Fixed-price
technical due diligence
for $1–5M online
acquisitions
A buyer-ready report on code, infrastructure, team risk, and compliance, delivered in days.
Deal-killers surface same-day, so you don’t wait for Day 7.
What buyers do today
Four ways technical risk slips through a sub-$5M deal. All four end with the buyer paying for it.
Skip tech DD entirely
Accept undiagnosed risk. It's the most common outcome, and the most expensive when it goes wrong.
How this plays out
A buyer closes on a $1.8M SaaS, then learns the code can't legally be resold as-is. The fix costs more than the discount any seller would have given.
Hire a freelancer
A code review with no methodology behind it. The issues surface post-close, when your leverage is gone.
How this plays out
A $2K review says "code looks fine." Six months later the one developer who ran everything quits, and nobody can update the product.
Overspend on PE-tier DD
A $50K engagement kills the math on a $2M acquisition before it starts.
How this plays out
Diligence quoted at 2.5% of the purchase price. The buyer walks away from a business that was actually fine.
Stop at financial DD
The books can look perfect while the product hides a license problem, a one-person team, or an "AI" that's really rented software.
How this plays out
The accountants confirm the revenue is real. Nobody notices the "AI platform" is a thin wrapper around a service anyone can rent.
The full picture, at a fixed price
You're spending a lot on this deal already. Diligence shouldn't be another negotiation; the price and scope are fixed and public.
Fixed price, scope & timeline
Published on this page. No discovery call required to find out what it costs.
Sized for sub-$5M deals
Right-sized rigor for your deal economics: the depth of a full assessment, scaled to a sub-$5M budget.
Technical-first
Code, infrastructure, team, and compliance. Pair us with your QoE provider for the financials.
EU coverage built in
GDPR baseline in every full assessment. NIS2, EU AI Act, and DORA readiness as add-on modules.
Before you close, validate the technical risk. BearingGate delivers a buyer-ready report at a fixed price, built on a repeatable methodology that holds up under investment-committee scrutiny.
One report. Two documents. Two readers.
Every TrueBearing™ engagement is delivered as a pair: one document for the person signing the check, one for the person inheriting the codebase.
Executive Verdict
Plain language, buyer-facing. It gives you the verdict, the deal-relevant findings, Cost-to-Replicate and First-Year True Cost, and what to do about each, readable in one sitting.
6–10 PAGES · FOR YOU AND YOUR ICTechnical Dossier
Full evidence: scan output, architecture review, interview notes, license inventory, remediation estimates. Built for the engineer who takes over on Day 1.
20–40+ PAGES · FOR YOUR INCOMING CTOThe seven pillars
Every full assessment covers all seven. No pillar is skipped because the codebase "looked fine".
Code & Architecture
Is the product well built, and can it grow with the business, or will it need an expensive rebuild?
Security
How easily could the business be hacked, and what happens if it is?
Infrastructure, Ops & Cost
What does it really cost to run each month, and are there surprise bills coming?
IP & Licensing
Do you actually own what you're buying, or is some of it borrowed, rented, or legally encumbered?
Key-Person, Team & Knowledge Risk
SignatureIf the founder walks away the day after closing, what breaks, and how fast can you recover? Includes the Founder Departure Day Simulation.
AI-Generated Code & AI-Washing
New for 2026Is the "AI" real technology you'd own, or a rented service dressed up for the sale?
Compliance
Is the business following privacy law, or are you inheriting fines and cleanup work?
The AI‑washing audit
In 2026, half the listings you'll see are "AI-powered". A few genuinely are; the rest are a system prompt away from being a commodity. Every TrueBearing report answers three questions the seller's deck won't.
Or is it a wrapped third-party API, one upstream pricing change away from erasing the margin you're underwriting?
And does it carry the characteristic debt patterns: duplication, dead paths, tests that assert nothing?
Without ongoing AI assistance? Or does the institutional knowledge live in a chat history nobody saved?
Booked to buyer-ready in seven days
Intro call
We frame the engagement to your deal context, technical literacy, and operating plan, so the report speaks to your situation.
Automated sweep
100% of the codebase scanned, synthesized, and prioritized by the TrueBearing™ algorithm.
Human deep dive
A senior architect manually reviews every high-risk area and interviews the team. Deal-killer findings are alerted same-day, the moment they surface.
Dossier assembly
Findings consolidated, confidence tags assigned, both documents drafted and reviewed by the architect who did the work.
Verdict delivered
Executive Verdict and Technical Dossier, walked through live on your delivery call.
Timeline shown for the TrueBearing™ Report. Pre-LOI Scan: 48 hours · TrueBearing Plus: 14 days.
Our coverage commitment100% automated coverage of the codebase + targeted human review of the areas that matter.8–15 hours of senior architect time, augmented by the TrueBearing™ algorithm and automated tooling.
