Article

What a company's records are worth

Last updated October 17, 2026

Every owner who hears that company records have a price asks the same next question. What are ours worth? The honest answer has two parts: what micro1 publishes, and what only micro1 can decide. Here are micro1’s published tiers, what moves a company up or down inside them, what our estimate shows, and where the estimate stops.

If you’re still at the step before this one, start with whether a company can get paid for its records at all. If you want to know who pays and why, read who buys company records to train AI models. This page is about the number.

The short answer

micro1 publishes three tiers. The floor is $100k+. The middle is $500k+. The top is $1M+. Its referral page puts the whole band as “$100K-$2M+ for approved data packages.”

Where a company lands depends on what its records show. micro1 names five things that decide it: size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise, and uniqueness. It evaluates each partnership on its own. Nobody, us included, can tell you the figure before micro1 has looked.

What we can do is show you the band, explain what pushes a company up it, and give you a range from five questions.

See if your company qualifies at micro1

micro1’s published tiers

On its data partnerships page, micro1 writes: “Compensation is based on the quality, uniqueness, and value of the data provided.” Then it lists three tiers.

$100k+: “Qualified Enterprise Data Partnerships.”
$500k+: “Large-scale operational datasets or ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions.”
$1M+: “Highly unique, proprietary operational data” with significant value to the buyer’s work.

Read the three lines slowly, because each one tells you something.

The first tier is the entry ticket. A company that qualifies at all starts there. micro1’s published requirements for the Enterprise Data Partnership are “30+ employees”, “US Prioritized” and “Primarily English”, with established documentation. What each of those means in practice is on who qualifies for micro1’s data partnership.

The second tier is about breadth. “Multiple teams and business functions” means the records cover more than one department. Sales, operations, finance and support, not just one of them. “Ongoing participation” means the arrangement can run over time, not as one delivery.

The third tier is about rarity. “Highly unique, proprietary” means records that nobody else can supply, because they describe how one company solved problems in its own way.

The tiers are floors, written with a plus sign. micro1 doesn’t publish a ceiling beyond “$2M+”.

What micro1 says moves the price

micro1 answers this directly. On the data partnerships page, under “How is company compensation determined?”, it lists the factors: “dataset size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise represented, and the uniqueness of the operational knowledge contained within the dataset.” It adds: “Each partnership is evaluated individually.”

micro1’s own payout page carries a second list. Its estimator there asks three questions: how many employees, how many years of data, and where the company is headquartered. Under the result it says: “Indicative estimate only. Final payout is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.”

Put the two lists side by side and five practical questions fall out. How many years? How complete? How well is the work written down? How many parts of the company does it cover? And how unusual is it? The next sections take them one at a time, with the reader’s records in each. The explanations are ours; the factors are micro1’s.

Years of records

micro1’s payout estimator asks for years of data, and notes it is “typically the number of years you’ve been in business.” That is the plainest signal on the page that time counts.

Here is why, in our own words. One year of a CRM shows how a company sold last year. Twelve years show how it sold through a slow market, a price rise, a new competitor and a change of sales manager. The same goes for the project history. One year of tickets is a sample. A decade is a record of how the company learned.

Say a mechanical contractor with 45 staff has job files back to 2012. That’s 14 years of estimates, change orders and closeout notes. Another contractor of the same size switched systems in 2023 and threw the old files away. The first has 14 years. The second has three, whatever its headcount.

If your company changed CRM or project software, find the old exports. Those years still count. Most owners have them on a shared drive or in a box of backups nobody has opened since the switch.

Completeness: the chain, not just the end

micro1 lists “data quality” and “volume.” Our reading, for a company that has kept records for years, is that completeness is where quality starts.

A complete record shows the whole path of a piece of work. Take a CRM. The won deals are the end of the path. The lost deals, the call notes, the proposal versions and the reasons logged against each loss are the path itself. A CRM with 2,000 closed deals and no notes is a list. The same CRM with notes on every stage is a record of how the company sold.

The same holds for a project history. The final invoice says what the job cost. The ticket says what was asked. The comments say what was argued. The change request says what moved and who approved it. Strip out the middle and you’ve kept the least useful part.

So the question to ask of each system is simple. Does it show only the result, or the steps that led to it?

How the work is documented

micro1’s data partnerships page says what it is looking for: “data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” It names SOPs, process documentation, internal knowledge bases, workflows, templates and operational frameworks. Then it says: “The most valuable datasets capture real operational expertise, decision-making processes, and repeatable workflows.”

That’s “workflow complexity” and “domain expertise represented” in practice. A company scores well here when its records show decisions being made, not just outcomes being filed.

