How to Evaluate a DRP Vendor: The 2026 Buyer's Checklist

The DRP market has consolidated through acquisitions, prices have increased, and the remaining options look increasingly similar on feature comparison slides. Meanwhile, the actual quality differences between platforms are enormous — and they don’t show up in a feature matrix.

This checklist covers the criteria that actually differentiate DRP vendors in 2026, organized by the questions most buyers forget to ask.

Data Collection: Where Does the Intelligence Come From?

This is the most important question and the one most buyers skip.

Does the vendor operate first-party collection infrastructure? Vendors that collect data directly from source platforms control their data quality, freshness, and coverage. Vendors that resell third-party data feeds introduce latency, quality uncertainty, and coverage gaps determined by their supplier, not by your needs.

What specific platforms do they monitor? “We monitor social media” is not an answer. Ask for the platform list. How many platforms? Which ones specifically? Do they cover Telegram, Mastodon, Bluesky, and niche forums — or just Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn?

What dark web sources do they cover? Dark web monitoring varies dramatically. Some vendors monitor a handful of major forums. Others maintain presence across hundreds of forums, marketplaces, and paste sites. The coverage breadth determines whether you see the threats that matter.

How frequently is data refreshed? Real-time monitoring means different things to different vendors. Ask how quickly a new social media post or dark web listing appears in the platform after publication. Minutes is acceptable. Hours is not.

Classification: What Does the AI Actually Do?

How many threat categories does the platform classify against? Some vendors classify binary — “threat” or “not threat.” Others classify across detailed taxonomies. The detail level determines how useful the classification is for routing and prioritization.

Can you see the classification taxonomy? If the vendor won’t show you what they classify, you can’t evaluate whether their classification covers your threat model. Ask to review the full taxonomy. DigitalStakeout publishes its 14 risk domains and 225+ threat scenarios openly.

How does the platform handle multi-domain threats? A threatening social media post that also reveals PII exposure and references a cyber attack vector spans physical security, cyber risk, and reputation risk. Does the platform classify it once (in a single category) or across all relevant domains?

What’s the false positive rate? Ask for specifics. Better yet, ask for a trial where you can evaluate the classification quality against your own monitoring scope.

Pricing: What Are You Actually Paying For?

Is pricing published or custom-quoted? Published pricing signals confidence and market competitiveness. Custom-quoted pricing signals that you’ll pay what the sales team thinks you can afford.

What does pricing scale with? Users? Entities? Data volume? Modules? The scaling model determines your cost trajectory as monitoring needs grow. Entity-based pricing (you pay for what you monitor) aligns costs with value. Per-seat pricing (you pay for who uses the platform) penalizes you for having a larger team.

Are there hidden costs? API access fees, integration charges, professional services for deployment, historical data access surcharges, and per-report pricing all appear in enterprise DRP contracts. Ask what’s included and what costs extra.

Vendor Stability: Will This Platform Exist in Three Years?

Is the vendor independently owned or PE-backed? PE-owned vendors operate under margin pressure and exit timelines that may not align with your multi-year investment.

Have they been acquired in the last three years? Recently acquired platforms frequently experience product integration disruption, pricing resets, and support degradation.

What’s the product development cadence? Ask about recent feature releases. A vendor that hasn’t shipped significant new capability in 12 months may be in maintenance mode.

Integration: Does It Fit Your Stack?

Does the platform support webhook delivery, REST API, native SIEM integrations, and email alerting? Can alerts flow into your existing case management and communication tools without custom engineering?

DigitalStakeout scores well across every criterion: first-party collection, 225+ classifiers across 14 risk domains, published entity-based pricing starting at $499/month, independent ownership, and multi-channel alerting with API integration.

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Evaluate DigitalStakeout against this checklist. Compare alternatives or get a demo.