A list of business names costs a few cents each. A location that has actually agreed to take a machine costs several hundred dollars, and sometimes a couple of thousand. You can read both numbers off the same published price list.
The Vending Locator posts its prices openly, which makes this easy to check rather than argue about. What follows is quoted from their pricing page, read on 15 September 2026. Prices change, so check the page before you rely on any of it.
What a batch of names costs
| Package | Price | What it says you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $19 | 50+ locations, 15-mile radius, 5-day delivery |
| Pro | $29 | 100+ locations, 25-mile radius, 3-day delivery |
| Start | $129 | 200+ locations, plus an eCourse, scripts and contract templates |
| Gold | $899 | 300+ locations, one guaranteed placement, LLC and EIN formation, a three-page website |
What one location that has agreed costs
| Package | Price | What it says you get |
|---|---|---|
| Quick Find | $500 | 1 guaranteed location, 50+ employees, 1 to 6 months |
| Smart Spot | $1,000 | 1 guaranteed location, 100+ employees |
| Prime Location | $1,500 | 1 guaranteed location, 150+ employees |
| Elite Placement | $2,000 | 1 guaranteed location, 200+ employees |
There is also a premium subscription at $199 a year for early access to leads before they reach the public list.
Do the division
Basic is $19 for 50 or more names, so a name costs at most about 38 cents. Take the lowest guaranteed placement, $500, and you are looking at a gap of roughly 1,300 times. Take the highest, $2,000, and it is more like 5,200 times.
That is the same company, in the same checkout, pricing two things that both get called "locations" in conversation. One is a row you still have to work. The other is a site where someone has already said yes.
Neither price is wrong. They are priced that far apart because they are not the same product, and the difference between them is the work in the middle: finding out which of those names has a reason to want a machine this month, and reaching the right person while that reason is still true.
The detail worth staring at
Look at how the guaranteed tiers are graded. Not by how fast you get the location, not by how much support comes with it. By employee count: 50+, 100+, 150+, 200+.
Headcount is the variable. A location with 200 people on site is worth four times one with 50, priced by a company that does this every day and has no reason to flatter anyone's theory.
If you have ever wondered whether qualifying a site before you approach it is worth the time, that price ladder is an answer from an unexpected direction. The market already pays for qualification. It just usually pays for it after the fact.
What an operator can take from this
Three practical things.
A cheap list is not a bad buy, it is an unfinished one. Thirty-eight cents a name is fair for what it is. Just budget the hours that come after it, because those hours are what the $500 tier is charging you for.
The expensive tier tells you what the hours are worth. If working a list yourself takes you twenty hours to land one placement, you now have a market rate to compare your time against. Our checklist for vetting a locator service goes through what to ask before you pay for either kind.
Spend the list on the right sites, not on all of them. You get one first impression per building. A generic pitch to a business with no reason to want a machine does not come back to zero, it comes back worse than zero, because that location now associates your name with a cold call and it will not hear you differently in six months when something changes there.
Where this leaves the timing argument
Everyone else invents a reason to contact a stranger. VendiSite reports one that already exists.
That is the whole difference, and the price list above is the clearest outside evidence for it we have seen. A name is worth cents because a name carries no reason. A location is worth hundreds because by then someone has found the reason, confirmed it, and acted on it in time.
VendiSite works the middle of that gap. It watches for the events that create a reason, a hiring surge, a new facility, an expansion, a relocation, complaints about the machines already there, then qualifies what survives on headcount, captive audience, route fit and venue type, scores it, and writes to the trigger that surfaced it.
We cut our own list from roughly 41,000 to 6,835 on purpose. That is the part operators find strange at first. It stops being strange once you have read the two tables above and noticed that the market prices a discarded name at about thirty-eight cents and a qualified one at five hundred dollars.
If you want the longer version of the timing argument, it is in why timing beats volume, and the practical channels are in our guide to finding vending machine locations.