How we estimate private-company revenue
Private companies don't publish their revenue, and the numbers scattered online are usually one unsourced figure copied from site to site. We wanted something better: a repeatable, testable estimate you can reason about — with the error bars shown.
Estimate it two independent ways, then reconcile
There's no single public number that gives away a company's revenue. But there are two independent views of it:
- The website funnel. How much traffic does the site get, and what share is real acquisition traffic vs. logged-in users? Published SaaS conversion rates turn that traffic into signups, then paying customers — multiplied by listed pricing, an estimate of self-serve revenue.
- The demand model. How much do people search for the brand, how mature is the company, how long has it existed? A model trained on companies whose revenue is public turns those demand-and-scale signals into a total-revenue estimate — including enterprise, sales-led revenue a funnel can't see.
We reconcile the two. For a self-serve product the funnel leads and the demand model confirms; for an enterprise, sales-led company the demand model leads and the funnel is a floor. The result is a single range.
We look things up — we don't invent them
Every rate in the funnel — visitor-to-signup, signup-to-paid, churn, customer lifetime, tier mix — is a published industry benchmark, not a knob we tuned to get a nice answer. Only the demand model is fitted, and it's fitted on real reported revenues.
Where a real number exists, we use it
For companies whose revenue has been credibly reported (press, filings, reputable data providers), the page shows the reported figure with a Verified badge, not our estimate. We never call an estimate "reported."
How accurate is it?
We can grade ourselves, because we know the real revenue for a set of these companies. So we test blind: hide the real number, run the full model as if we'd never seen it, and compare.
- Median miss: ~1.5x — the typical estimate is within ~1.5x of the real figure.
- ~70% land within 2x, and ~90% within 3x.
- Tightest for self-serve companies (revenue shows up in web traffic), loosest for large enterprise companies (revenue is nearly invisible to public signals).
Ranges and confidence, not false precision
Every estimate is a range with a confidence label. High confidence means a reported anchor or two methods that agree closely; low confidence means thin signal and a deliberately wide range. Read the range, not the midpoint.
What this is — and isn't
- A transparent, testable estimate built from public signals and published benchmarks.
- Updated as traffic, pricing, and reported figures change.
- Not audited financials, insider information, or a company-confirmed number.
- Not a precise figure — anyone quoting a single exact revenue for a private company is guessing.