A new entrant in the ESG tooling market is rarely worth a solo consultant's time, because the tooling tier they actually need — public-record substrate priced as monthly overhead — is the one most vendors skip on the way to enterprise procurement. WhatsMyESG occupies that gap. It is a Tier 2 light-snapshot product: EPA Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) records, state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) feeds, and county-level violation history aggregated into a per-site lookup, exported in a format that drops directly into a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment appendix under ASTM E1527-21. This review covers what the product is, what it costs, how it differs from Workiva and the institutional ratings vendors, and where the alternative buying paths sit.
What WhatsMyESG Is, Stated Plainly
WhatsMyESG is a public-record aggregation product. The data substrate is three-layered. The federal anchor is EPA ECHO, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's compliance and enforcement history database, accessible at echo.epa.gov. The second layer is state-level DEQ feeds — California's CalEPA, Texas's TCEQ, New York's NYSDEC, and equivalent state regulators — which cover state enforcement actions that may precede or supplement federal records. The third layer is county-level environmental, code-enforcement, and health-department actions, useful when a site identifier is noisy or when a target portfolio crosses jurisdictional lines.
The output of a WhatsMyESG lookup is three artifacts: a detailed PDF report with full data lineage, an executive-summary PDF, and a CSV export. The PDFs are branded with the consultant's name and logo. The exports are formatted to drop into a Phase I ESA appendix as a data exhibit consistent with ASTM E1527-21 expectations for prior environmental records review.
The product was launched out of Dallas, Texas, by Dr. Mohamed Elansary, who holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering, an MS in Environmental Engineering, and is qualified as an ASTM E1527-21 Environmental Professional. The launch was announced via wire on August 28, 2025, in a press release titled "WhatsMyESG Launches Free AI Platform Democratizing ESG Compliance Globally," distributed across regional news sites including counton2.com. That release is the only existing organic press mention of the brand at this writing.
What the product is not, and the WhatsMyESG marketing materials are explicit on this point, is a Phase I ESA itself, an engineering opinion, an assured ESG disclosure under any framework, an institutional rating, or an enterprise reporting platform. The deliverable is data plus lineage. The interpretation is the consultant's.
WhatsMyESG Pricing in 2026
There are two cohorts and one set of subscription terms.
The Founding 100 cohort is priced at $99 per month. The rate is locked for the lifetime of the subscription, provided the account remains active. Cancellation forfeits the lock; resubscription after cancellation is charged at the then-current public price. The cohort is capped at 100 seats, with a live counter on the pricing page.
The Round 2 cohort is priced at $249 per month. It opens automatically when the 100th Founding 100 spot fills. Round 2 carries standard renewal terms.
Subscriptions cancel at the end of the current billing period. The customer retains access until then. There are no refunds for partial periods. There is no free trial; the entry-point offer is the Founding 100 rate locked for the cohort's lifetime, not a satisfaction promise.
A referral mechanism is published. After a referred friend's first paid month vests, both parties receive the next month free as a Stripe customer-balance credit. There is a self-referral guard against same email-domain referrals and a 5-pending cap.
There is no published usage cap. Fair-use applies — operators sustaining greater than 500 reports per month may be contacted for a future operator-tier offering, which is not currently published. The Terms enforce a no-debrand rule.
For a solo consultant running multiple due-diligence engagements per month, the practical math is that $99 spread across a portfolio of engagements amortizes to a marginal cost per snapshot that no hourly model can match. That margin is the product's reason for being.
WhatsMyESG vs Workiva
WhatsMyESG and Workiva are different products built for different buyers, and the comparison only resolves once that difference is named directly.
Workiva is a Tier 5 enterprise reporting platform serving controllers and chief sustainability officers at public companies and large private companies assembling regulator-grade disclosures — U.S. SEC filings, sustainability reports, CSRD disclosures, IFRS S1/S2 baselines. The platform's core capability is connected data linking across financial and non-financial reporting, with audit trails, version control, and integrations into ERP and consolidation systems. Workiva is publicly traded on the NYSE under ticker WK.
Workiva does not post a price on its public pricing page; the page directs prospective buyers to contact sales. The published pricing posture itself is the relevant fact: Workiva is sold via direct sales motion to enterprise buyers, not via a published self-serve price.
