Why this site exists

The problem

Search for “best small business loans” and you will find pages ranked by who pays the most per lead, written to move you into a form as quickly as possible. Enter your details and you are sold to four brokers who call you for three weeks. The information that would actually help - which lenders fund businesses like yours, at what size, at what rate, and how often those loans go bad - is nowhere on the page, because it does not help sell the lead.

Meanwhile the Small Business Administration publishes exactly that information. Every 7(a) and 504 loan it has ever guaranteed, with the bank, the rate, the term, the industry, the county, the franchise brand, and the eventual outcome. It publishes it as raw CSV files that essentially nobody reads.

What we do about it

We read them. Every quarter we download the SBA’s FOIA extracts, aggregate 1,052,071 loans worth $507.10B, and turn them into 1,519 lender profiles plus pages for every state, industry, and franchise brand with enough history to say something true.

Around that we publish plain explainers on every way a business can raise capital - including the expensive ones, with the arithmetic that shows why they are expensive.

What we are not

FundingForBusinesses.com is not a lender, a broker, or a financial advisor. We do not originate, arrange, negotiate, or service financing. We take no applications. We accept no fee from any business seeking capital. We do not sell leads, because we do not collect anything to sell.

There is no form on this site asking for your revenue, your credit score, or your phone number. Every calculator runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. That is a structural choice, not a feature - it is what keeps us a publisher and keeps you from being a lead.

How we pay for it

Referral fees from lenders when you click through and apply on their site, and clearly labelled sponsored placements. That is all, and the complete list of who can pay us is public on the advertiser disclosure page. Compensation is walled off from the data: every ranking here is computed from the federal file by a formula published on the methodology page, and no lender can buy position in one.

What we would like to be judged on

• Whether our numbers reconcile with the SBA’s own published reports. They do - we check before every release.
• Whether we print a dash when the data is too thin, instead of a number that looks authoritative. We do.
• Whether we recommend things that earn us nothing when they are the right answer. Grants, CDFIs, and SSBCI programmes get the same care as anything else here.
• Whether our disclosures are readable by a human being.

Who publishes this

FundingForBusinesses.com is published by FIH LLC, 30 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014. Write to us at hello@fundingforbusinesses.com - corrections especially welcome.