Traditional Due-Diligence Investigators Are Too Expensive and Slow for SMBs

Summary

SMB owners and indie founders describe paying professional-services providers (lawyers, CPAs, investigators, consultants) on hourly billing in tiny 5-minute increments, where even a two-line email costs ~$35 and a half-hour call exceeds $200. This makes any expert-led due-diligence-style work on a supplier or counterparty prohibitively expensive and slow, forcing founders to either skip verification entirely (exposing them to deposit loss and fraud) or spend disproportionate amounts of capital and time. There is no good, affordable, fast alternative for the kind of sourced background check that would tell you whether an unknown B2B counterparty is real — existing tools are either enterprise-grade platforms priced for large procurement departments or manual investigators who bill by the hour. This is a severe, unsolved pain for exactly the audience SupplierProof targets (indie founders, SMB ops, cross-border buyers).