Research & analysis · GLG cost

GLG cost: GLG pricing, subscription cost and cost per user, from GLG's own SEC filing

Every article about GLG cost quotes a range, and none of them cite anything. You will read that a GLG subscription is $50,000 to $150,000, or $80,000 to $300,000, that a call costs $1,500 an hour, or $8,000 for two hours, or that there is a minimum plus a success fee. Those numbers come from blogs published by smaller expert networks competing with GLG for the same budget. Not one of them is sourced to a contract or a filing.

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There is a document. On 18 October 2021 Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc. filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public, and that filing contains audited revenue, annualized contract value, retention and user counts. GLG withdrew the offering on 25 March 2022, so those statements remain the only financial disclosure the company has ever made. This page reads them as a price list, because with the user and account counts alongside them, that is effectively what they are.

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The short answer

How much does GLG cost?

GLG does not publish prices, but it filed audited figures with the SEC in 2021. Those show about $25,600 of annualized contract value per GLG Direct user per year, and roughly $192,000 per client subscription account. The largest single client paid about $29.5 million a year. Around 90% of GLG revenue is subscription rather than pay per call.

Last updated September 2026

Why it works

What the filing shows that the estimates do not

GLG is a subscription business, and the per hour framing describes under a tenth of it

GLG splits its own revenue into two lines. Subscription revenue came to $531.4m of $589.1m in 2020, which is 90.2%, and $509.8m of $572.2m in 2019, which is 89.1%. The other line, which GLG calls transactional, is defined in the filing as discrete projects with defined deliverables such as surveys, plus work for law firm clients using network members as expert witnesses. GLG also states plainly that the majority of its customers enter one year subscription agreements. So the hourly rates you see quoted describe the smaller, mostly legal end of the business. If a private equity or hedge fund buyer is being quoted purely per call, that is a starter arrangement rather than how GLG sells to its core market.

The average seat costs about $25,000, and the largest client paid 29% less

Divide ACV by unique GLG Direct users and the answer barely moves: $25,928 in 2019, $25,623 in 2020, $24,871 at June 2021. Then there is one account whose size the filing discloses directly. GLG terminated a large consulting firm in October 2020 that had carried $29.5m of ACV in the twelve months to June 2020 across 1,618 unique users. That is about $18,232 per user per year, roughly 29% below the company average in the same period. It is the only point on GLG's volume curve that is a matter of public record, and it says that scale earns a discount of that order rather than the halving buyers sometimes hope for.

Consumption contracts are a minimum commitment plus overage, in GLG's own words

The filing explains how consumption based subscriptions are counted: ACV reflects the contractual minimum commitment plus upgrades during the term where consumption has exceeded that minimum. In plain terms you commit to a floor and pay more if you go past it, which makes the minimum and the overage rate the two numbers worth negotiating hardest. The filing also confirms multi year consumption contracts with minimum commitments above $10m exist. Wallet retention gives you the other half of the picture: it fell to 91.3% in 2020, meaning existing clients did successfully cut their spend that year, so the floor is not immovable at renewal.

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Costs $29 to $249 per month against about $25,600 of contract value per GLG seat
Puts the bull case and the bear case side by side with explicit risk flags
Covers small and mid caps that get little or no sell-side coverage
Needs no minimum commitment, no seat count and no annual term
Complements primary research rather than replacing an expert call

NVDA NVIDIA Corp. Illustrative

Thesis

Dominant AI accelerator supplier. The debate is the durability of data-center demand versus a cyclical capex peak.

Bull

CUDA moat, near-monopoly share

Bear

Customer concentration, cycle risk

P/E 46.2 Rev +94% 3 risk flags

Side by side

GLG cost and revenue, from the figures GLG filed with the SEC

Every dollar figure in the first six rows is taken verbatim from the Form S-1 that Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc. filed on 18 October 2021 (SEC accession 0001193125-21-301055). ACV is annualized contract value at the end of the period. The per user and per account rows are our own arithmetic on those figures and are labeled as such.

