A free data room for startups: what it needs and your options
What a startup data room must contain, which free options exist as of October 2026, and where ArtifactSend fits today.
The short answer
A startup data room is a private place where investors read your company files and you see what they read. For PDFs, start on the free plan of Peony or Papermark, or use a shared Google Drive folder. For live HTML memos and models, use ArtifactSend for free.
As of October 2026, full multi-document data rooms are a paid feature in most tools. Check each pricing page for current prices.
What a seed or Series A data room contains
- Pitch deck and a short company memo.
- Financial model and a summary of key metrics.
- Cap table.
- Incorporation documents and past financing documents.
- Key customer contracts, or a summary of them.
- Team list and option plan summary.
- Product demo or product overview.
What the room must do
- Control access: only invited people can open it.
- Prove identity: readers confirm their email.
- Show activity: you see who read which file.
- Allow updates: you can change a file without new links.
- Allow revoke: you can close access after the process.
Free options as of October 2026
Peony has a free plan that does not expire, with 50 documents and page-by-page analytics. Its free plan does not include data rooms. Data rooms start on the Business plan.
Papermark has a free plan with 50 documents, 50 links and page-by-page analytics. Data rooms start on its Data Rooms plan. Papermark is open source, so a technical team can self-host it.
Google Drive can share a folder with specific people. Its Activity dashboard shows viewers only for files owned by work or school accounts, and only for signed-in viewers.
DocSend and Orangedox offer free trials, not free plans. Their data rooms are paid.
Where ArtifactSend fits today
ArtifactSend shares one artifact per link. An artifact can be an HTML page, a Markdown file or a Claude artifact. Every reader door and all analytics are free.
This works well for the parts of a raise that benefit from a live page:
- An interactive company memo with charts.
- A metrics dashboard that investors can filter.
- An HTML pitch deck with time per slide.
- A model summary with inputs readers can change.
What is coming
PDF, Word and Excel uploads are coming to ArtifactSend. Multi-document data rooms are also coming. Until then, send the memo and the deck with ArtifactSend. Keep legal PDFs in a shared folder or a data room tool.
Set up a simple room today
- Write the company memo as a Claude artifact or an HTML page.
- Share it with ArtifactSend behind an email code door.
- Add an allow list with each fund's @domain.
- Put legal PDFs in a folder that you share with the same people.
- Link to the folder from the memo.
- Check the report each day and follow up with active readers.
Name and order your files
Investors read data rooms fast. Help them find things. Number each file in the order you want it read. Use plain names, such as '01 Pitch deck' and '02 Financial model'. Put a one-page index at the top that lists every file and what it shows.
Keep one version of each file. Old versions confuse readers and can show numbers that are no longer true. With ArtifactSend, you update the memo in place, so the link always shows the current version.
Close the room after the process
When the round closes, remove access. Set an expiry date on each link, or turn the links off. Remove old emails from allow lists. This keeps your numbers private after the investors who did not invest move on.
When to pay for a full data room
Pay for a full data room when you have a term sheet and enter due diligence. At that point you need many files, audit logs and group permissions. Before that, a tracked memo and deck are often enough.