One paid data subscription or four county sites and a spreadsheet I maintain myself

I priced this out both ways this week and the gap is smaller than I expected.

The platform route: a national data subscription with skip tracing bundled, call it $100 to $300 a month depending on tier, and I get filters, comps, and a list I can pull at 11pm. The catch is that the underlying record quality varies a lot by county, and roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, so in those markets the platform is showing me a model estimate and calling it a comp. If I don't know which counties are strong, I'm paying for confidence I haven't earned.

The county route: assessor and recorder sites are free or close to it, and the data is the actual record. I've pulled tax delinquent and pre-foreclosure lists straight from source. It took me most of a Saturday per county to work out the export format, and two of the four counties I looked at have no bulk download at all, which means paging through results by hand.

What I keep going back and forth on is whether the platform's real product is time or accuracy. If it's time, the county route is fine for two markets and impossible for six. If it's accuracy, the platform is worse in exactly the states where I'd most want help.

Where do you land, and did that change once you were past your first few contracts?