WhatsMyESG is a Tier 2 light-snapshot product. It serves the solo consultant, the Phase I practitioner, the M&A diligence analyst, the EHS consultant, the sustainability analyst, and the underwriter. The product is sold at $99 per month for the Founding 100 cohort or $249 per month for Round 2, posted publicly at whatsmyesg.com/pricing, with self-serve sign-up and self-serve cancellation.
The two products do not substitute for each other. A Workiva customer is assembling a regulator-grade disclosure under a named framework, frequently signed off by a third-party assurance provider. A WhatsMyESG customer is producing a data exhibit for a Phase I ESA appendix or a flag-and-prioritize input for early-stage diligence. A controller at a CSRD-scoped issuer cannot use a WhatsMyESG snapshot as a CSRD disclosure, and a Phase I practitioner does not need a Workiva-grade reporting environment to produce a per-site environmental record review.
The buyer-side decision criterion is the deliverable. A signed assured filing belongs in Tier 5 reporting infrastructure with Tier 4 assurance. A data exhibit belongs in Tier 2 substrate with the consultant's interpretation on top.
WhatsMyESG vs MSCI, Sustainalytics, and EcoVadis
A second comparison surfaces in solo-consultant scoping calls: WhatsMyESG against the institutional ESG ratings vendors. The comparison again resolves at the tier boundary.
MSCI ESG Ratings, Morningstar Sustainalytics, and EcoVadis are Tier 5 institutional ratings products. MSCI ESG Ratings and Sustainalytics produce ratings consumed by asset managers for portfolio screening, engagement, and exclusion-list construction. EcoVadis produces supplier sustainability ratings consumed by procurement organizations to score and gate vendors. Pricing for all three is not publicly posted; access is sold through enterprise contracts.
WhatsMyESG does not assign a rating. It does not produce an MSCI-style score, a Sustainalytics risk classification, or an EcoVadis medal. The output is environmental-record substrate with source lineage. A sustainability analyst who needs a public-record overlay before commissioning a deeper rating-vendor engagement can use WhatsMyESG as the pre-research layer; the rating itself remains the institutional vendor's product. A small or mid-market firm asked to disclose supplier environmental performance to a customer who buys EcoVadis ratings can use WhatsMyESG to compile per-supplier public-record context as a complement to — not a replacement for — whatever rating the customer ultimately requires.
WhatsMyESG Alternatives, by Tier
The word "alternative" only resolves once the buyer is clear about which tier they need. Listing every ESG-adjacent tool together is the failure mode that lets vendors mis-sell up the stack.
Tier 1 — DIY workbooks, $0 to roughly $500. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol corporate calculation tools, the SME Climate Hub workbook, the B Lab B Impact Assessment, the Science Based Targets initiative target-setting tool, free CDP guidance documents, ISO 14064 templates. Useful as scaffolding for Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventories at the smallest end of the market. Not a per-site environmental record review.
Tier 2 — other public-record aggregators in the $50 to $500 per-month band. A handful of EPA-ECHO-derived aggregators and state-DEQ-scraping tools occupy adjacent positions. Buyers should evaluate them on the eight-question checklist below.
Tier 3 — mid-market consulting hours, roughly $5,000 to $75,000 per engagement. The right answer when the deliverable is a scoped report under a named framework — GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S1/S2 — with original data collection, materiality assessment, and stakeholder interviews. WhatsMyESG sits underneath this tier, not in competition with it; a Tier 3 consultant routinely uses Tier 2 substrate inside a Tier 3 engagement.
Tier 4 — full audit and third-party assurance, roughly $50,000 to $250,000 per cycle. Independent verification under ISAE 3000, ISAE 3410, AA1000AS, or, for U.S. issuers, a PCAOB- or AICPA-aligned attestation pathway. The Big Four, second-tier audit firms, and accredited assurance providers — DNV, LRQA, BSI, Bureau Veritas, SGS, ERM CVS — operate here. WhatsMyESG output is not assured and is not an alternative to assurance.
Tier 5 — enterprise platforms and institutional ratings. Workiva, Persefoni, Sphera, IBM Envizi, Sweep, and Watershed for connected reporting and emissions accounting; MSCI ESG Ratings, Sustainalytics, and EcoVadis for institutional ratings. None post public per-seat pricing; all sell through direct enterprise sales. WhatsMyESG is not an alternative to a Tier 5 platform for a public-company buyer with public-company-style stakeholders. It is, however, an alternative to a Tier 5 platform for a solo consultant being upsold into one because no Tier 2 option had been presented.
