Seven Rungs, One Word: "Appointment"
An ISO shopping for MCA leads or appointments sees prices from $0.02 to $400 in the same afternoon, all described in language that sounds interchangeable: leads, transfers, submissions, meetings. They are not the same product. Each price point on this ladder buys a different amount of work someone already completed on your behalf, from a raw phone number all the way up to a merchant who has confirmed interest twice on a specific calendar slot.
Rung by Rung, Sourced to Published Pricing
- Raw business data, roughly $0.02 to $0.20 per record. A name, phone number, and basic firmographic data, no qualification of any kind.
- Aged leads, roughly $0.05 to $5 per record. Vendors disagree by 10x here. Synergy Direct Solution publishes aged leads at 1 to 5 cents each with no minimum order; The Leads Warehouse publishes a wider $0.05 to $0.50 band for the same category.
- UCC and trigger data, roughly $0.20 to $15 per record. Pulled from public UCC-1 filings or other trigger events, priced above raw data because it signals a merchant recently took on financing, per The Leads Warehouse's published guide.
- Shared or real-time leads, roughly $10 to $60 or more. Fresher than aged data and typically sold to more than one buyer, sitting between raw leads and true exclusive leads on price.
- Exclusive leads, $50 to $120. MCA Leads Pro's own published pricing page for a record sold to a single buyer, marketed as fresher and human-verified.
- Live transfers, $75 to $200 or more. MCA Leads Pro publishes $80 to $200-plus; The Leads Warehouse independently corroborates with $75 to $150-plus. A real-time phone handoff of a qualified merchant.
- Full submissions with bank statements, $75 to $250 or more. MCA Leads Pro's top published tier, a completed application package ready to send to funders.
Why the Ladder Climbs the Way It Does
Every rung up costs more because someone already did more of the qualifying work before you paid for it. A raw record requires you to find, reach, and qualify the merchant yourself. A live transfer means someone already reached the merchant and confirmed interest in the moment, in real time, but you still have to close the conversation cold on a call you did not set up. A full submission means the merchant already handed over bank statements. The price is a rough proxy for how much of the sales cycle has already been completed before the product reaches you.
Where Different ISOs Sit on the Ladder
New and small ISOs tend to start low on this ladder. DailyFunder poster capaxess recommends targeting aged data on merchants who funded within the last 12 months and have over $1 million in annual sales, over chasing "fresh" leads, since "the newer 'fresh' leads are the worst in my opinion because everyone is calling them so even if you find the merchant he's fried from so many calls." High-volume shops and direct funders sit higher on the ladder by necessity and by budget, buying at the submission or exclusive-lead tier because their unit economics can absorb it and their underwriting requires a more finished product.
Why VA Horizon Prices at the Top, Not the Middle
VA Horizon's held, double-confirmed meeting prices at $200 to $400, at or above the live-transfer and full-submission tier on the ladder above. That is a deliberate position, not a rounding choice: no vendor identified in this research sells a double-confirmed, exclusive, pay-per-held-meeting product, since the market prices per record or per transfer, not per completed, reconfirmed appointment. A meeting that has already cleared two confirmation checkpoints, once when the merchant picked a time and again as the meeting approached, is a more finished product than a live transfer, where the confirmation happens once, in the same call where you also have to close.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- MCA Leads Pro, how much do MCA leads cost
- The Leads Warehouse, how much do MCA leads cost in 2026
- Synergy Direct Solution, MCA live transfers
- DailyFunder, "Please help - we need quality leads!" thread