Line	FY2019	FY2020	Six months to 30 Jun 2021
Subscription revenue	$509.8m	$531.4m	$290.6m
Transactional revenue	$62.3m	$57.7m	$31.7m
Total revenue	$572.2m	$589.1m	$322.3m
ACV at period end	$489.2m	$480.0m	$520.5m
Wallet retention	95.3%	91.3%	102.5%
Unique GLG Direct users	18,866	18,733	20,930
ACV per GLG Direct user (our arithmetic)	about $25,928	about $25,623	about $24,871
ACV per subscription account, 2,500 accounts (our arithmetic)	about $195,700	about $192,000	about $208,200
Largest single client, share of sales	about 6%, roughly $34.3m	about 5%, roughly $29.5m	Not disclosed
Top ten clients, share of sales	about 18%	about 19%	Not disclosed
Subscription share of total revenue	89.1%	90.2%	90.2%
Investables.ai, for scale (published rate)	$29 to $249 a month	No seat minimum	No annual commitment

GLG withdrew the offering on 25 March 2022 and has disclosed nothing since, so these are 2021 figures and the company has grown. Trailing twelve month revenue to 30 June 2021 was $628.5m. The per user and per account rows divide a disclosed total by a disclosed count; they are averages across every client from the smallest to a $29.5m account, not a quote. Educational only, not procurement or investment advice. Investables.ai pricing is our own published rate.

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Good questions

Questions about glg cost

GLG does not publish an hourly rate and no filed document contains one. The figures in circulation, commonly $400 to $600 for a mid level specialist, $800 to $1,200 for a C-suite operator and $1,500 to $2,000 all-in, come from blogs published by competing expert networks and are estimates rather than contract data. What the SEC filing does establish is that this pricing shape covers under 10% of GLG revenue, and that the bulk of it sits in the transactional line alongside survey work and law firm expert witness engagements.

The GLG S-1 never uses the word credit. It describes two contract types, time based subscriptions and consumption based subscriptions, and defines consumption ACV as a contractual minimum commitment plus any upgrades once usage passes that minimum. Credits and units are how sales teams package that consumption commitment, so the number that matters at signature is the annual minimum and the rate applied to anything above it, not the label on the unit.

The average works out at roughly $192,000 a year. GLG reported $480.0m of ACV for 2020 and said it serviced more than 2,500 active customer subscription accounts annually. The spread around that average is enormous: the top ten clients took about 19% of sales, the single largest paid about 5% of $589.1m, which is roughly $29.5m, and one terminated account alone carried $29.5m of ACV across 1,618 users.

There is no verifiable answer, and any page that gives you one without a source is guessing. Under a subscription, a call does not carry a separate price at all; it draws down a commitment you already made. Under a consumption contract it consumes units against a minimum. The only GLG prices in any US public record are three small Securities and Exchange Commission purchases of expert services, at $65,975, $46,530 and $7,897.50, and those are expert witness engagements rather than research subscriptions.

Two subscription types plus a transactional line. Time based subscriptions give a defined group access for a term. Consumption based subscriptions set a contractual minimum commitment and bill upgrades once usage exceeds it. Both are counted in ACV. The transactional line, about 10% of revenue, covers standalone projects such as surveys and expert witness work. GLG states that the majority of customers sign one year terms with no obligation to renew.

No. GLG has never published a rate card, and unlike S&P Global Market Intelligence and Moody's Analytics it has not filed one on a public procurement framework either. The 2021 Form S-1 is the closest thing that exists, because it pairs audited revenue and ACV with user and account counts, which lets you derive the averages. That filing was withdrawn in March 2022 and nothing has replaced it.

It depends on whether your edge comes from talking to people or from reading and counting. If a diligence process turns on what a former operator at a target competitor knows, an expert network is the only way to get that and GLG has the largest panel, roughly a million profiled network members. If the work is understanding a listed company from filings and fundamentals, a six figure commitment buys very little that a research tool cannot, and the wallet retention figure of 91.3% in 2020 shows buyers reaching that conclusion.

None of the four publishes a rate card, and GLG is the only one that has ever filed audited financials. In the S-1 GLG says it is 2.3 times larger than its nearest competitor, AlphaSights, on that company's reported 2020 revenue, which implies roughly $256m for AlphaSights that year. Third Bridge and Guidepoint are smaller again and are usually reported as the cheaper way in. Size is not price, but on a per seat basis the smaller networks generally quote below GLG for comparable access.

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Informational only, not financial advice · past performance does not guarantee future results

GLG cost: GLG pricing, subscription cost and cost per user, from GLG's own SEC filing

How much does GLG cost?

What the filing shows that the estimates do not

GLG is a subscription business, and the per hour framing describes under a tenth of it

The average seat costs about $25,000, and the largest client paid 29% less

Consumption contracts are a minimum commitment plus overage, in GLG's own words

A structured first pass on every name

GLG cost and revenue, from the figures GLG filed with the SEC

One research card that compresses the reading

Both sides, every time

Risks on the page

Faster diligence

Questions about glg cost

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