Best Places to Sell a SaaS Business

A SaaS needs a buyer who speaks its language

Selling software differs from selling a content site in one way that decides everything else: the buyer has to underwrite recurring revenue, churn and a codebase they will inherit. List a SaaS somewhere its buyers price assets by traffic and you will get offers that ignore the value of revenue that renews. So venue choice is not really about audience size. It is about whether the people looking are equipped to value what you built, and then about what each one costs you.

What each venue charges

Verified 5 September 2026, and read the ranges as ranges. Two cautions worth more than the table itself. First, almost every detailed fee breakdown in this market is published by a company selling a competing service — the fullest ones come from ExitBid, which sells a flat-fee alternative, and from FE International comparing itself to Flippa. Second, sources genuinely disagree about Acquire.com: some describe a pure buyer-pays model with nothing charged to the seller, others describe a low single-digit success fee. Confirm on the venue’s own pricing page before you list, and treat any guide quoting one flat number per platform as having simplified something tiered.

Acquire.com is the SaaS-native option

Built specifically for software and tech acquisitions, and the closest thing this market has to a default for small and mid-sized SaaS. Its economics run the other way round from most venues: sellers list free and buyers pay for access, which means the platform's incentive is to keep listing quality high enough that buyers keep renewing. That is why it vets submissions, and reportedly rejects around 55% of them. The trade is a smaller, more self-selected buyer pool than an open marketplace, made up of people who paid to be there.

Flippa is volume, with a layered fee stack

The largest audience by a wide margin, reportedly over 600,000 registered buyers, and it will list almost anything. The cost is that the fees arrive in layers rather than as one number: a non-refundable listing fee, a success fee on completion, escrow on top, and optional featured placement if you want to be visible among thousands of other listings. For a SaaS in the low six figures, competing for attention on a general marketplace is a real disadvantage compared with a venue where every buyer came for software.

FE International and Quiet Light are the advisory route

Both are full-service brokers working roughly from $250,000 upward, and both charge a sliding commission with nothing upfront. What you are buying is the process: valuation, a proper information memorandum, outreach to a vetted buyer network, negotiation and diligence support. FE International reports a private network of more than 50,000 SaaS-focused acquirers. It also has criteria, and will decline what does not fit — micro-SaaS under about $100,000, browser extensions, bots and newsletters generally go elsewhere, which is information rather than a verdict on the asset.

Empire Flippers sits in between

A vetted marketplace rather than a brokerage, with verified numbers, a large public buyer pool, built-in escrow, and a commission structure that starts around 15% on the first $700,000 and tapers as the deal grows. It carries content sites and ecommerce alongside software, so its buyers are less exclusively software-literate than Acquire.com's, but the verification and the managed process suit an established SaaS whose owner does not want to run the transaction themselves.

What the fees actually cost on a $300,000 sale

Approximate seller-side cost on a $300,000 SaaS, using the mid-point of each range above:

Do not read this as an argument for the cheapest option, which is the mistake the fee-comparison content in this market encourages. A broker charging $36,000 who achieves 20% more than you would have achieved alone has made you $24,000 better off. The fee is a cost, not the decision — what matters is the net figure after fees, and a competitive process on a business worth six figures routinely moves the price more than the commission costs. The spread is only decisive when the deal is small enough that no process will improve the price much.

Match the venue to the size

Under about $50,000, self-serve is almost always right: no process will lift the price enough to cover a broker's commission, so keep the fees low and do the work. From roughly $50,000 to $250,000, Acquire.com is the natural first stop for a genuine SaaS, with Flippa as a wider net if the vetting goes against you. From $250,000 up, get valuations from two full-service brokers before deciding anything, because the difference between a competitive process and a listing is largest exactly here. Above a million, you are in advisory territory and the relevant question is which firm, not whether.

The buyer type changes with the venue

Worth thinking about separately from fees, because it changes what you can ask for. Self-serve marketplaces bring individual operators and small funds who will pay a fair multiple for a clean, boring business. Brokers can reach strategic buyers — companies that want your product for its customers, its technology or its market position — and a strategic buyer is the only kind who might pay well above the financial multiple. If your product has an obvious acquirer already in your market, that is an argument for a broker regardless of size.

Prepare your metrics before you list

Whatever venue you choose, SaaS buyers will not move without clean numbers, so have MRR, churn, lifetime value and customer acquisition cost ready and verifiable before you list. Organise them so they reconcile with your payment processor, and be prepared to explain any anomaly rather than hoping nobody asks. Software buyers move quickly on businesses with legible metrics and stall indefinitely on opaque ones, and the stall is usually what kills a deal rather than the numbers themselves.

The metrics that decide which venue will take you

Venue choice is largely settled by your numbers before you get a say in it. Monthly recurring revenue determines the tier: small products sell on self-serve marketplaces, mid-sized ones through vetted platforms, and larger ones through brokers who work by introduction. Churn determines whether a listing attracts offers at all, since a product losing customers faster than it adds them is a turnaround rather than an acquisition. And code and infrastructure documentation determines how many of the interested buyers can actually take it on.

What to have ready before you approach anyone

SaaS diligence asks for things content-site diligence doesn't. Monthly cohort retention over the last one to two years. Revenue split by plan tier, with the concentration of your largest accounts stated. A record of what the infrastructure costs to run per month. An honest account of technical debt and what it would cost to address. And clear ownership of every dependency, including anything you licensed or borrowed. Assembling this before you list shortens the process considerably and prevents the re-pricing that follows a buyer discovering it themselves.

Work it out: Marketplace fee calculator · Net proceeds calculator