A year at a time. Nothing auto-renews.
Read the filing.
Not the pitch.
Every franchisor hands you a few hundred pages and a salesperson. This reads the pages — the fees in Item 6, the investment in Item 7, what Item 19 actually says — and puts the SBA’s record of how its borrowers repaid next to it.
One brand, five, or all of them
A franchise decision turns on comparison — and a shortlist that costs more to widen is a shortlist you stop widening. Buyers arrive with three to five brands in mind and the list moves for months, which is why we point at the catalogue: it is the plan that does not charge you for changing your mind. Each runs a year and nothing renews itself — when the year is up, access lapses and you decide again.
The brand your account already opens is extra: buy five and you can read six.
One more brand
$49 for a year
1 brand of your choosing, for a year
This comes off the catalogue if you upgrade.
Buying accepts our terms and refund policy.
Five brands
$99 for a year
5 brands of your choosing, for a year
This comes off the catalogue if you upgrade.
Buying accepts our terms and refund policy.
Every brand we have read
$199 for a year
All 966 brands we have read
Buying accepts our terms and refund policy.
Or a filing we have never seen
Upload a disclosure document and it is read the same way every brand here is read — the fee stack in dollars, what Item 19 states, what the filing leaves out. $49 per filing. No tier above includes one: access opens the brands we have already read, and this is a new reading.
Payment is handled by Stripe on their own page. No card details reach this server.
What $199 opens
- Every fee in Item 6, priced in dollars against your own revenue assumption — not a royalty percentage on its own
- The investment range from Item 7, high and low, as the filing states it
- What Item 19 actually says — and, where the filing describes its average ambiguously, that it cannot be compared with the others
- Red flags and what to ask about, drawn from the record rather than from opinion
- A five-year model you put your own numbers into
Every brand, not a number of them. A franchise decision runs for months and turns on comparing one against another — pricing that by the brand would only teach you to compare fewer.
What never costs anything
- Every SBA loan outcome — who repaid, who was charged off, and how that compares with the brand’s industry
- The whole brand database, searchable, including which brands have a filing we have read
- Whether a brand discloses Item 19 at all, which is most of what narrows a list
- The fee to start, what it costs to open, and how many outlets there are — on every brand whose filing we have read, without an account
- Industry comparisons and rankings on loan outcomes
The SBA file is a public federal dataset. It is free here because it is free everywhere, and putting a price on a public record would be charging you for someone else’s work.
Three days to change your mind
The free sample is complete and costs nothing — that is where to judge whether this work is worth paying for, before you pay for it.
If you bought by mistake, write to us within three days and we refund it in full without asking why. Opening the brand you bought is using it, and ends the refund.
Write to support@franchiserecord.com from the address on the account. Refunds are issued by hand, usually the same day, and land back on the card Stripe charged.
What else you could do
| This site | Franchise attorney | Franchise broker | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads the actual FDD | Yes | Yes | No |
| Shows SBA loan outcomes | Yes, free | No | No |
| Compares against peer brands | Yes | No | Sometimes |
| Paid by the franchisor | No | No | Yes — commission |
| Legal advice on your contract | No | Yes | No |
This is not a substitute for a franchise attorney and does not try to be — nobody here reads your franchise agreement or advises you on it. It is the reading of the disclosure document you would otherwise do yourself, and the loan record you could not assemble yourself.
Free, no account
Before you buy
- 966 brands have a filing we have read
- Of 1,426 in the database. The rest are here because they appear in the loan record, and their pages say so rather than estimating anything.
- 444 of 774 Item 19s state a revenue figure you can model on
- A franchisor can satisfy Item 19 with unit counts or a top-quartile figure alone. Where the filing describes its average ambiguously, it is marked and kept out of comparisons instead of being averaged in.
- These are the figures as filed, not audited
- Every value is read out of the franchisor’s own document. A franchisor that files an optimistic number produces an optimistic figure here. How the reading works and where it refuses to guess.