Every price comes with a question: what does it actually cover?
Rightmove is heading to a tribunal, Trainline is dealing with the regulator, and Revolut is rewriting its own; then the Budget has set a new one for founders.
Home hunters spent 16.8 billion minutes on Rightmove in 2025 and paid nothing, but Rightmove’s 2025 revenue still reached £425.1 million, and the average estate agency branch paid £1,636 a month in the first half of 2026.
A £1.5 billion class action says those fees are excessive, and a tribunal has set aside two days in November to decide whether it can go to trial or not.
Trainline sold £6.3 billion of tickets in the year to February 2026 and kept £453 million. The CMA opened an investigation in August into whether its booking fees, from 59p to £2.79, are shown in the upfront price.
Revolut’s Standard account is free, but the group still made £1.7 billion in pre-tax profit in 2025, it has since started lending, at rates from 6.9% to 29.3% APR, and from 19th December existing customers on three of its four paid plans will pay more.
The Budget then set a price of its own, so qualifying founders are due to pay 10% on the first £10 million of lifetime gains from April 2027, while the lifetime limit on the older relief most founders use is halved to £500,000.
Read the full breakdowns of How Rightmove Makes Money, How Trainline Makes Money, How Revolut Makes Money and What Founders’ Relief means for You.
Also on EP+ this week:
→ Two of Britain’s best-known online weight-loss brands now sit inside one US-listed company, so we asked who really owns the UK’s weight loss jabs market.
→ Everyone wants UK compute, so we looked at who is actually building the UK’s AI data centres.
→ How do you price a startup with no revenue? We set out how to reach a valuation investors will believe.
→ The UK startup secondaries market is giving founders a new exit route, and we explain how it works.
The wider ecosystem spent the week asking who pays to keep founders here.
Days before the Budget, Alex Depledge announced she was leaving as the Treasury’s entrepreneurship adviser, saying ministers treat scaleups as “a bit of a sideshow”.
We profiled her Hassle.com story earlier this year.
Then the Chancellor delivered a relief for founders.
The Budget
→ Founders’ Relief charges 10% on the first £10 million of lifetime gains from 6 April 2027. The proposed tests include a 25% stake, a five-year holding period and 15 full-time staff, and they are still in consultation.
→ The older Business Asset Disposal Relief limit halves from £1 million to £500,000. For a higher-rate taxpayer with a £1 million gain, tax rises from £180,000 to £210,000 under it, against £100,000 under Founders’ Relief.
→ The British Business Bank gets £5 billion of extra capacity, including £450 million for a new venture debt product that doesn’t dilute founders.
→ Healey also held the line on capital gains tax, despite pressure to equalise it with income tax.
→ On Friday, Bloomberg reported that economists and tax experts expect the relief to fail at keeping founders in the UK.
Who pays to keep them here?
→ The British Business Bank put £180 million into six AI and deeptech funds on 15 October. None of the 19 growth rounds above £75 million raised by UK university spinouts since 2022 relied on UK money alone.
→ Overseas pension funds invest around 16 times more into UK private capital funds than British schemes do.
→ Machenta, the Imperial Robotics spinout, raised $40 million, the largest seed round ever by a UK robotics startup, led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures.
→ 22one, a London police-AI startup, is reportedly valued at nearly $400 million and has yet to show its product. Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lux and Creandum back it.
→ Smaller rounds: London’s Querio launched with €4.48 million to help data teams tackle conflicting answers across AI tools.
Every one of these answers the same question: if a price is set in the UK, who is willing to pay it here?
One pattern we noticed
A price is easy to set, but what it covers is the part everyone argues about.
Rightmove’s £1,636 a month is heading to a tribunal.
Trainline’s booking fees are with the CMA.
Healey’s 10% is a price on success, and the experts quoted by Bloomberg say it won’t be enough.
22one’s valuation is a price too, and nobody has seen the product.
Setting the number takes a day, but defending it definitely takes a lot longer.
One number
£305 million
What halving BADR is forecast to raise a year by 2031–32, against up to £300 million a year for Founders’ Relief.
Question of the week
Founders’ Relief taxes your first £10 million of gains at 10%, if you qualify. Would you sell at £10 million, or keep building for a bigger exit?
Email us at [email protected] and tell us, because we read every single answer, and yours might just end up in next week’s brief.
Sources: Rightmove, Trainline, Revolut, weight loss jabs and Budget figures from EP+’s own reporting, drawing on company results, the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the CMA, HM Treasury and the House of Commons Library. Revolut loans from Reuters, via The Paypers and Finimize. Alex Depledge from BusinessCloud and EP+. Bloomberg on reaction to Founders’ Relief. British Business Bank figures from the Startup Coalition and SME Web. £180 million and spinout funding figures from TechRound, citing Bidwells and Beauhurst. Pension fund comparison from City AM. Machenta from Imperial College London. 22one from Inc and Tech Funding News. Querio from EU-Startups.
