There's a ninety-day window in the life of every new advisory firm when it buys everything at once — custodian, portfolio system, compliance, E&O, fund lineup, CRM. There is no vendor to displace, because there is no vendor yet. So far in 2026, 542 firms have entered that window. Ninety more join them in an average month.
RIA Wire tells you who they are — every month, from the SEC's own file. No demo. No quote call. No annual contract. The price is on this page.
Between May and July of this year, thirty-nine advisory firms in the $100M–$500M band disappeared from the SEC's file entirely. Not shrank. Not reclassified. Gone — absorbed, wound down, or acquired, in a market that announced 167 deals in the first half of 2026 alone.
Meanwhile, 185 firms entered the band over those same two months — firms growing into real money, with budgets still forming and no vendor relationships hardened yet. They're the best calls available, and if your list is a static file you bought last year, they're simply not on it.
Add it up and the band churns roughly 5% a quarter. The incumbents' answer is an annual contract at $5,000 to $20,000 a year — for last quarter's market. Ours is a subscription that refreshes from the SEC's own monthly file, every month.
This isn't a mock-up. These are actual rows from the latest Form ADV extract, cleaned and formatted for immediate use. What you see is what you load.
Everything traces to a public filing — which also means you can verify us. Pick any firm in your pipeline and check it against our file. The numbers you can verify matter more than the adjectives you can't.
Below $100M, a firm rarely has the assets or the staff to buy what you sell. Above $500M, it has a gatekeeper, a due-diligence committee, and a favorite vendor already.
In between sits the growth band: firms with real money, real problems, and a principal who still answers the phone. The enterprise data platforms bury these firms inside universes of forty-five thousand names. This file is nothing but them.
And it moves. Firms grow into the band and appear; firms outgrow it and drop out. Your list is current to the latest filings — not a static database decaying on a shelf.
RIA Wire is $219 a month, published right on this page. The incumbents in this space run $5,000 to $20,000 a year — quote-based, annual contract, and you sit through a sales call just to learn the number. When something costs 90% less than the alternatives, a reasonable person assumes it's 90% worse. So here is exactly why the price is what it is.
We're a first-principles company. RIA Wire isn't built by licensing data from the same handful of resellers everyone else licenses from, each one adding a markup and a sales team. It's built directly from the source — the SEC's own public Form ADV filings — processed by a research engine we built ourselves, running on 2026 technology. Not a 2010 cost structure with a 2010 headcount to feed.
The incumbents' prices are paying for their sales commissions, their demo teams, and their contract lawyers. Ours aren't, because we don't have any. You keep the difference.
The data the enterprise vendors sell behind a demo wall is built from a public file anyone can have. We just do the tedious work of making it usable, and we sell it like a normal product.
What you don't get: a demo. A quote call. A "customer success manager." The only contract we offer is the monthly subscription. Cancel any time.
Take a full month. Load the directory into your CRM. Work the calling windows. Read The Buying Mode Report. If RIA Wire hasn't earned its keep in your first 30 days, email us and we'll refund every dollar you've paid — no questions, no retention script, no "before you go" survey.
I can offer that because I know what happens in thirty days of working this data. The risk is mine. It should be.
Karilyn Colegrove
Publisher, RIA Wire