Guide
A cheap 409A is fine. A careless one is expensive
Updated
Paying less for a 409A is not the risk people assume, because the standard the report has to meet is set by statute rather than by price. The risk is buying one that fails the specific tests the IRS and your auditor apply. Those tests are checkable before you buy, and the cheapest provider here publishes clearer answers to them than the dearest.
What safe harbour actually requires
Section 409A gives a presumption of reasonableness where the valuation is done by qualified independent appraisers, applied to an illiquid startup's common stock, and is no more than twelve months old with no material event since. If the presumption holds, the burden shifts: the IRS has to show the valuation was grossly unreasonable rather than you having to show it was right.
That is what you are buying. A cheap report that meets those conditions carries the same presumption as an expensive one.
The four things worth checking
Who signs it. Eqvista states its valuations are performed by NACVA certified valuation analysts, the only appraiser qualification named on any pricing page in this comparison.
Whether audit support is included and for how long. Eqvista states lifetime audit support for every valuation. That matters because the report is challenged, if it ever is, years after you bought it and long after the relationship has gone quiet.
Whether the report is described as audit-ready or audit-defensible. Cake Equity states an audit-ready 409A on its Team plan and audit-ready reporting for Series A and B+ on Pro. Pulley and Fidelity Private Shares make no such claim on their pricing pages, which is not evidence of a worse report but is a gap in what you can check beforehand.
What happens on a raise. The valuation you bought in January is void the day a priced round closes, so ask what the refresh costs before you need one.
Where cheap genuinely goes wrong
Not in the arithmetic, which is largely conventional, but in two places. The first is a report that will not survive your auditor's questions about method and inputs, which is why appraiser qualification and audit support are worth more than a discount.
The second is timing. A valuation that arrives after you have already granted options does not retrospectively protect those grants. Speed and price trade off directly here, and the expedite fee is the honest price of having left it late.
What none of them publish
Three things are absent from every pricing page we read. None publishes what a refresh costs outside its bundle. None publishes what happens if your auditor rejects the report. And only one publishes a turnaround time at all.
Get all three in writing before you sign, whichever route you take. They are the questions a 409A provider can answer in a sentence, and a vague answer to any of them is itself informative.