For first-time buyers about to wire their life savings
Know if it's a $200,000 mistake — before you buy the business.
DealLoupe is an AI pre-screen built for first-time buyers of Main Street businesses — deals up to about $1M, where a full $30,000–$80,000 due-diligence workup simply doesn't fit the budget. Upload the documents the seller gave you. Get a clear report on the red flags, the gaps, and the questions to ask, with every term explained, all before you spend a dollar on due diligence.
Founding round open: the first 50 pre-screens are free. No credit card required.
A first-pass filter, not a replacement for your CPA or attorney.
The stone above is a geode. Whole, it looks like any gray rock, and you can't tell from the outside whether it holds crystal or nothing at all. A business for sale is the same. DealLoupe cracks it open, so you see what's really inside before you pay for it.
The problem
The biggest purchase of your life comes with the least protection.
Full due diligence (attorney, CPA, Quality of Earnings review, valuation) easily runs $30,000–$80,000 or more. It only makes sense on large deals. A Quality of Earnings review (QoE, the accountant's deep check that the profit is real) alone costs $15,000–$50,000. So on a Main Street deal — anything up to about $1M — most buyers skip real verification and trust the seller's numbers. That's how life savings disappear.
The first three ranges are industry estimates drawn from broker and advisory surveys, not audited data — no public registry tracks private small-business deals. We would rather show you the range, and where it comes from, than one confident number.
The buyers who get burned are almost always the ones who saved on verification. Not because they were careless, but because the tools built for verification were priced for million-dollar deals.
The solution
A purpose-built first filter: the AI Deal Pre-Screen.
Buyers are already pasting P&Ls into ChatGPT — $20 instead of $20,000. The market is moving this way. DealLoupe is the purpose-built version of that instinct: the same speed and price class, with a methodology distilled from the sources professionals actually use.
Upload your deal documents
The listing or CIM (Confidential Information Memorandum — the seller's information packet), profit-and-loss (P&L) statements, tax returns, balance sheet — whatever the seller gave you.
The AI reads & cross-checks
It pulls the numbers, compares every document against every other, and flags what doesn't line up and what's missing.
Get your report
A risk level, the red flags, the questions to ask the seller, and a clear call: proceed with conditions, pause for evidence, specialist decision required, reprice or restructure, or hard stop.
The seller hands you the stone. Never the cut.
The listing is glossy. The seller is friendly. The numbers are round. That's the outside of the rock, and the outside is the only part the seller controls. What matters is inside: does the profit turn into cash, do the add-backs (expenses the seller adds back to profit, claiming a new owner won't have them) hold up, do the tax returns match the story? The pre-screen cuts the deal open so you can see for yourself before you commit.
What you get
One report. What the documents prove, and what they don't.
Written for a buyer, not an accountant, and built to be read in one sitting. Every conclusion carries the evidence behind it. See a sample report →
Executive summary and the call
The business, the price, the documents you provided and the ones you didn't, the risk level, and the headline call: proceed with conditions, pause for evidence, specialist decision required, reprice or restructure, or hard stop. There is no plain “proceed” — we never issue one.
Confirmed conclusions
What the paperwork actually establishes, claim by claim. Each one is labelled with how far it got: asserted by the seller, documented, reconciled against a second source, or contradicted. You see the difference between “they said” and “we checked.”
Evidence gaps
What your documents cannot prove, stated plainly, with the specific document that would close each gap. Most tools go quiet here. This is the section that tells you how much weight the rest of the report can carry.
Your red-flag list
Every risk visible in the documents, in words you'll understand, ranked by how badly it can hurt you — critical, pause, routine — across all 17 analysis modules.
Follow-up questions, addressed
The exact questions to ask next, each one aimed at the person who can answer it: the seller, the broker, your CPA, your attorney, or your lender.
Source documents and limits
Every conclusion traces back to the document and page it came from, so your CPA can check our work. The report ends by stating its own limitations, not by hiding them.
Why it's different
Between "trust your gut" and "$50,000 in fees," there was nothing. Until now.
- You read the listing and trust your gut.
- You don't know what you don't know.
- Very high risk. This is how savings get lost.
- Reads and cross-checks every document.
- Red flags, missing data, seller questions, and a clear call.
- An instant report, the moment your documents are in.
- The first filter, before you pay the pros.
- Checking more than one business? Three deals cost $1,197 — the price of two.
- Attorney + CPA + QoE + valuation.
- The right move, on the right deal.
- Out of reach for most Main Street buyers.
The pre-screen doesn't replace the pros. It tells you whether the deal deserves them.
Who this is for
Built for your first (or second) acquisition.
This is for you if
- You're buying your first (or second) business — a shop, a service company, a route, a small franchise — anywhere up to about $1M.
- You're looking at multiple listings and can't pay $30K to vet each one.
- You plan to use an SBA loan and your own savings — so a mistake is personal.
Buying bigger?
Acquiring at $2M+ with a deal team and a Quality of Earnings budget? You'll still run the full professional diligence — at that scale it's non-negotiable, and no pre-screen replaces it. But buyers at your level use DealLoupe differently: as a $597 filter to rank candidates and kill the weak ones before spending $30K+ of QoE budget per deal. Same report. Different job.
Selling a business?
