About FranchiseDiff

Buying a franchise is one of the biggest financial commitments a person makes — typically $200K to $2M, locked into a 10-year agreement. Yet most prospective buyers walk into that decision without a clear picture of how the brand has been trending.

Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) are public, updated every year, and required to contain the truth about fees, unit growth, closures, litigation, and dozens of other facts that should drive any buyer's decision. The problem is that comparing them is brutal: each FDD is 200-400 pages of dense legal language (including exhibits), and spotting what actually changed year-over-year means reading two versions side by side. Almost no one does it.

FranchiseDiff fixes that. We cover 200+ U.S. franchise brands across 23 standardized FDD items. For each brand we extract the structured data and the item-by-item text changes from every available filing, then show you exactly what shifted from one year to the next — fees, royalties, ad contributions, unit counts, openings, closures, transfers, and the actual contract language.

Facts and trends, no opinions

We are strictly a data tool. We don't rank franchises, we don't recommend franchises, and we don't tell you which one to buy. We extract factual information from publicly filed FDDs and present it in clean comparison tables with page references so you can verify everything yourself.

Why this exists

I'm Heemin Cho — I built FranchiseDiff. I spent over a decade as a multi-unit franchisee with British Swim School, where I consistently operated in the top 10% of franchisees system-wide. Across those years I talked with hundreds of other franchisees across dozens of brands. A pattern came up over and over: people's actual experience as a franchisee was very different from what they expected when they signed. Sometimes the brand had quietly shifted in ways the FDD would have shown — if anyone had bothered to read it carefully.

I built FranchiseDiff as a personal venture, for fellow franchisees, so the next round of prospective buyers can spot those shifts before they sign, not after. The goal is better-fitting matches between buyer and brand — and fewer people getting blindsided by a fee structure or unit-count trend that was right there in last year's FDD. (I also co-founded a separate startup, Jakiro, in the franchising tech space; details on that and other relevant disclosures live on the Disclaimer page.)

What we are not

We are not franchise brokers, consultants, or advisors. We do not provide legal, financial, or investment advice. We do not host or distribute the actual FDD documents — we extract structured data from publicly filed versions and surface it for comparison. For the official FDD, contact the franchisor or use an authorized FDD distribution service.