What's the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive data licenses?

A buyer who gets the record to themselves doesn't have to worry that a rival is training on the same material. That's worth paying for, and it's why exclusive offers usually come in higher.

How much higher is hard to pin down. A January 2026 FAQ from Epoch AI, a research group, reported that two founders in a neighboring market, training environments for AI agents, independently put exclusive deals at roughly four to five times the cost of non-exclusive ones. That's an interview estimate about a different product. It's a sign of direction, not a measurement of your records and not a forecast.

A lower price per license, in exchange for room to move. You can license the same record to more than one buyer, add a new buyer when one appears later, and keep a feed of new records available as they accumulate.

Several non-exclusive licenses can add up, but nothing guarantees they'll beat one exclusive offer. That's why we compare real bids instead of guessing.

• Money now or room later. Exclusive usually pays more per deal and closes the door on that scope for the term.
• Who else could benefit. If a particular competitor getting an edge from your records would bother you, say so. You can rule out named competitors and uses before anyone bids.
• Your own use. An exclusive license should limit who else you license to, not what you do with your own records. Have your lawyer read that clause.
• New records. Does the exclusivity cover only what exists today, or what you create next year too?
• What happens at the end. For a term license, ask what the buyer does with the data when the term ends.

This is general information, not legal advice. Your counsel should review any license before you sign.

Say a software company has eight years of code history, support tickets and sales call recordings. One buyer offers an exclusive license to everything. Two others want only the tickets and only the calls, non-exclusively, each at a lower price. Added together, the split might or might not beat the single exclusive offer, and it leaves the code free to license again.

This is an illustration, not a real deal. The point isn't that one structure is better. It's that you can only judge once the bids are on the table.

When we take your record to market, we ask buyers to bid on more than one structure: exclusive, time-bound exclusive, field of use and non-exclusive. If you already know you want, or want to avoid, a structure, tell us at intake. If you're open to any of them, say that.

At the offers stage you see the bids side by side, with term and payment terms next to the price, so you can set an exclusive offer from one buyer against a non-exclusive one from another. You choose. How a deal works walks through the stages, and how much your data is worth covers what moves the numbers.