisal if you run an established, profitable business and you want its value estimated from real earnings, a revenue multiple, a DCF, and comparable sales, with the drivers explained.

If you are early-stage and pre-profit, Equidam speaks your language. If you have trailing earnings a buyer would underwrite, a cash-flow tool will give you a range that reflects how your business would actually trade.