The decision frame: a buyer looking for a "WhatsMyESG alternative" is really asking which tier their deliverable sits in. The answer is rarely "another Tier 2 tool." It is more often "the right tier for the work."
Where WhatsMyESG Fits
WhatsMyESG is a Tier 2 product in the five-tier ESG market. The substrate is three-layered: federal EPA ECHO records, state DEQ feeds, and county-level violation history. The output is a per-site lookup exported as a detailed PDF, an executive-summary PDF, and a CSV, all branded with the subscribing consultant's name and logo, formatted for direct inclusion as a Phase I ESA appendix consistent with ASTM E1527-21.
The product does not assign a rating. It does not produce GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S1, IFRS S2, CSRD, California SB 253, or California SB 261 disclosures. It does not provide third-party assurance under ISAE 3000, ISAE 3410, AA1000AS, or any PCAOB- or AICPA-aligned attestation framework. It does not draft a Phase I ESA. It does not draft a materiality assessment. It does not constitute an engineering opinion. It does not replace a site visit.
WhatsMyESG provides data and source lineage. Interpretation, framework alignment, and the deliverable signature are the consultant's responsibility.
Pricing is $99 per month for the Founding 100 cohort, locked for the lifetime of the subscription provided the account remains active, and $249 per month for Round 2, which opens automatically when the 100th Founding 100 seat fills. Subscriptions cancel at the end of the current billing period; there are no refunds for partial periods. Cancellation forfeits the Founding 100 lock. The published referral mechanism credits both parties one free month after the referred party's first paid month vests.
For a solo consultant scoping engagements with mid-market private clients in the $5M to $500M revenue band, the product economics are that one $99 seat services the data-layer needs of multiple engagements per month. The reseller and operator framing is permitted under the Terms, with the no-debrand rule enforced.
Buyer's Checklist — Eight Questions Before Subscribing
The same eight questions apply to WhatsMyESG that apply to any tool at any tier.
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What is the data substrate, and is it public, licensed, or proprietary? WhatsMyESG aggregates public-record data — EPA ECHO, state DEQ, county-level violation history — with the substrate enumerated by source name on the methodology page.
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What is the refresh cadence per source, and is it logged? Cadence varies by upstream source. ECHO publishes its own refresh schedule. State DEQ feeds vary by state agency. The methodology page documents the per-source cadence and the changelog tracks substrate changes.
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Is the output exportable in a format an audit or assurance provider will accept? The detailed PDF, executive-summary PDF, and CSV exports are designed for inclusion as appendix exhibits in a Phase I workflow. The exports are not themselves an audited or assured artifact — that signature comes from a Tier 4 provider engaged separately, if the engagement requires one.
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What is the framework coverage, and what is explicitly out of scope? WhatsMyESG covers public-record environmental enforcement and compliance data. It does not produce framework-aligned disclosures under GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S1/S2, CSRD, SB 253, or SB 261. Framework alignment is the consultant's deliverable.
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Who signs off on the output, and what is their professional accountability? The consultant signs off on the deliverable that uses WhatsMyESG output. WhatsMyESG provides the data layer; the consultant is the named, accountable interpreter.
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What is the contract term and the cancellation pathway? Monthly subscription with self-serve cancellation. Subscriptions cancel at the end of the billing period. No refunds for partial periods. Cancellation forfeits the Founding 100 lock.
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Is pricing transparent, and is it cohort-locked or subject to change? Public pricing is posted at whatsmyesg.com/pricing. The Founding 100 rate of $99 per month is documented as cohort-locked for the lifetime of the active subscription. Round 2 at $249 per month is the next cohort tier.
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Where does the tool stop, and what does the consultant still owe the client? The tool stops at the data layer. The consultant owes interpretation, framework alignment, materiality judgment where relevant, and the named-deliverable signoff in the engagement letter.
Closing
WhatsMyESG is what it claims to be: a Tier 2 public-record substrate priced for a solo consultant's monthly overhead, with a Phase I ESA appendix-compatible export and a documented methodology. It is not a Phase I, not an assurance product, not a framework disclosure tool, and not an institutional rating. The product wins where it is honest about its tier — and loses, correctly, where a buyer needs Tier 3 hours, a Tier 4 signature, or a Tier 5 platform.
WhatsMyESG. Public-record ESG snapshots in minutes. https://whatsmyesg.com/pricing
