Free tool · Business case
The ROI of competitive intelligence is the revenue from a higher competitive win rate plus the manual research labor you stop paying for, measured against the cost of the program. Enter your deal size, your competitive deal volume, and the hours your team already spends on competitor research to see all three numbers.
Free, no account required.
Annual contract value, in dollars.
Only deals where a named competitor is in the evaluation. Not your whole pipeline.
Percentage points, not percent. Keep it defensible: 3 to 5 points is arguable, 20 is not.
Across everyone: product marketing, sales, founders checking changelogs.
Salary plus benefits and overhead, per hour.
For comparison. Use a real quote if you have one; enterprise competitive intelligence suites are typically quote-only.
Annual model
Contested pipeline
$960,000
80 competitive deals a year at $12,000 each. This is what competitive intelligence is protecting.
Revenue from the lift
$48,000
+5 points takes you from 28.0 to 32.0 wins a year, or 4.0 more deals.
Cost of manual research
$15,600
208 hours a year at $75 an hour. This is spend you are already making.
Total annual benefit
$63,600
Revenue from the win-rate lift plus the labor you stop spending.
| Option | Annual cost | Net gain | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keep doing it manually | $15,600 | $-15,600 | — |
| Enterprise CI suite | $30,000 | $33,600 | 2.1x |
| Linkeddit Compete | $1,188 | $62,412 | 53.5x |
At these inputs, Compete pays for a full year in 7 days of benefit. One additional won deal at $12,000 covers 10.1 years of the subscription.
How to argue with this number
The labor line is real spend and hard to dispute. The win-rate line is a forecast, so it is the one finance will push on. Keep the lift at 3 to 5 points, and if you can, baseline your current competitive win rate from closed-lost reasons in your CRM rather than from memory. A defensible 53.5x beats an unfalsifiable 40x.
One is a forecast and one is already on your P&L. Lead with the second one.
Lever one
Reps who know what a competitor just shipped, what their pricing actually is, and what their customers complain about lose fewer deals to them. The effect is real, but it is a forecast, so it is the line finance will interrogate.
Keep the assumption small and cite where your baseline came from. A modest number you can defend beats a large one you cannot.
Lever two
Someone is already checking competitor pricing pages, changelogs, and review sites, usually a founder or a product marketer, usually on a Friday afternoon. That time has a loaded cost and appears in no budget line.
This is existing spend being reallocated, not a projection, which makes it the strongest argument in the model.
If a named competitor appears in only a handful of deals a quarter, no amount of intelligence moves your number. Fix demand generation first.
If you lose because a capability genuinely does not exist yet, a battlecard will not save the deal. Competitive intelligence tells you which capability, then you have to build it.
Briefs that arrive weekly and are read by nobody cost more than they save. If no one owns acting on the intel, the honest ROI is negative.
If the model does clear the bar, the next step is arming the team: build a battlecard and set up free monitoring before you spend anything. See Compete pricing for what the automated version costs.
Step 1
Enter the deals per quarter where a named competitor is actually in the evaluation, not your whole pipeline. Overstating this is the single fastest way to get the whole model dismissed.
Step 2
Pull it from closed-lost reasons in your CRM if you can, rather than from memory. If you have no data, use your overall win rate and note the assumption when you present it.
Step 3
Three to five percentage points is arguable in front of a CFO. Twenty is not, and claiming it costs you the credibility of the labor savings too, which were the part nobody could dispute.
Step 4
Total the hours per week that anyone spends checking competitor changelogs, pricing pages, and review sites. This is existing spend, which makes it the strongest line in the model.
When you outgrow this tool
This tool is free and complete on its own, with no account and no limits worth mentioning. Linkeddit is what you use when the job stops being a one-off and starts needing to run every week without you.
FAQ
How the arithmetic works, which assumptions survive a CFO, and when the answer is to buy nothing.
Add the revenue from a modeled competitive win-rate lift to the labor cost you stop spending on manual research, then divide by the annual cost of the program. The labor figure is existing spend and hard to dispute. The win-rate figure is a forecast, so keep it conservative or the whole model gets discounted.
Three to five percentage points is a defensible assumption for a team that previously had no systematic competitive process. Vendors quote much higher numbers, but those are self-reported and rarely controlled. If you present twenty points, expect finance to discount everything else in your model too.
Enterprise competitive intelligence suites are typically quote-only and land in the five-figure annual range, which is why this calculator asks you for a real quote rather than assuming one. Linkeddit Compete is published at $99 per month, or $1188 per year.
Because it is the one line nobody can argue with. Someone is already checking competitor changelogs and review sites; that time has a loaded cost, and it appears in no budget line item. Four hours a week at seventy-five dollars an hour is over fifteen thousand dollars a year of invisible spend.
That is itself the finding, and worth reporting. Start with your overall win rate, label it as an assumption, and use the model to argue for tracking competitor names on closed-lost records. You cannot improve a number you do not measure, and most teams discover the tracking gap first.
It shows all three options, including doing nothing, with the same arithmetic applied to each. The manual row carries a real cost, because it does. If your competitive deal volume is low, the model will show that no tool is worth it, and that is a legitimate output.
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser with no account, and nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere, which matters given that deal sizes and win rates are sensitive numbers.
Every tool on the shelf is free and needs no account. See all free tools.
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