You do the hard part — generating the leads. Then you sell them wholesale to an aggregator that keeps a cut of every dollar. Lead Router lets you build your own direct buyer network: a storefront buyers shop, prepaid SKUs they fund, real-time routing that picks the winner, and billing on your own Stripe.
Real-Time
Routing decision
Ping-post
Real-time auction
Prepaid SKUs
Lead inventory
Your Stripe
Buyer billing
The Wholesale Tax
Aggregators take margin on every dollar today, and they concentrate your revenue into the kind of customer list that gets discounted at exit.
10–31%
What aggregators keep of every dollar transacted. MediaAlpha discloses a 14% take rate; EverQuote keeps a 31% variable marketing margin.
$5–25 vs $75–100
A shared auto-insurance lead wholesales for $5–25. Sold exclusively to an agent, the same consumer fetches $75–100.
39%
EverQuote’s single largest customer is 39% of its revenue. Sell through aggregators and you stack your concentration risk on top of theirs.
~1%
Your largest customer’s share of revenue when 1,000 buyers buy direct. That’s the profile acquirers compete for.
Sources: MediaAlpha and EverQuote FY2024 SEC filings; FOCUS Investment Banking (2025); industry pricing data; Bulow & Klemperer, American Economic Review (1996).
Why It Stays This Way
Direct buyers pay more. Everyone sells wholesale anyway — because managing hundreds of small buyers used to be more work than it was worth.
Selling wholesale means a middleman resells your leads and keeps a cut. That cut is 10 to 31 percent of the transaction, disclosed in public filings — margin that should be yours.
When five aggregator accounts are all your revenue, any one of them is a concentration risk. Acquirers apply a 20 to 35 percent valuation haircut when a single customer exceeds roughly 20 to 30 percent of revenue.
Direct buyers pay more, but everyone sells wholesale anyway — because onboarding, billing, filters, and caps for hundreds of small buyers used to mean manual work multiplied by every buyer.
Without a catalog buyers can browse and a wizard they can onboard through, every new buyer is a sales call and a spreadsheet. That ceiling is what keeps sellers dependent on a handful of aggregators.
How Lead Router Solves It
Storefront, onboarding, routing, billing — the operational layer that makes selling direct to hundreds of buyers practical.
Publish your lead products as SKUs in a Shopify-style catalog. Buyers browse specs and pricing, fund a balance, and buy prepaid inventory with a card. The routing engine draws down that inventory as matching leads arrive, with FIFO tracking so every prepaid pack is consumed in order. See Buyer Storefront.
A new buyer creates an account, funds a balance, picks the products they want, and sets filters and caps — without a manual back-and-forth for every deal. That is what makes a network of hundreds of direct buyers practical instead of theoretical. See the onboarding wizard.
Let buyers bid on a lead in real time before committing, or cascade a lead down a ranked list until it sells. The engine evaluates every buyer contract in parallel the instant a lead arrives and selects winners by price, priority, weight, or round-robin. See ping-post and waterfall routing.
Every contract carries daily, weekly, and monthly caps, numeric and set-match filters, schedule windows, and buyer-level deduplication so a buyer never pays twice for the same person. See cap management and lead dedup.
Buyer charges, prepaid top-ups, and balances run through your connected Stripe account. The money moves directly between you and your buyers — Lead Router is the routing and billing layer, not the merchant of record for your lead sales.
Partners and your own landing pages post leads to a single documented endpoint keyed by campaign posting key. The same lead flows into the routing engine no matter where it came from. See the lead API.
The Bigger Picture
Frequently Asked
Questions lead sellers ask before building a direct buyer network.
Selling to an aggregator means one buyer resells your leads and keeps a share of every dollar. MediaAlpha discloses a 14 percent take rate and EverQuote keeps a 31 percent variable marketing margin, so 10 to 31 percent of the transaction never reaches you. Selling direct means each buyer pays you the full price. Lead Router gives you the storefront, onboarding, routing, and billing to manage hundreds of direct buyers without the manual overhead that used to make wholesale the only practical option.
A Shopify-style catalog where your buyers browse the lead products (SKUs) you publish, see specs and pricing, and buy prepaid inventory with a card. Each SKU carries its own price, filters, and caps. Buyers fund a balance or buy prepaid lead packs, and the routing engine draws down that inventory as matching leads arrive.
You do, on your own Stripe account. Buyer charges, prepaid top-ups, and balances run through your connected Stripe account, so the money moves directly between you and your buyers. Lead Router is the routing and billing layer, not the merchant of record for your lead sales.
Yes. A self-serve onboarding wizard walks a new buyer through creating an account, funding a balance, choosing which products they want, and setting their filters and caps. You approve and go live without a manual back-and-forth for every buyer, which is what makes a network of hundreds of small direct buyers manageable.
Every lead is evaluated against your buyers’ contracts in real time: buyer status, balance, schedule, geo and demographic filters, caps, and cross-buyer deduplication. Ping-post lets buyers bid on a lead before committing to buy it, and waterfall routing cascades a lead down a ranked list until it sells. Winners are selected by your distribution rule — price, priority, weight, or round-robin — and every buyer contract is evaluated in parallel, so the engine is never the bottleneck.
Built For Lead Sellers
A storefront buyers shop, prepaid SKUs they fund, real-time routing that picks the winner, and billing on your own Stripe. One platform from lead intake to buyer payment.
All features included from day one.