What we collect
Our pages compare the routes to a business plan: doing it yourself with free help, plan software, templates, freelancers, professional writers, and Draper. For each route we record the seller, the product or tier, the price, the date we saw it and the page it came from.
Industry pages add the start-up and running numbers a plan has to show. For vending that meant Census data, new-machine prices from four sellers, used-machine listings, card reader prices, commission contracts and owners’ own posted figures.
Where the numbers come from
We read every number from the page, PDF or data file it belongs to, never from a search snippet. Census figures come from the Census Bureau’s bulk files, because its API now needs a key.
Some sites don’t allow automated tools. When a site doesn’t, Tom Hill saves the pages himself and we work from his copies. For our vending page that meant Fiverr, Upwork and Reddit.
Draper’s own price comes from Draper’s pricing records, and the source line links to Draper’s pricing page.
How each number is dated
Every source carries the date we accessed it and, where it has one, its publication date. We check those publication dates. The Hustle’s survey of vending owners carries a 2024 date, but the Wayback Machine’s first copy is from October 2020, so we date it to about October 2020.
Prices are in US dollars only. When a page shows another currency, we convert it at the European Central Bank reference rate and say so. Fiverr showed Tom prices in Australian dollars, so we converted them at the ECB rate for 11 Nov 2026 (1 AUD = 0.68592 USD), taken from frankfurter.dev. The source line says which day’s rate we used.
Where a figure is our own arithmetic, the working sits next to it in the page’s source file so a checker can re-run it. Tables built from our own sums say so in their caption.
Sample sizes and their limits
Every median in our price tables has its sample size beside it.
- Fiverr: we searched “vending machine business plan” on 12 Nov 2026. The first page showed 43 gigs. 17 were business plan gigs, and we kept the 13 that write general or vending plans, dropping design-only and edit-only gigs, a bar and restaurant plan and a nonprofit plan. Their starting tiers have a median of $115 (n=13), from $26 to $389. The search page shows only the cheapest tier, which usually has no financial model, and Fiverr sorts by relevance, so this is not a random sample.
- Upwork: we searched “business plan writer” on 12 Nov 2026 and recorded the hourly rates of the 10 freelancers on the first page. The median is $32.50 an hour, from $14.99 to $50. Three of the ten are in the US. These are hourly rates, not prices for a finished plan.
- Owner accounts: our vending page draws on 13 public owner accounts for sales per machine, but only 5 give a net figure. They are self-reported, not audited, and mostly from people still in business. The page says so beside its owner figures.
- Machine prices: used machine prices are asking prices from listings, not sale prices.
What we never do
- We never invent a figure, a source count, a quote or a testimonial.
- We never name forum posters by their usernames. We describe them by role, such as “a 7-year ex-operator” or “one buyer”. People already named in the press or on their own channels keep their names.
- We never present receipts as income. Census receipts are sales before stock, commission, card fees and fuel, and the page labels them that way.
- We never rank Draper first unless it is the best option for that reader. On our vending page the free route ranks above Draper, and Draper is left off the list for plans a lender reads, because we don’t claim its plans meet a lender’s requirements.
How AI is used, and who checks it
Each price page goes through the same steps, each done by a separate AI agent: a research brief, an evidence pack, an outline, a draft, a fact check, a plain-English edit and an independent review. Tom Hill then reads the page and approves it. Pages stay out of search engines until he does.
The fact check traces every number back to its evidence and re-opens sources live. On our vending page it checked about 130 figures, re-opened 26 sources and made 23 changes. In one case the draft gave 2009 as the year a court entered a $4.06 million judgment in an FTC vending case. The FTC’s release, dated January 2009, says the judgment came in October 2008, so the page now says 2008.
The plain-English edit changes wording only, and every number and footnote is compared with the version before it.
The reviewer has not seen the page before. On our vending page it found a source marked as checked that no evidence file showed anyone opening. That page has since been opened by hand, and what it offers is recorded in the evidence file.
Updates and corrections
There is no fixed schedule for re-checking prices. A page is re-checked when a source changes or someone reports an error, and the updated date in the byline changes when the page does. A corrected page goes live only after Tom approves the change. About and corrections has more.