Expert cost on a deal is driven by seniority more than sector, and multi-market work scales close to linearly per market. Published category ranges describe list rates rather than what is actually billed.
What does a deal's expert research cost?
The question a deal team actually has is not what one call costs but what the workstream totals. Those are different numbers and the second is much harder to find, because the published material in this category is written by marketplaces and affiliate publishers who quote per-hour bands and stop there.
Those bands are not wrong, exactly. They describe list rates — what an expert's profile says they charge. What gets billed is a different figure, and the gap between the two is the reason budgets set from published ranges tend to be wrong in the same direction.
The figures below are realized: what was actually invoiced across billed engagements, aggregated so that no engagement is identifiable.
What moves an expert's rate?
Seniority and scarcity, in that order, and the two are not the same thing. A former group-level operator in a narrow sub-sector prices above a current functional head in a large one, because the pool of people who can answer the question is smaller rather than because the title is bigger.
Sector matters less than either. That surprises people scoping budgets, who often assume healthcare or financial services carries a premium across the board. What carries the premium is a narrow screen, and narrow screens occur in every sector.
How does geography change the price?
Materially, and for labor-market reasons rather than quality ones. Experts based in India and Southeast Asia clear below equivalent seniority in North America and Western Europe at the same level of relevance, which is the main reason regional coverage changes a research budget rather than only a research plan.
The practical consequence is that a multi-market commercial diligence does not cost a simple multiple of a single-market one. Where the additional markets are in Asia, the incremental cost per market is lower; where they are in Western Europe, it is close to linear.
We set the research budget from a published range and it was wrong by enough to matter. Not because the range was dishonest — because it described what people ask for, not what we ended up paying.
Should you buy calls or credits?
Per-call pricing suits teams with irregular demand and no standing program. A credit pack or subscription suits a desk running research continuously, and the break-even is a function of annual volume rather than of deal size. Volume per deal, in turn, is set by the point at which calls stop changing your view.
The mistake worth avoiding is buying a subscription against an aspiration. Teams that commit to a volume they expect to grow into routinely underuse it, and the effective cost per call ends up above what per-call pricing would have been.
What is not in the quote?
Five things typically sit outside the expert's hourly rate: recruiting experts who do not clear the screen, scheduling, compliance and conflict checks, transcription, and any translation. Depending on the provider these are inside a platform fee, billed separately, or absorbed. On a moderated call the moderator's time is a sixth.
It is worth asking which of the five a quote covers, because the screening cost in particular is invisible and real. On a narrow screen, the people who do not clear can outnumber those who do by a wide margin, and somebody pays for that work either way.