The lead they refused
is still worth money.
When a buyer turns down your asking price, TierX lets them name their own, and the best bid across every tier wins. Leads you would have written off sell anyway, and nothing gets skimmed off the top on the way through.
From $375/mo · or license it and run it on your own servers.
Refusals turn into revenue. A no becomes a counter-offer instead of a dead lead, and you take the highest one on the board.
You stop paying for junk twice. Fraud is scored before a buyer ever sees it, so bad traffic never burns a ping or a buyer relationship.
Nobody holds your business hostage. Run it on your own servers if you want to. Your buyers, your data, your margins.
Taken per lead
You pay for the platform, not a cut of every sale that runs through it.
Ways to sell one lead
Waterfall, counter-bid, live auction, or the same lead placed with several buyers at once.
Under the category
Hosted ping-tree platforms run roughly $500 to $2,500 a month. TierX starts at $375.
Yours to keep
Self-host it and your buyer list and lead data never leave your own servers.
Two places your money leaks. Both close here.
Most operators lose margin twice on the same lead: once to the buyer who said no, and again to the platform taking a slice on the way past. Here is what each one costs on a hundred leads.
Leak 1 — the buyer said no
Illustrative figures, chosen to show the arithmetic. Your acceptance and bid rates will differ; the point is that the 38 are worth something instead of nothing.
Leak 2 — the platform's slice
TierX charges a flat subscription. Route twice the volume next month and the bill does not move until you cross your plan's included leads.
Every dollar is traceable to the ping that earned it.
When a buyer disputes a lead, or a source starts underperforming, the argument gets settled by the record instead of by whoever shouts louder. Here is what gets written for a single lead.
Accepted on a publisher key, in whatever shape they send
JSON, form-encoded or XML, detected from the content type. Duplicate submissions are claimed atomically inside a five-second window, so a double-fired form does not become two leads. If that check itself fails, it fails open rather than dropping your traffic.
Their field names become yours
Inbound fields map to a canonical dictionary per niche, then get sanitised: phone, SSN and email normalised, IP and user agent enriched, all before anything is validated. Required-field and format rules are configured per niche and cached, not hard-coded.
Scored for fraud before a buyer is contacted
Short-circuit rules reject outright. Everything else accumulates weighted signals across IP, email, phone, domain and velocity into one score, which resolves to allow, flag, degrade or reject. It is deterministic: the same lead scores the same way twice, and you can read the trace.
The tier walk, recorded attempt by attempt
Every ping is one row: which buyer, what was asked, what came back, how long it took, and the exact request and response payloads. When bandit policies are enabled they choose against realised revenue rather than acceptance rate, and if a guardrail trips the deterministic waterfall takes over. Optimisation never blocks a lead.
Sold, then sealed
The winning price books to the ledger the reports read from. Then the payload is encrypted at rest and the plaintext is cleared. What stays visible is a masked version. Reading the real thing takes a passphrase, an MFA code and a written reason, it lasts five minutes, and it is written to an append-only audit table.
Four ways to sell the same lead.
Switch the instrument at the top between them. They are not presets on one algorithm: each is a different negotiation, and you can mix them per niche. More ways to sell a lead means fewer leads that go unsold.
Sequential waterfall
Buyers sit in tiers, ordered by what they pay. The lead goes down the stack and the first acceptance ends the walk. Simple, predictable, and the fallback everything else degrades to.
Price reject + bid
A buyer that will not pay your asking price may name its own. Bids are collected as the walk continues and the best one across every tier wins, so the lead you would have lost sells lower instead of not at all.
Ping-post auction
Every buyer is pinged at once rather than in turn. Bids arrive concurrently, the highest takes the post, and the walk costs one round trip instead of five.
Shared lead
Some verticals pay for the same lead more than once. The lead is placed with several buyers at declining positions, and each placement is recorded with the position it held.
The parts that keep the money honest.
Routing is the visible part. These four are why the numbers hold up.
Traffic Guard
Rule-based fraud scoring with a readable decision trace on every lead. Rules can short-circuit to an outright reject, or accumulate into a score that degrades the lead's routing instead of killing it. Deterministic by design: there is no model to explain to a buyer.
Realised-value optimisation
Buyer selection can learn from what was actually banked, not from acceptance rate. A buyer that accepts everything and pays little loses to one that is choosier and pays more. Statistical guardrails hold it back until the sample is real, and it always falls through to the waterfall.
AI buyer onboarding
Paste a buyer's spec sheet and it is extracted, mapped against the canonical dictionary, verified and repaired into a working integration you review before saving. The part of adding a buyer that used to be an afternoon of field-matching.
PII custody you can prove
Lead payloads are encrypted at rest under an envelope scheme bound to the lead itself, masked for ordinary dashboard use, and readable in the clear only through an audited five-minute break-glass session that requires a passphrase, MFA and a written reason.
Priced under the category, on purpose.
Hosted ping-tree platforms generally run between $500 and $2,500 a month, and most of them will not tell you which until you sit through a demo. These are the numbers. Flat monthly, no per-lead cut, no setup fee.
Starter
25% under the category's entry tier
- 500K leads and 500K pings a month
- All four distribution modes
- Traffic Guard fraud scoring
- Unlimited users and buyers
- $0.0011 per lead beyond that
Growth
25% under the category's mid tier
- Everything in Starter
- Higher-throughput routing
- AI buyer onboarding
- Realised-value optimisation
- Monetisation flows and retries
Scale
25% under the category's top published tier
- Everything in Growth
- Highest routing throughput
- Publisher and buyer portals
- Priority support
- Migration help from your current platform
Or run it yourself
License TierX and deploy it on your own infrastructure. PostgreSQL and the application, nothing else: no Redis, no broker, no managed queue. Your buyer list and your lead data never touch someone else's servers.
Early-access pricing. Flat monthly billing, no setup fee, and no percentage of what you sell.
The questions that actually come up.
Straight answers, including the ones that are not flattering.
What does it cost?
$375, $935 or $1,875 a month depending on throughput, or a license if you would rather host it yourself. Flat billing, no setup fee, and no percentage of your sales. The full table is above.
How hard is it to move off my current platform?
The part that usually hurts is re-mapping every buyer's fields. Paste a buyer's spec sheet and TierX extracts it, maps it against 479 canonical fields, repairs what does not line up, and hands you the integration to approve before it saves. Migration help is included on Scale.
What do I have to run to host it?
PostgreSQL and the application. The queue, the retry logic, the outbox and every background worker are Postgres rows claimed with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so there is no Redis, no broker and no managed queue in the dependency list. It also runs on AWS Fargate if you would rather not hold the box yourself.
Are the numbers on this page real?
The prices are real. The buyers, leads and bids in the live instrument are synthetic demonstration data, labelled as such, chosen to show how each distribution mode resolves. The worked examples in the economics section are illustrative arithmetic, not measured results. There are no customer names or testimonials here because there are none to quote yet, and we would rather say so than borrow someone else's.
What happens to a lead nobody buys?
It is recorded as unsold with the full attempt history, and, where configured, handed to a fallback group, a retry tree or a monetisation flow that can try to earn something from it downstream. Then it is encrypted like any other lead.
Start keeping the leads you are currently writing off.
$375 a month, flat, with nothing taken per lead. Or license it and run the whole thing on your own servers.
Flat monthly billing · no setup fee · no cut of your sales.