$1,000*
per search. First one on us. Fixed price, one deliverable, no seat licenses. Roughly 1% of a retained engagement fee — in exchange for a week of researcher time.
* No credit card for the first one. No subscription. No trial that auto-converts.
$0
Submit a brief, get a sourced shortlist back — same product, same pipeline, same QA bar as a paid one. If it earns the next search, you pay $1,000 for it. If it doesn't, you owe nothing.
no credit card · no subscription · no auto-convert
No tiers, no seat licenses, no annual commitment. Every $1,000 search is the same product.
→ the relationship surface belongs to the recruiter.
A researcher spending three to five days per search at loaded cost runs $1,200–$4,000 of labor before a name is ready to discuss. Output varies with who had bandwidth that week. Sourcing behind claims is rarely documented — the partner reviewing the list before a client call is often re-qualifying names from scratch.
At $1,000, Cerna represents roughly 1% of a typical retained engagement fee. The question is not the number. The question is: compared to what?
A thin shortlist with honest sourcing is a better product than a full list where some claims do not hold. If a search returns two verifiable on-spec matches, the shortlist has two Section A executives — and says explicitly why the pool was thin. Cerna would rather tell you clearly than pad the list.
Each additional search is $1,000. There is no per-search discount for volume at this stage. If you are a firm running a significant volume of searches and want to discuss a structured arrangement, contact the team at /try.
Every confirmed criterion has a named source in the document. If you believe a source does not support the claim as stated, flag it and Cerna will review. The sourcing is in the document — you can verify it without asking what it was based on.
No. Cerna's model is transactional per-run. You pay per search, not per month.
The first search is on us. Same pipeline. Same sourcing discipline. Same QA bar as a paid one.
No credit card. $1,000 per search after that.
