Article

What companies have been paid for their records

Last updated October 17, 2026

The first question about any of this is the obvious one: what have other companies been paid? It is the right question, and there is a published answer. Polyshares, the buyer this page is about, lists four closed deals with amounts, which it calls a selection, and a typical range. Here is what Polyshares publishes, deal by deal, in its own words. Then what those figures do not tell you, which matters as much as the numbers.

The roofing company: $450,000

The first deal on Polyshares’ case studies page is a roofing company, filed under home services. The amount is $450,000. Polyshares describes the deal in one line: “Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record. Anonymized before delivery.”

That is all Polyshares publishes about it. Not the years of records, not the number of crews, not the systems. Polyshares says “Company names stay confidential.” So the roofer stays a roofer here too.

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The general contractor: $300,000

The second deal is a general contractor, filed under construction, at $300,000. The description is the same line: “Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record. Anonymized before delivery.”

A general contractor’s record is close to a roofer’s in shape, but Polyshares does not say what this one contained. We don’t know whether it was bids and change orders or something else, and we won’t guess.

The solar company: $275,000

The third deal is a solar company, filed under energy, at $275,000. Same licence form, same anonymisation line: “Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record. Anonymized before delivery.”

A solar installer quotes, permits and installs, so its paperwork looks like a trade record. Polyshares does not say which of it was licensed.

The marketing agency: $110,000

The fourth deal is a global marketing agency, filed under professional services, at $110,000. Again: “Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record. Anonymized before delivery.”

It is the smallest of the four and the only one outside building and energy. Polyshares says it buys from “any company with real operating history, in any sector.” An agency qualified. So did a roofer.

What the four have in common

Read the four entries side by side and three things repeat.

The licence form. Each deal is a “perpetual exclusive license to the operational record.” Not a sale of the company, not a share of it. A licence to the record.

The anonymisation. Each deal is “anonymized before delivery.” Polyshares’ case studies page describes the four as records it has bought and anonymised, “across sectors and company sizes.” The anonymisation happened before the record reached anyone downstream.

The confidentiality. “Company names stay confidential.” Polyshares names the trade and the sector, and the amount. It does not name the company.

Polyshares also says how each one went. “Every license starts with the same intake used by any seller: a few questions about the company’s systems and data.” Then: “We review the record and come back with an offer within one to two weeks.” And: “Once terms are signed and the data is anonymized and delivered, payment follows net 30 to 60.” The four deals ran on the same track Polyshares describes for everyone.

The typical range Polyshares publishes

The four deals sit inside a wider range Polyshares publishes. On its home page: “Typical deals run $100K to $2M and above.” In the terms table on the same page, the deal size is “$100K to $2M, and above for large records,” paid by Polyshares to the company. In its questions on the same page: “Deals typically land between $100K and $2M, and run higher for large or long records.”

Note where the four published deals fall. All four sit in the lower half of that range. The largest, the roofer, is $450,000. The smallest, the agency, is $110,000, just above the floor. Polyshares does not publish any deal at the top of its range. We can only report what is on the page.

What moves the number

Polyshares says what moves a price inside that range, and it is not file size. On its home page: “Depth of operating history and how much visible reasoning the record contains move the number far more than raw volume does.” And, on who qualifies: “The length and texture of the record matter more than headcount or revenue.”

Its answers page on what a company’s data is worth goes further. “The first instinct is to measure the asset in terabytes, but buyers do not price it that way. What we are paying for is captured judgment.” Then the list of what moves the number up: “Length of continuous operating history,” “Visible disagreement and correction,” “A specialized domain, because material from a trade with few written records is scarce in a way general business correspondence is not,” and “clean rights.”

Polyshares also lists what caps a number or kills it. “A short operating history.” Records “the company holds but does not own.” Personal information “woven through the record in a way that cannot be cleanly stripped.” And material “that is already public, published, scraped, or widely syndicated.”

Read that against a trade company. Fifteen years of estimates with their versions, the supplements, the change orders, the callbacks: that is length, texture and visible correction. A trade with few written records is exactly where Polyshares says material is scarce. The page on what data buyers want from a trade business walks that test through four trades, file by file.

How Polyshares says it prices

Polyshares says it does not price from a description. On its home page: “We look at the record before we price it. An offer comes within one to two weeks, and terms are papered right after.” In its questions: “We read a sample of the record. That is how we price it, and why we do not pay for something we have not seen.”

The data handling page says who reads the sample and what they see. “Someone on the team reads the anonymized sample before Polyshares prices the record. The review is scoped to what would actually be licensed.” The sample is anonymised before that read happens; the fields come out first.