Run your own documents through the pre-screen before you list. You'll see exactly what a prepared buyer will see — the gaps, the questions, the red flags — and you'll price your business with a clear head instead of a guess.
Why trust it
Not just AI. AI running the professionals' own playbook.
Loaded into the system is the working knowledge base of everyone who vets deals for a living: the Quality of Earnings checklists CPAs use to test whether profit is real, the legal review lists M&A attorneys walk through, the underwriting standards SBA lenders apply before they fund, and the due-diligence frameworks professional buyers run. A chatbot answers the one question you thought to ask. DealLoupe runs the entire methodology — including the questions you didn't know existed.
A real methodology
Not a generic chatbot prompt. Every deal is checked against the same fixed methodology, every time. Read the methodology →
The 10 Red Flags framework
Our free guide, "The 10 Red Flags When Buying a Business," is the public half of the framework the pre-screen runs on. Get the free guide →
What buyers say
This box stays empty until real buyers fill it. The founding round is running now, and the first reviews will appear here with names attached. We'd rather show you an empty box than a borrowed quote.
Free, no account needed to start
Not at the document stage yet? Screen the listing first.
Most buyers are still scrolling listings, holding nothing from the seller but a page on a marketplace. That is too early for a pre-screen — and still early enough to waste weeks on the wrong business. So the first step is free.
Paste the listing
Paste the link to the listing. If we cannot fetch that marketplace, paste the text or upload the PDF instead. The reading happens in your browser, before any account exists.
See what we read
Asking price, revenue, the profit figure and the multiple it implies — pulled out and shown back to you. Correct anything we misread and fill the gaps. It takes a few minutes.
Get the screen
A short screen of the listing, the questions to ask the broker on the first call, and the list of documents to request from the seller. Free, and yours to keep.
What a listing screen is honest about. Every figure in it comes from the listing — that is, from the seller — and not one of them has been checked against a document. It tells you which listings deserve a real look and what to ask for. Verifying the answers is what the pre-screen is for.
For owners thinking about selling
A buyer will run this on your business. Better you read it first.
The same pre-screen, pointed at your own documents. It reads them the way the buyer's side will read them — except it happens while there is still time to fix what it finds, instead of six weeks into diligence when the price is already being renegotiated.
Which of your numbers are documented
Every claim in the report is labelled by how far it got: asserted, documented, reconciled against a second source, or contradicted. The figures that stop at “asserted” are the ones a buyer discounts — and you get to see which yours are before they do.
What businesses your size sold for
Median multiples from a published quarterly survey of closed deals, applied to your earnings, with the quarter named so the figure can be checked. A median is the middle: half of comparable deals closed above it and half below.
The gap between your figure and your documents
Expenses that come back every year but were presented as one-time, and the owner’s own work that a buyer has to hire someone to do — both come out of the earnings you would quote. The report shows what that difference is worth once the multiple carries it.
What this is not. Not a valuation, not an appraisal, and not an opinion of what your business is worth — that is a licensed appraiser’s work and this does not stand in for it. What it shows is what published medians imply for a business your size, and what your own documents actually support. You walk into a buyer’s diligence already knowing what it is going to say.
For brokers, lenders and advisors
You already know what to look for. This is the part that takes you a weekend.
Reading a full document set to decide whether a deal deserves your hours is not the skilled part of your job — it is the part that stops you taking on the next one. The pre-screen does that reading in minutes and hands back the same structure every time, so your judgement starts where the paperwork ends.
Take a listing to market already knowing its weak points
Run it on your own listing before a buyer’s advisor does. The add-backs that will not survive, the figures resting on nothing but the owner’s word — you find them while there is still time to fix them, instead of in week six of diligence.
Spend your hours on the deals that deserve them
The same fixed framework across every deal a client brings you, so three businesses can be compared on the same terms rather than on how carefully you happened to read each one.
See the coverage before you commit underwriting time
Debt service under stress, the funding structure, and what the documents do not prove — laid out before a file goes into underwriting rather than after.
Where this stands today. There is no professional tier on sale yet. Advisor — a shared workspace and a lower per-deal rate — is being built, and the price on the pricing page is provisional until it launches. Today professionals use the same pre-screen everyone else does, at the same price. What is open now is the waitlist, and the reason to join it is that we are still deciding what Advisor should be.
Who's behind the pre-screen
Built by Alex Mez. Thirty years reading deals.
Alex has spent three decades in the financial markets and still runs his own FINRA Registered Broker-Dealer / Licensed Securities Firm. Over those years he watched first-time buyers fall in love with a deal and get burned — and saw that in a small-business sale, no one at the table is paid to protect the buyer. So he built DealLoupe: a pre-screen that runs the professionals' own methodology on your documents. He's the founder, not a reviewer of your individual deal.
The first 50 pre-screens are free.
This is our founding round. We want real deals running through the system while we gather feedback, so the first 50 pre-screens are genuinely free — no card required. Once the 50 spots are gone (or the deadline passes), the price goes to $597 — and the founding 50 keep their second deal at $397.
Claim a free pre-screen →The trade is simple: you get a full pre-screen, we get feedback on a real deal. That's the whole catch.
One report. Before the wire, not after.
If the deal is good, you'll walk into your CPA's office with a clear head. If it isn't, you'll find out for $597 — not $200,000.
Your documents stay confidential: used only to produce your report, never shared, and deleted automatically after three months.