Callers ask us one question more than any other, usually in the first minute: "What's your rate?" It is a completely reasonable question. It is how you shop for everything else, and anyone who refuses to answer it sounds evasive. So this article gives the full answer, including the part that fits badly in a phone call: a firm rate quoted before anyone has read your file is not information. It is bait, and the shops that hand it out most freely are the ones to trust least.
By the end of this page you will know exactly what determines the price of business funding, why an honest shop cannot shortcut that process, what we can tell you upfront instead, and how to turn the rate question into a fast test of anyone you are considering working with, us included.
What actually sets the price of a funding offer
Business funding is priced the way insurance is priced: on the specific risk of the specific applicant, measured from evidence. When a funder underwrites a file, a handful of concrete inputs drive the number that comes back.
- Bank activity. Several months of statements: revenue level and trend, average daily balance, negative days, bounced payments. This is the heart of it, and what underwriters read in your statements is knowable in advance.
- Existing obligations. Current advances or loans and their payments, plus any liens already filed against the business, which determine what position new money would take.
- Time in business and industry. A nine-year machine shop and a nine-month restaurant are different risks, and funders price whole industries differently based on their own loss history.
- Credit, for some products. Weighted heavily by some providers and lightly by others, which is one reason the same file can be priced very differently across funders.
Why a blind quote is arithmetic without inputs
Hold those inputs next to the first-minute phone quote and the problem states itself: none of the inputs are known yet. A shop quoting a firm rate before seeing statements is performing underwriting with no underwriting, which means the number was not computed from your risk. It was selected for its effect on you.
There is a second, structural reason no honest broker can make rate commitments: brokers do not set prices. Funders do, provider by provider, file by file, and the same business can receive meaningfully different quotes from different funders in the same week. A broker controls which funders see a file and how well the file is presented. The price comes back from the other side of the table, which is why anyone whose ads read like a rate menu is advertising a decision that is not theirs to make.
The lifecycle of a teaser rate
So what is the number you were quoted on the phone? Usually it is the shop's best theoretical tier: the rate a flawless file might receive, quoted to a caller whose file nobody has seen. It is not, strictly, a lie. It is a number wearing a disguise, and it has a predictable lifecycle.
You anchor on it, mentally spend the difference, and stop shopping. You send documents, and days pass. Then comes the walk: your statements showed some slow weeks, the industry is priced a little higher this quarter, the real offer is worse than the teaser, but by now you have invested time, hope and paperwork, and the deadline that made you call in the first place is closer than it was. So you take the worse number, which was the plan from the start. The teaser did its whole job in the first minute of the first call, and everything after it was retrieval.
Once you see the mechanism, you also see the defense: a rate only means something when it arrives attached to your actual file, in writing, with its costs and payment schedule beside it, at which point it stops being a quote and becomes an offer you can compare against others and evaluate with a clear framework.
What an honest shop can tell you before underwriting
Refusing to invent a rate does not mean refusing to say anything, and it is fair to expect real information upfront. Here is what can honestly be described before anyone reads your file: how each product's cost is structured, what a factor rate is and how it differs from an interest rate, what inputs will drive your specific price, what funders will want to see from you, how fast the process realistically moves, and every fee category that could appear on a closing statement.
Structure, process, requirements and fees, fully; your price, only after your file. That boundary is not evasion. It is the exact line between what a broker actually knows before underwriting and what a broker would be making up, and you can hold us to it: if you want a sense of scale before applying, the funding estimator will give you an honest range, clearly labeled as an estimate, from the few inputs that can support one.
Turning the rate question into a filter
Here is the practical payoff of everything above: the rate question, asked deliberately, is the fastest honesty test available in this industry. Call any shop, ours included, and ask directly: "What rate can I get?" Then classify the answer.
A shop that answers with a firm, attractive number and no questions about your business has just shown you its sales process, and you have learned what its later "final terms" conversation will look like. A shop that answers with questions, about your revenue, your time in business, your current obligations, is doing the job in the correct order. And a shop that explains what the rate depends on, tells you what it can and cannot know yet, and offers to get you real numbers from real underwriting is giving you the only version of the answer that was ever true. The refusal you were treating as evasion turns out to be the tell of the shop that plans to still be defensible at signing.
The same test extends naturally: ask how the shop is paid, and read how broker compensation really works first so you can grade the answer. Ask where your file will be sent. Shops fail these questions in clusters, and every failure before you send documents is a bullet dodged for free. The fuller pattern of what failing looks like is catalogued in the warning signs of a predatory funder.
The version of this page we would want as customers
Strip the industry detail away and the principle underneath is ordinary: prices computed from evidence are worth something, prices invented to keep you on the phone are worth less than nothing, and the willingness to say "it depends, here is exactly what it depends on" is what honesty sounds like in a business where the real answer genuinely does depend.
So, plainly: we will not tell you your rate today, because today we would be guessing, and you deserve better than a confident guess. What we will do is tell you exactly how the price gets made, show you every cost in writing when real offers come back, and put those offers next to each other so the arithmetic, not the phone call, makes the decision. If another shop offers you certainty faster than that, now you know exactly what that certainty is made of.
Frequently asked questions
Why won't any broker give me an exact rate before I apply?
Because pricing is set by funders after underwriting your actual file, and the inputs that drive it, bank activity, existing obligations, time in business, industry and sometimes credit, are unknown until your documents are read. A broker quoting a firm rate before that has invented the number. Honest shops can describe structure, requirements, fees and realistic ranges upfront, but a real price requires a real file.
Is a low advertised rate ever real?
The number usually exists somewhere: it is typically the best tier offered to the strongest files, advertised to everyone. The practical question is not whether the rate exists but whether your file, this month, receives it, and that is precisely what advertising cannot know. Treat advertised rates as a ceiling on optimism, and treat only written offers based on your documents as information.
How do I compare funding options if nobody quotes rates upfront?
Compare real offers rather than phone numbers: submit through one accountable channel, get the resulting offers in writing, and reduce each to net funded, total payback and payment schedule. Those figures make different products and rate formats directly comparable, which is what the offer comparison tool automates. A phone quote cannot enter that comparison, because it has no file behind it.
What questions should I ask instead of "what's your rate"?
Ask what the price will depend on for your specific file, what every possible fee is and when each applies, how the shop gets paid, and which funders will see your documents. These have knowable answers before underwriting, and how completely a shop answers them predicts how it will behave at signing far better than any early rate talk does.