Polyshares gives the reason on its answers page about how a deal works. “Two records that look identical on an intake form can be worth very different numbers. One is ten years of people working problems out in writing; the other is ten years of calendar invitations. Nobody can tell those apart from a description, which is why we review the record and agree what is in scope before quoting, rather than after.”

So the sequence is: intake, a call, a sample read, then an offer within one to two weeks. The number comes after the read. That is why the four published amounts cannot be read backwards into a formula.

How the money moves

No fee. No commission. In the terms table on its home page, the cost to the company is “None. No fee, no commission. We pay you.” And: “Money moves one way, from us to you.”

On timing: “Net 30 to 60 once the data is approved, anonymized, and delivered.” The data licensing page puts it as “Net 30 to 60, once the data is approved, shared, and anonymized.” The case studies page says the same for the four deals: “Once terms are signed and the data is anonymized and delivered, payment follows net 30 to 60.”

On what is deducted: nothing, by Polyshares’ account. “The number we quote after that review is the number the company receives, with nothing deducted from it.” And if terms are never reached: “there is no fee at any stage, no exclusivity while we talk, and no obligation to proceed.”

What the figures do not tell you

Here is the limit of the four numbers, stated plainly.

Polyshares does not publish how many years of records sat behind the roofing deal. It does not publish how many crews, how many estimates, or which software the record came out of. The same is true for the general contractor, the solar company and the agency. Four amounts, four trades, four sectors, one licence form. Nothing else.

So a past deal does not predict an offer. A roofer was paid $450,000. That does not mean the next roofer will be, or that a roofer with half the years will be paid half. Polyshares says it reads the record before it prices it, and that depth and visible reasoning move the number. Two roofers with the same headcount can hold very different records.

Our own estimate on this site is a range, not an offer. It takes what Polyshares publishes about what moves the number and places your company in a band. Polyshares makes offers. We don’t, and we can’t. The buyer prices each company; we can only show you the band.

One more thing. Polyshares does not publish where each record went: “we do not disclose which labs take which data.” What it publishes is that it anonymises the records, builds them into data sets and supplies them to labs. Labs license records like these to train AI models.

What a licence is and is not

All four published deals are licences, so it is worth being exact about the word. Polyshares’ answers page on licensing versus selling draws the line. “A sale transfers ownership permanently in exchange for one payment. A license grants defined rights over defined material for a defined period while the company keeps ownership, keeps operating on its own records, and can license again later.”

Polyshares says the licence is the structure it uses. “For a going concern with a record that is still accumulating, the license is the better instrument, and it is also the structure Polyshares uses. The company keeps the business and the underlying data, and the license is defined and bounded.” Its data handling page says what bounded means: “Defined systems, a defined term, and exclusive by default unless we agree otherwise. Nothing outside that scope is covered.”

Exclusive has a cost, and Polyshares says so. “An exclusive license, where no other buyer may license the material for the term, commands a premium but closes off every other buyer for the duration, so it is a decision to make deliberately.” The four published deals are each described as exclusive and perpetual. Polyshares does not publish what a non-exclusive deal would have paid, so we can’t compare.

What a licence is not, in Polyshares’ terms: not equity, not debt. “A license carries no equity and no debt. It does not touch the cap table, and it creates no repayment obligation.” You are not selling the company.

How it works with Polyshares

These are Polyshares’ published terms:

The company pays no fee and no commission. “Money moves one way, from us to you.”
The structure is a licence to defined operational data, non-dilutive, with no equity and no debt. “A license is not a sale.”
Intake is “three quick questions, then the detail once your account exists. About two minutes.” It asks for record counts, not files or exports.
Polyshares reads an anonymised sample, then returns an offer within one to two weeks. Terms are papered right after.
Nothing leaves the company’s systems until Polyshares has made an offer and the company has accepted it.
A specialist PII partner removes or replaces names, emails, phone numbers, account numbers and addresses before Polyshares or any buyer sees the record. Roles, timestamps and the work itself are kept.
Payment is net 30 to 60 once the data is approved, shared and anonymised.
The licence covers defined systems and a defined term, and is exclusive by default. Resale or use beyond the licence scope is not permitted.
Buyers see de-identified listings only, carrying a code instead of the company’s name.

Polyshares also says confirming ownership starts with the company, because only the company holds its customer contracts, and that a company should have its own counsel review any licence before signing. We say the same.

Worth two minutes to see your range? The estimate asks five questions.