Here is what that looks like, as our own description. An estimate that became a job, with the three versions in between and the email that caused each one. A change order on a job that went sideways, with the reason, the cost and the person who signed it. A service ticket where the first diagnosis was wrong, the second visit found the real fault, and the technician wrote down why. A QA checklist with the failures logged next to the fix.

Each of those is a small piece of judgment, written down while the work happened. A busy company of 60 people produces a great many of them a year without noticing.

Breadth: more teams, more functions

The $500k+ tier names “ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions.” That’s the clearest published signal that breadth moves a company up.

In our own terms, breadth means the records cover more than one desk. A company whose only system is its accounting package has one function on file. A company with a CRM for sales, a project tracker for delivery, a knowledge base for support, SOPs for operations and Slack or Teams for the exceptions has five.

micro1’s data partnerships page shows the range of functions it means. It lists software and engineering, finance and accounting, customer support, sales and CRM, legal and contracts, and operations and logistics. A company of 30 or more usually runs several of those, even if nobody calls them departments.

Say a logistics company of 80 has dispatch procedures, incident reports, vendor correspondence, a CRM of shipper accounts and a support inbox. Those are separate functions, each with its own record. That’s what “multiple teams and business functions” looks like on a shared drive.

Uniqueness: the top tier

The $1M+ tier is for “highly unique, proprietary operational data.” micro1 also lists “the uniqueness of the operational knowledge contained within the dataset” as a pricing factor.

We can’t tell you what micro1 will call unique. We can say what tends to be hard to find elsewhere, as our own observation. Records from a trade or a process that rarely gets written down. Long runs of decisions in a field where the reasoning usually stays in someone’s head. The exceptions a company handled that no textbook covers, because the company was the one that met them.

A specialist fabrication shop with 20 years of quote-to-delivery files is a different record from a general office with a tidy wiki. Both count. One is harder to replace.

What moves a company down

micro1 publishes the factors that raise a price. It doesn’t publish a list of what lowers one, so this section is our own advice.

Few years. A company that kept two years of records has less to show than one that kept 15.
The middle is missing. Final invoices without the estimates, tickets without the comments, deals without the notes.
One function only. A single system covering a single desk.
Records that belong to someone else. Anything a client owns under contract stays out, however good it is.
Records not in English. micro1 says it is “primarily looking for companies that operate in English and maintain their documentation, workflows, and knowledge bases in English.”

None of these rules a company out by itself. They’re the questions micro1’s review will ask, so it’s worth asking them first.

A worked example: two companies of 40

This is hypothetical, and it carries no dollar figure, because micro1 publishes none per company.

Say two companies each have 40 staff and have traded for 12 years.

The first is a commercial electrical contractor. It kept every estimate, every revision and every lost bid in its job software since 2014. Change orders sit in the same file as the job, with the reason and the sign-off. The project managers argue scope in a Teams channel. The office runs on written SOPs, and the service team logs every callback with the fault found. That record covers sales, delivery, service and operations, with the reasoning attached.

The second is an electrical contractor of the same size. It moved to new software in 2022 and didn’t keep the export. Change orders were agreed on the phone and only the invoice survived. There are no SOPs; the owner explains things in person.

micro1’s own words say which is closer to “large-scale operational datasets” across “multiple teams and business functions.” Both companies qualify on headcount. Only one has written down how it works.

What our estimate shows

Our estimate asks five questions. Is the company operating or closed? How many people work there, now and at peak? How many years of records does it keep, from one to “25 or more”? Which systems hold the work? And which industry?

For an operating company with 30 or more people, now or at peak, the range sits inside micro1’s published band of $100K to $2M+. Three answers move it within that band: the years of records, the number of systems, and the larger of the two headcounts. More years, more systems and more people push the range up. The industry question doesn’t change the number, because micro1 says “operational data from every industry can contribute.”

The top of our range is about four times the bottom, and we round to the nearest $5,000. Our lowest range is $100,000 to $400,000 and our highest is $200,000 to $800,000. It never shows the $1M+ tier, because the questions can’t see what earns it.

What the estimate can’t see is everything micro1 actually prices on. It doesn’t know whether your CRM has notes. It can’t tell a project tracker full of argued tickets from an empty one. It has no way to judge uniqueness. Those are the things micro1 looks at in its review, and they’re the reason the final figure can sit anywhere in the band, or above it.

The limit: micro1 prices each company

This is the part we’d rather say plainly than have you find out later. micro1 prices each company. It says so: “Each partnership is evaluated individually, and compensation is aligned with the overall value and relevance of the data provided.”

micro1’s own payout estimator says the same about its own numbers: “Indicative estimate only.” The final payout depends on “data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.” If micro1’s own calculator isn’t an offer, ours isn’t either.

