What the site does
Most pages that answer “how much does a business plan cost” are written by someone selling a plan, and this one is too: Draper, which makes this site, sells one of the routes. What we do differently is price every route side by side, with a named, dated source: free help from the SBA, SCORE and Small Business Development Centers, plan software, templates, freelancers on Fiverr and Upwork, professional writers, and Draper.
We want to help you pick the cheapest route that satisfies whoever reads your plan. If your plan is for a bank or the SBA, we say which routes suit a lender, and when the cheap ones won’t do.
Industry pages, such as our vending machine business plan, add the start-up and running numbers that kind of plan has to show.
Who makes it
The site is made by Draper. Draper is about 50 workshops that take you through every step of starting a business, and together they build a business plan with you. The first workshops, including Validate Your Idea, are free with no card. Draper Start opens every workshop for US$25 a month. Draper Scale costs US$200 a month and adds direct help from Draper’s founders.
Draper’s prices come from Draper’s own pricing records and appear on its pricing page.
How we handle the conflict
We sell one of the options on this site, so every page says so. A “Made by Draper” bar runs across the top of every page. Wherever we rank Draper, it is marked as ours: “made by us” on its card and “ours” in price tables.
Our rule: the cheapest route that satisfies whoever will read your plan comes first, whoever sells it. Draper is ranked by that rule like everything else. It comes first only where it is genuinely the best option for that reader, and its entry always says when it does not fit. On our vending page the free route ranks above Draper, because a confident spreadsheet user doesn’t need a paid workshop. Draper is also left off the list for plans a lender reads. It builds a plan with you, and we don’t claim that plan meets a lender’s requirements.
Our links to Draper are marked as sponsored in the page code, which tells search engines they are commercial links. They also carry tracking tags that tell Draper which site, page and spot on the page a visit came from.
Draper is the only seller we earn from. We have no affiliate or referral deals with anyone else.
Who writes the pages
Every page carries Tom Hill’s byline as editor. Tom is Growth Lead at Draper, so his job includes growing Draper. That is why the ranking rules are written down on this page. He approves every page before it goes live.
The pages are drafted with AI. For each price page, separate AI agents write the research brief, gather the evidence, outline the page, draft it, fact-check it, edit it into plain English and review it independently. Tom then reads and approves it. How we collected these prices explains each step, with examples of what the checks caught.
Where a page gives Tom’s own view, it says so, attributes it to him as editor, and never presents it as data.
Our standards
- Every price has a source and a date.
- Prices are in US dollars. Other currencies are converted at the European Central Bank rate, and the page says which day’s rate.
- Medians come from real samples, and our price tables print the sample size beside them.
- Nothing is invented: no figures, source counts, quotes or testimonials.
- Forum posters are described by role, never by username.
Our sister site
Is This a Good Business Idea? answers the question before this one: whether a kind of business makes money at all. It is also made by Draper and follows the same rules. Its vending page links to our vending machine business plan.
Corrections
A corrected page goes live only after Tom approves the change, and the byline shows the date the page was last updated.
If a price is out of date, a figure is wrong or a source doesn’t say what we claim, tell us at tom@bardar.app and name the page and the figure.