What you keep

Under Polyshares’ published terms, “You keep the business and the underlying data. The license is defined and bounded.” The data handling page puts it in a sentence an owner can hold onto: “The company keeps operating exactly as before, with the same data, the same systems, the same customers.”

The estimates stay in your quoting software. The job files stay in your folders. The customers stay yours, and Polyshares says a buyer never contacts them: “Polyshares is the sole counterparty.”

What this means for a trade company

Two of the four published deals are from the building trades, and a third is from energy. That is the published fact. What follows is our own description of what each trade’s record is, not a list from any buyer. Polyshares decides what it licenses, after it has read the sample.

A roofing company’s record is the estimate chain, the insurance supplements and the adjuster’s replies, the change orders from what the tear-off found, and the callback log.

An HVAC company’s record is the repair-or-replace estimate with its load calculation and options, the service agreements and maintenance logs visit by visit, and the repair tickets.

A plumbing company’s record is the quote and the second version after what was found behind the wall, the camera reports, the permits, and the service history by address.

An auto repair shop’s record is the estimate against the repair order, car by car, with the diagnosis, the parts, the hours and what the customer declined.

In every one of these, the estimate is the spine. The estimates and quotes page explains why the versions and the lost bids count. Polyshares’ words apply across the four: “a thread where two people disagree about a quote and work it out carries judgment that cannot be manufactured.”

A company that is not in the trades has its own pages on this site. The test is the same: length and texture of the record, in Polyshares’ terms, not headcount or revenue.

What is never included

Polyshares’ own line first. On its data handling page: “Names, emails, phone numbers, account numbers, and addresses are removed or replaced by a specialist PII partner before Polyshares or any buyer sees the record.” On its home page, the licence “does not cover what you hold on behalf of your own clients.” On its answers page about whether selling company data is legal, material held for a client under an agreement that assigns ownership to the client “cannot be licensed regardless of value, and only the contracts separate the two.” And: “No buyer with regulatory exposure will accept a record carrying personal information.” It calls the client-ownership problem “the single most common reason a promising record turns out to be unsaleable.” That is what Polyshares publishes.

Now our advice, which is ours and not Polyshares’:

Customer names and contact details were never the thing being bought. You don’t scrub them yourself; the PII partner does.
Payment details. Card numbers and bank details are not part of how the work was done. For a card number written on a scanned estimate, keep that page in your own cabinet and raise it at discovery.
Anything a client owns. Find the contracts before you count the files.
Health and employee files. A customer’s medical details on an accessibility job, or an employee’s personal file that ended up in the job folder, are personal information. Ask Polyshares before you apply if any of your records sit near those lines.

What Polyshares licenses is decided by Polyshares, in the offer, after it has looked at the record. We can only tell you what is usually in and usually out. The safety page says the same in plain words.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain the process and give you a range with our estimate. Five questions, two minutes. The estimate is ours, not an offer; Polyshares makes offers, after it has read the sample. The estimate names the buyer that fits your headcount; when that is Polyshares, you apply to it yourself, through the estimate’s link. Polyshares 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:

Don’t read the four deals as a price list. They are four amounts for four records Polyshares read and does not describe. Your record is a different one.
Count the years, not the documents. Polyshares says length of continuous operating history and visible reasoning move the number. A shop that has quoted since 2011 has 15 years, whatever the file count.
Find the client contracts. Anything held for a client under an agreement that gives the client ownership stays out, and only the contracts say which is which.
Don’t tidy up. The versions, the lost bids and the arguments over scope are the reasoning. The PII partner handles the names.

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

Alex, TrustPast

Questions and answers

Where do these figures come from?

They are Polyshares’ published figures, from its case studies page. Polyshares describes each deal by trade, sector, licence form and amount, and says company names stay confidential. The links under Sources go to the pages where Polyshares publishes them.

What has a trade company been paid?

Polyshares’ published deals include a roofing company at $450,000 and a general contractor at $300,000. Both are described as a perpetual exclusive licence to the operational record, anonymised before delivery.

Will my company be paid the same?

Not necessarily. Polyshares says it looks at the record before it prices it and does not pay for something it has not seen. A past deal does not predict an offer.

What is the typical range?

Polyshares says typical deals run $100K to $2M and above, and that depth of operating history and visible reasoning move the number far more than raw volume does.

When does the money arrive?

Polyshares says payment is net 30 to 60 once the data has been approved, shared and anonymised, and that the review comes first because it does not pay for a record it has not seen.

Does the company pay a fee?

No. Polyshares says there is no fee and no commission, and that money moves one way, from Polyshares to the company. Polyshares pays TrustPast a referral fee; you pay us nothing.