If you are wanting to sell your startup but aren't sure where to do that, here are all your options. There's lots of choice here for you whether you have a SaaS, an e-commerce site or a newsletter. Of course, always do your own research before using a platform to sell your business! There are no affiliate links here - this is an unbiased view of the options out there for selling a website.
Flippa
Flippa is a marketplace where you can sell anything from blogs to SaaS to e-commerce businesses. 12,000 deals are done on Flippa each year, which is a huge volume! Flippa also boasts a list of 600,000 investors and buyers to share your business with.
For deals under $50,000, Flippa charges 10% commission. This commission decreases with the more that your website sells for. If you sell a website for between $1m and $4.9m your commission fee is 5%, for example. You also have to pay to post your website for sale and there are a variety of packages and prices.
Acquire
This is a relatively new marketplace and an alternative to Flippa which gained a lot of early popularity because it was free for sellers and only website buyers had to pay to access the database. However, now sellers pay 4% of the sale price if you are successful in selling your website but unlike Flippa, you don't have to pay to make a listing. Most of the websites that use Acquire are SaaS businesses i.e. Software as a Service.
Acquire claims they have an audience of 200,000 people who can potentially buy your startup. There is a free escrow service to hold funds while they are transferred. Acquire also has non-disclosure agreements available so you can keep confidential information under wraps.
You are required to add data like your revenue and profit for the last 12 months. You can connect your Google Analytics data but it's disappointing that there is no option for connecting privacy-based analytics tools like Fathom, Simple Analytics or Plausible.
Want to find out what 20 indie companies sold for? Check out the free report!
Empire Flippers
Empire Flippers has processed $450m worth of website deals. Most of the public deals are e-commerce, Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) businesses. You can sell a SaaS here but at the time of writing, there were only three SaaS businesses for sale on the public listings section.
Quiet Light Listings
This is a brokerage which gives you a free valuation of your website. Quiet Light claims that 85% of websites listed on their platform sell in under 90 days. Quiet Light was founded in 2006 and since then 750 online businesses have been sold there with a total of $500m worth of transactions. The company prides itself on hiring founders who know what it's like to buy or sell a business.
Microns
A fairly new marketplace for startups, especially smaller deals for bootstrappers. Most deals are for 4 or 5 figures, so smaller than on other websites. There is zero commission for buying or selling websites on Microns. Buyers can access the information for all the websites for sale by paying $299.
Tiny Acquisitions
This is a marketplace for buying and selling projects for less than $100,000 which launched in June 2021. It's a good place if you have a project that is making a relatively small amount of money that you wish to sell. You can also list pre-revenue startups for sale, which many sites such as Acquire discourage.
Duuce
Duuce is a marketplace which focuses only on buying and selling newsletters. Creating newsletters has boomed in popularity in recent years with companies like Morning Brew and The Hustle selling for tens of millions of dollars. So it's natural that this has triggered a huge interest in buying and selling newsletters.
Duuce has a free newsletter valuation tool so you can put in some data and find out how much you could sell your newsletter for. As Duuce only deals in newsletters, this may be a good bet if you want to buy or sell a newsletter business as you can cut through all the SaaS businesses or e-commerce sites that are common on less niche website marketplaces.
Borderline
This is a fairly new marketplace for selling pre-revenue websites or which have made a small amount of revenue. Andrew Davison sold his Airtable-based tool after listing it on Borderline. Dmytro sold his software tools directory for $9500 after listing it on Borderline. Read his interview about building and selling his website.
A nice feature of Borderline is that it shows you what programming languages the founder used to make their website. This way you can avoid wasting time looking at a website to buy if it's not using a language or framework that you like using. Here's an AI writing app built in Node and Next.JS:
Private communities
Some founders may choose to seek out buyers for their projects in private communities where they have greater privacy. For example, I sold a remote job board to a member of the Indie London Slack community in 2022. There are lots of small communities for founders (such as Ramen Club, WIP and Makerlog) on platforms like Discord, Telegram and Slack.
The advantage of selling a business here is that you can be more discrete and only announce you are selling to a small number of people. You're also more likely to know that person or be able to ask others in your community if they are reliable.
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