Every finding tells you how we know
Each finding is tagged inline: Verified (we tested it), Inferred (the evidence points there), or Reported (the seller told us). Your IC sees the evidence behind every finding, not just the verdict, so the report survives the questions it will be asked.
The full price list, no call required
If a diligence provider won't tell you the price before a call, ask yourself what else gets discovered late.
Pre-LOI Scan
$1,500
48-HOUR TURNAROUNDA fast read before you commit to exclusivity.
- Automated stack & dependency scan
- 1–2 page senior summary
- Proceed / caution / walk signal
- Credits in full toward Tier 2 within 30 days
The TrueBearing™ Report
$5,000
7-DAY TURNAROUNDThe core product. Post-LOI, pre-close.
- Full seven-pillar assessment
- Seller & team interviews
- Executive Verdict + Technical Dossier
- Cost-to-Replicate & First-Year True Cost
- Same-day deal-killer alerts
TrueBearing Plus
$9,500
14-DAY TURNAROUNDFor deals where the tech is the thesis.
- Everything in The TrueBearing Report
- Expanded code review
- Day-60 delta report
- 90-minute CTO delivery call
- 2 post-close advisory calls
Post-Close Health Check
Uptime & CVE monitoring, monthly report and call, hiring and vendor advisory.
$2,000 / MONTHPenetration Testing
Full offensive security engagement, scoped separately from the report.
QUOTEDCompliance Modules
SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, NIS2, EU AI Act, DORA, WCAG/ADA, PCI-DSS readiness.
QUOTED PER MODULEThat's what $5,000 is: less than the broker fee, less than the legal fee, and the only line item that tells you whether the technology you're buying is worth what you're paying for it.
The walkaway refund schedule
Walk away from the deal, walk away from the engagement. Published and milestone-based: the further we've gone, the less comes back. No negotiation required.
"Why not just point AI at the codebase?"
You should, and we do. Automation is the floor of this engagement; the human judgment on top is the product.
What automation covers
- 100% of the codebase, scanned with industry-standard tooling
- Known vulnerabilities, secrets, and dependency risks
- Full open-source license inventory
- Code-quality and complexity metrics, repo-wide
- Synthesis and prioritization via the TrueBearing™ algorithm
What it can't answer
- "Should you still do this deal?" Deal-specific judgment.
- "What will this cost you in Year 1?" A post-close projection.
- "Is the CTO going to leave?" Key-person risk, via interviews.
- "Does this GPL dependency mean you don't own the IP?" Legal exposure analysis.
- "Was this codebase vibe-coded?" And what that means for maintainability.
Built for the people doing sub-$5M deals
Self-funded & SBA-backed buyers
"The seller's tech is a black box. If something is broken, I won't know until I'm running it. By then it's too late."
Don't close on a tech business you can't read.
Search funds & independent sponsors
"My IC will tear apart any DD report that looks ad-hoc, but I can't justify a $50K engagement on a $3M deal."
IC-grade technical due diligence, priced for the deals you actually do.
Lower-middle-market PE
"We can't fire the full-scale advisory bazooka at every $2M add-on."
Same rigor as your platform-level engagements, sized for add-on economics.
Strategic acquirers
"Our engineers can do code review, but they're not deal people."
Your engineers know your code. We know what a buyer needs to know about theirs.
Operators who've run what you're buying
Every assessor on the bench has actually run a technology organization: built teams, carried technical debt, and made build-vs-buy calls with real money on the line. They're the operators a buyer wishes they had on staff.
Bryan O'Neil
Seventeen years in the M&A industry, an original co-founder of Centurica and FE International and Tech Lead at Quiet Light, Bryan lives and breathes online business acquisitions. Having also founded and invested in 12 SaaS businesses, he's developed a proprietary framework to evaluate them. That framework stands behind every TrueBearing™ verdict.
Reijo Sirila
Diligence LeadFounder-CTO who's built and scaled multiple software platforms, Reijo's idea of fun has been running technical diligence on deals for years — far before AI was a thing.
David Barnett
Infrastructure, Ops & CostA seasoned fractional COO who spots dangerous operational patterns in his sleep. No stone is left unturned when David reviews and signs off your TrueBearing™ verdict.
Wei Tan
AI Code & IP / LicensingBuilt ML products before it was fashionable. He can tell genuine in-house AI from an API wrapper in an afternoon, and reads a dependency license chain like the contract it actually is.
Every report is reviewed and personally signed by the lead architect on your deal. You get the names and credentials of everyone who touched your assessment. No anonymous "analyst team", and every finding has an author.
Read a verdict before you book one
A sample Executive Verdict on an illustrative deal: the verdict, the headline numbers, the confidence tags, exactly as a buyer receives them.
A member of the team emails you the sample within one business day. No drip sequence, no SDR follow-up afterward.
Don't close on a tech business you can't read.
A 20-minute intro call scopes the engagement to your deal. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so on the call.