Affinity vs 4Degrees

4Degrees answers the pricing question with a sentence rather than a number. Its pricing page reads, verbatim: "At 4Degrees, we charge on a per-user per-month model. The exact pricing depends on a few factors specific to your organization and team, so we will need to get in touch." No tier names, no floor, no minimum seat count, no trial. The only unit disclosed is per user per month, which is worth noting on its own, because the incumbent it's usually compared with sells annually.

Affinity publishes three numbers and attaches named features to each: Essential at $2,000 per user per year, Scale at $2,300, which is where AI Chat, the notetaker, the Ascend agents and the MCP server begin, and Advanced at $2,700, which adds enrichment from PitchBook, Dealroom and Crunchbase plus packaged Slack, Salesforce and Box integrations. Enterprise is custom. Publishing the number doesn't make it self-serve, and it's not: every tier still runs through a sales conversation and there's no free tier.

Treat the disclosure gap as a buying consideration rather than a character judgment. A published price lets a four-partner fund budget before the first call, and it caps how far a quote can drift from list. An unpublished one means the number is set in the room, which sometimes lands lower for a small team and sometimes does not. Either way, ask 4Degrees for a written per-user per-month figure at your exact headcount before you compare a single feature, because without it the comparison has one side missing.

Strip both products back and the engine is identical: sync the firm's email and calendar, resolve people and companies, score each relationship on how recent and how frequent the interaction was, then show a deal team who owns the warmest path. Affinity describes the score as coming from recency and frequency of interactions. 4Degrees describes it as coming from emails, meetings and shared calendar events. Those are two phrasings of one mechanism.

The difference sits above the engine. Affinity has broken the layer into priced steps you can read off a page: the notetaker, AI Chat, the Ascend agents for meeting prep, warm intros and data updates, and an MCP server, all starting on Scale; enrichment from 40+ sources including PitchBook, Preqin and Grata, plus Slack, Salesforce and Box, on Advanced. A fund can therefore decide which layer it's paying for.

4Degrees publishes no tier structure, so the same decision happens in conversation. Its own pitch is that the layer is workflow rather than data: on its comparison page it claims pipeline, document, data room and AI workflows as what it adds after the relationship is found, and it ships Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn and Chrome extensions, which Affinity doesn't advertise. Whether that bundle costs more or less than $2,300 a seat is the one thing 4Degrees does not publish.

Both of these are firm purchases. Neither sells to an individual, neither has a free tier, and both are priced as a system of record for a team with a procurement process behind it. That leaves a large group of people who ask the same question these products answer, angels, solo general partners, scouts, operators and founders, with nothing to buy.

The search half of the job has a free answer. Happenstance searches the accounts a person connects, or that a group pools, and answers in plain English who they know and who can introduce them. The pipeline, the notes and the CRM record are what Affinity and 4Degrees sell; Happenstance is the search layer beside either. For a fund that has already bought one, it's a free second surface; the 4Degrees comparison sets out how the two fit together.

These two don't coexist. They capture the same email and calendar, build the same kind of graph and hold the same deal records, so running both means paying twice and splitting the record. Firms evaluating this pair are almost always choosing one, or moving from one to the other.

The subscription is the small part of what the move costs. It's the deal history, the field mapping, the reports partners already rely on and the weeks of adoption before the new system is trusted. That cost is the reason to price this decision on a three-year horizon rather than a first-year discount, and the reason to get 4Degrees' per-user per-month number in writing before either contract is signed.

Two more questions belong in the same conversation, because both products end up holding the firm's relationship history. What does a full export look like on the last day of a contract, and which of the enriched fields sitting on your records leave with you when the license does? Neither vendor publishes an answer, and both matter more in year three than any feature above.