dealhead is priced per transaction, with annual licenses available for teams running higher volume or larger-scale deals. Before we talk specifics, see what dealhead saves you on every deal. Then connect with us for pricing tailored to your workflow.
Adjust the inputs below to match your typical deal profile. This calculator estimates the direct legal cost savings from tasks dealhead automates, including negotiation tracking, signature coordination, and closing binder assembly.
More than most teams have ever measured, because it is never a line item. Deal administration (circulating turns, chasing signatures, assembling the closing binder) is billed inside the same hourly stream as legal judgment, so it disappears into the invoice. This calculator pulls that work back out and prices it, using a per-task hour model published in full below.
The estimate is deliberately narrow. It counts only the coordination tasks that dealhead automates outright, at rates you set yourself. It does not attempt to price diligence, drafting, negotiation strategy, or regulatory work, because those are legal judgment and no software removes them.
It measures one thing: the attorney hours consumed by the mechanical, repeatable administration of a transaction, converted to dollars at your blended rate. It is built for the person who has to defend transaction spend to someone else.
Three groups, in rough order of how much the number moves. Corporate development teams doing four to ten deals a year, where administrative drag is invisible because each deal feels bespoke. Serial acquirers running a repeatable playbook, where the same coordination tax is paid fifteen or twenty times annually. Private equity platforms executing roll-ups at thirty to fifty deals a year, where the aggregate is large enough to be a budget conversation. General counsel and finance teams underwriting deal costs use it the same way. Law firms use it in reverse, quantifying the administrative load they absorb on fixed-fee or capped engagements.
Three independent components are computed and summed, then multiplied by your blended attorney hourly rate. Two components scale with deal complexity; one is a flat per-deal cost. There is no hidden multiplier, no efficiency factor, and no discount rate.
Stated exactly as the calculator runs it:
Negotiation cost = Documents x Turns x 0.8 hrs x Rate Signature cost = Signatories x 2.8 hrs x Rate Binder cost = 6.5 hrs x Rate Per-deal total = Negotiation + Signature + Binder Annual total = Per-deal total x Deals per year
The three hour constants (0.8, 2.8, and 6.5) are the Est (Actual) tier subtotals. Each is built from itemized sub-tasks shown in the tables under “How We Calculate This” in the calculator above. Note that the signature and binder components do not scale with document count: signature effort tracks the number of parties, and binder assembly is charged once per deal at close.
We estimate 6.5 hours at the Est (Actual) tier, and it is the single largest per-deal line in the model. That breaks down as 1.0 hour generating the table of contents, 5.0 hours compiling executed and final documents, and 0.5 hours circulating the finished binder. The compilation figure is the one most often disputed, so it is worth being direct: on a clean, small deal it can be under two hours, and on a messy one with scattered execution versions it can exceed fifteen. The Minimum tier prices this same work at 0.6 hours if you want the defensible floor.
Several, and some are rough. The hour constants come from dealhead’s own task-level decomposition of transaction workflows, validated against practitioner interviews and observed deal files, not from a published industry survey, because none exists at this granularity. Treat them as informed estimates, not measurements.
Every task is priced at three levels, and the tier you choose changes the answer by roughly a factor of five. Minimum is the unassailable floor: the least time in which the task could conceivably be completed, intended as a guarantee benchmark. Est (Low) is the most efficient realistic attorney working at peak efficiency. Est (Actual) is the time most likely to be billed in practice, and it is what the headline figure uses. If you need a number that survives a skeptical CFO, quote the Minimum.
It excludes paralegal and support staff time, which is real but billed at lower rates. It excludes the cost of errors, omissions, and post-close rework. It excludes deal delay, the carrying cost of a transaction closing two weeks later than it needed to. It excludes internal business-team hours entirely. And it does not subtract dealhead’s own fee, so every figure on this page is gross legal fee reduction rather than net savings or ROI. A complete economic picture would be larger in the first four respects and smaller in the last.
One more honest caveat: the blended rate is applied uniformly to every task. In reality some of this coordination work is delegated to more junior timekeepers at lower rates. If your firm delegates aggressively, adjust the rate slider downward rather than assuming the model already accounts for it.
Three worked examples, computed with the formula above and shown with every input visible. Nothing here is rounded for effect. Each figure is the exact output of the model at the stated inputs.
An in-house corp dev group at a mid-market operating company, doing a handful of tuck-in acquisitions a year with outside counsel on each one.
Same profile at the other tiers: Minimum $3,250 per deal, Est (Low) $7,605 per deal. Open this scenario in the calculator →
A programmatic acquirer with a standing playbook, a dedicated integration function, and a panel of firms it uses repeatedly.
Same profile at the other tiers: Minimum $6,300 per deal, Est (Low) $14,100 per deal. Open this scenario in the calculator →
A PE-backed platform running a roll-up strategy, with high deal count, larger document sets, and premium counsel rates.
Same profile at the other tiers: Minimum $11,340 per deal, Est (Low) $24,750 per deal. Open this scenario in the calculator →
dealhead is priced per transaction, with annual licenses available for teams running higher volume or larger-scale deals. We do not publish rate cards, because pricing depends on deal profile, volume, and whether the fee is settled through the closing funds flow. Contact us and we will quote against the deal profile you entered above.
A virtual data room is a repository. It stores documents and controls who can see them, which is a diligence problem. dealhead is a transaction execution layer: it tracks negotiation turns, drives the signature process, maintains the closing checklist, and assembles the closing binder. The two are complements, not substitutes; most teams keep their VDR for diligence and use dealhead for everything from first markup through post-closing distribution.
No. dealhead orchestrates the signature process around your existing e-signature provider rather than replacing it. The hours this calculator attributes to the signature process are the coordination work surrounding execution: building signature packets, chasing signatories, and compiling executed pages into the record. They are not the cryptographic act of signing, which DocuSign and its peers already handle well.
Most teams are running their first live deal on dealhead within days rather than months, because there is no data migration step. A transaction starts empty and fills as it executes. The heavier lift is agreeing on the closing checklist template with your counsel, which is usually a single working session.
The headline number uses the Est (Actual) tier, which is our estimate of hours most likely billed in practice, so it is a realistic figure, not a conservative one. The calculator also reports a Minimum tier that we consider genuinely unassailable, and that figure is typically three to five times smaller than the headline. If you need a number to defend in a business case, use the Minimum.
No. Every figure on this page is gross legal fee reduction, the cost of attorney time spent on tasks dealhead automates. It does not net out dealhead's transaction fee, so the numbers here are not a net savings or ROI figure. Contact us for pricing and we will build the net view with you.
It is built for the person who has to justify transaction spend: corporate development leads, general counsel and deputy GCs, PE operating partners, and finance teams underwriting deal costs. It is also useful for law firms that want to quantify the administrative load they are absorbing on fixed-fee or capped engagements.
Yes. Every input is encoded in the page URL, so once you have set your deal profile you can copy the address bar and send it to someone, and they will see the same inputs and the same figures. Those links are also readable by search engines and AI assistants, so a specific scenario can be cited directly.
Have a deal profile that does not fit these examples? Adjust the calculator above and the figures update, or talk to us about what dealhead would cost against your actual volume.