The 90-Day Test
Could a competent competitor, with unlimited AI tooling and $50,000, reach this exact position within 90 days?
If yes, the moat is close to zero — however sophisticated the codebase. If no, something specific is blocking them, and that blocker is what the report prices. Note the test is not “could this be built.” Almost anything can be built. The question is whether the position can be reached.
Only four blockers survive that test
Each scores 0–25. Together they produce a Moat Score out of 100.
Domain age, backlink profile, review history, months genuinely live with users. The purest moat there is, because it is non-negotiable — no amount of capital or compute ages a domain.
The integration takes an afternoon. The approval takes nine months and may never arrive. Regulatory licences, restricted API tiers, compliance certifications, gated app-store categories.
Volume, uniqueness, and whether the data measurably improves the product. With one qualifier most methodologies ignore entirely: data that cannot legally transfer to a buyer scores negative, because they inherit a liability rather than an asset.
Active usage with genuine switching cost, third parties who have built against the API, contracted commitments. Registrations are not embedment — usage is. Distribution is the hardest thing on earth to rebuild.
Score your asset against those four axes
Free and self-assessed. You’ll get the score, the per-axis breakdown, and the three changes that would move it most.
The payoff
Same score today. Very different assets.
The DX Score tells you whether an asset is good today. The Moat Score determines how much of that survives. Combined, they produce a five-year durability projection.
All three score DX 78 today. On a scoreboard that reports one number they are indistinguishable — and a buyer would price them identically. They should not be priced identically.
Commodity Risk
The number sellers don’t enjoy
Every ADR publishes the inverse of the moat score: what share of the asset is simply reproducible code. A mainstream stack with no novel algorithm scores high. A trained model or genuinely proprietary algorithm scores low.
We publish it anyway, because a valuation you can only trust when it flatters the seller isn’t a valuation. It also gives sellers a concrete reason to build real moats before listing — which improves what buyers see on the board.
The range is not a price
The ADR range answers one question: how much of the asking price is backed by something a competitor cannot cheaply reproduce?
That is not the same as what the asset is worth. An asset can be worth considerably more than its range — most good ones are. The range is the part a buyer is acquiring rather than betting on.
A SaaS product built largely with AI tooling. Three live surfaces, five capabilities, a month of build time, roughly a thousand dollars of actual spend. No proprietary data, no integrations, no clearances, no revenue yet. The seller asks $100,000 on the strength of their revenue projections.
The ADR comes back around $3,000 – $15,000, with a Moat Score near zero.
That is not us saying the asset isn’t worth $100,000. It may well be. It is us saying that roughly $14,000 of that price is backed by position, and the remaining $86,000 is a bet on execution the buyer is being asked to take. A competitor with the same tooling can reach that position next quarter for the same thousand dollars. Nothing is stopping them — so nothing is protecting the price.
Sellers with a real moat get the opposite result, and it argues in their favour. When years of accumulated data, a certified partner tier or a regulatory registration sit underneath the price, the range rises to meet it and the buyer can see exactly what they are paying for. That is the whole point of separating the floor from the bet: it rewards the assets that earned it.
We don’t price your projections
Forward revenue, expected users, pipeline, the model in the deck — none of it enters the range. That is deliberate, and it is worth being direct about why.
Projections are the most inflatable input in any marketplace. Rebuild cost was already too easy to move, and it at least referenced money that actually left a bank account. A projection references nothing. The moment a number moves the valuation, it stops describing the asset and starts describing the seller’s optimism — and a number every seller can move is a number no buyer can use.
There is a second reason, and it matters more. The ADR is a durability instrument. It measures what survives contact with a competitor who has the same AI tooling and a year to catch up. Forward revenue is a different question, answered by a different method, and folding the two together produces a figure that means neither thing.
So the report states the range and what it is anchored on, and leaves the asking price where it belongs — as your claim, argued on its own terms, next to a number that was not. We would rather hand a buyer two honest figures than one blended one.
What’s in the report
Eleven sections. Delivered as a shareable page and a PDF you can hand to a buyer, a board, or an accountant.
We check the licences, read the change-of-control clause, scan the repository, and a Deal Manager reviews the evidence. Full ADR report fee: $199 (under $50K asset), $349 ($50K–$250K), or $699 ($250K+).
It is analytical guidance, not a legal valuation, and the durability projection is a model output rather than a forecast. Our multiplier bands are reasoned rather than empirically calibrated. We tune them against assets we have scored in full and, as deals close, against what they actually sold for — and we will say publicly when each of those moves. Every report states its own confidence level, and an axis resting on seller attestation is labelled as such rather than presented as verified.
A Moat Estimate is weaker still — it is your own answers scored against the same rubric, with nothing checked. We publish no valuation range against an estimate for that reason: a dollar figure built on unverified inputs is the one output that could genuinely mislead you about your own asset.