The order of events matters too. micro1 publishes four steps: get started, evaluation, discovery, partnership. In our reading of those steps, the figure comes at the end, after the discovery call about your data and privacy requirements, and only “if approved.” The referral page adds that compensation is for “approved data packages.”

So treat the published tiers as the map and our estimate as a pin on it. The address comes from micro1.

Why there’s a price at all

On 9 October 2026, micro1 announced “a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data.” It says it uses “de-identified company data” because “real business operations involve incomplete information, competing priorities and exceptions that require judgment.”

That’s the reason the middle of the record matters more than the end. The exception, the argument and the change of plan are what a clean ledger leaves out. They’re also what a company of 30 or more has been writing down for years, in the CRM, the tracker and the inbox.

For the full picture of what a buyer wants and what it ignores, our guide to what data buyers want from a trade business walks through it file by file.

What this means for a company with 30 or more staff

Four kinds of company, four records. This is our own description, not a list from micro1.

A services or software company of 30 to 100 holds its value in the tracker and the CRM. The tickets with their comments. The statements of work and the change requests. The proposals, won and lost, with the reasons. The knowledge base and its edit history.

A construction or mechanical contractor of 40 to 150 holds it in the job files. The estimate and its versions. The change orders with the sign-off. The daily reports and the closeout notes. The service histories by site, which show what was tried and what failed.

A logistics or operations company holds it in the procedures and the exceptions. The SOPs. The incident reports and the procedure change that followed each one. The dispatch history. The vendor correspondence.

A professional practice holds it in the engagement files and the review notes. The checklists. The comments between a junior and a partner. The templates and the edits made after a client pushed back.

In each case, the price questions are the same: how many years, how complete, how many functions, and how much of the reasoning survived. The page for companies with 30 or more staff goes deeper on which records count. Worth two minutes to see where yours sit? The estimate asks five questions.

What is never included

micro1 says every partnership is designed with “clear controls over what is shared, how it is handled, and what is never included.” Before any participation, it defines with the company the “approved data scope and clear boundaries,” the “anonymization and redaction requirements” and the “internal approval processes and permissions.” micro1 settles what is excluded with each company before any participation.

On how records are handled, micro1 says personally identifiable information “is removed when relevant.” Some datasets “may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.” Companies can “review representative samples before use,” and deletion requests are honoured under the engagement’s terms.

Buyers commonly exclude attorney-client privileged records, health information, payment-card and financial-account details, Social Security numbers, minors’ data, biometric data, and classified or export-controlled material. That’s our own advice, not micro1’s. Ask micro1 before you apply if any of your records sit near those lines.

Two more points, also our own. Customer names and payments were never what’s wanted. What’s wanted is how the work was done: how an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed. And anything a client owns under contract stays out, because only the contract says whose it is. Our safety page covers this in plain words.

What you keep

micro1 says: “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.” It describes data licensing. The CRM stays your CRM. The project files stay in your tracker. You keep using them the next morning.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain the process and give you a range with our estimate. The estimate is ours, not an offer. You apply to micro1 yourself, through the button below. micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing. We never see your files.

Before you apply

Four things to do first, as our own advice:

Count the years in each system. The CRM, the tracker, the shared drive, the chat. Write down how far back each one goes, old exports included.
Check the middle. For a sample of jobs or deals, see whether the versions, the notes and the change orders survived, or only the final figure.
List the functions. Sales, delivery, support, operations, finance. Note which ones have their own record.
Find the client contracts. Anything a client owns stays out, and only the contracts say which is which.

Then answer the five questions. If the range is worth your time, apply.

Alex, TrustPast

Questions and answers

How much does micro1 pay for company records?

micro1 publishes three tiers: $100k+ for qualified Enterprise Data Partnerships, $500k+ for large-scale operational datasets or ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions, and $1M+ for highly unique, proprietary operational data. Its referral page lists company compensation of $100K to $2M+ for approved data packages.

What decides where a company lands?

micro1 says compensation is determined by dataset size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise represented, and the uniqueness of the operational knowledge in the dataset. Each partnership is evaluated individually.

Is the TrustPast estimate an offer?

No. It is a range inside micro1's published band, worked out from your years of records, the systems that hold the work and your headcount. micro1 prices each company after its own review.

Does micro1 want our customer names or payment records?

micro1 says personally identifiable information is removed when relevant, some datasets are rewritten synthetically, and the scope and the anonymisation and redaction rules are defined together before any participation.

Do we have to sell the records?

No. micro1 says companies retain ownership of their underlying data. It describes data licensing, and the company keeps using its own systems.