US buyer guide, updated August 2026

Software Companies for Sale: Buy a Software Company, App Business or Tech Company

Software companies for sale in the US are listed across about ten venues, and only two of them publish what a buyer pays. The prices are quoted in two different languages that are easy to confuse: private software M&A is priced on annual revenue, where Aventis Advisors puts the median at 4.5x across 543 disclosed deals since 2015, while the small end of the market is priced on average monthly net profit, where Empire Flippers reports a typical 26.4x. Those two numbers describe similar businesses. Divide the monthly multiple by twelve and 26.4x becomes about 2.20x annual profit, which is our arithmetic, not theirs.

See how it works → See the comparison ↓

Verified metrics · published multiples · vetted buyers · escrow-backed closes

AI SaaS deal deck Sample

Sort

Max asking Min MRR

No deals match those filters yet. Widen your range.

Sample cards showing the listing format · not live listings

Verified MRR / ARR Published multiples Vetted, capital-qualified buyers Escrow-backed closes AI-SaaS-native

Not every software business is a SaaS business, and the gap is smaller than the pitch decks suggest. Aventis compared SaaS against non-SaaS software, meaning on-premise vendors, API and SDK platforms and component companies, and found the SaaS premium ran above 40% from 2015 to 2020, then narrowed to roughly 21% by 2024 as buyers competed for traditional software and as on-premise vendors moved to subscription pricing themselves. Buyouts is the marketplace built for AI SaaS with verified MRR, ARR, growth and churn, so treat this page as an honest map of the whole US software market rather than a pitch: if you want an on-premise vendor or a dev agency, several venues below serve that better than we do. Browsing Buyouts is free, and buyer membership is planned rather than currently on sale.

About ten venues list software companies for sale in the US, they disagree sharply on what a buyer pays and on what is verified before listing, and Buyouts covers the AI SaaS end of that market with verified MRR, ARR, growth and churn.

Read from each venue directly

Where software companies are actually listed in the US

Every row was read from the venue's own pages on the date shown, not from a roundup article. "Not published" means the venue does not state the figure anywhere a buyer can read it, and "not verifiable" means the site blocks automated access so we will not repeat third-party numbers we could not confirm. Eight of these ten publish no buyer-side cost at all.

Swipe to see every column →

Venue	What a buyer pays	Software listed here	Verification before listing	Checked
Buyouts	Browsing free, buyer membership planned and not yet on sale	AI SaaS only	Verified MRR, ARR, growth and churn on every listing	Aug 2026
Acquire.com	Free basic account, paid membership starting at $390	SaaS and software startups	Listings curated and vetted by its curation team, with standardized financials	Aug 2026
Empire Flippers	No buyer fee published	SaaS alongside content, ecommerce, FBA and apps	Curated before listing, with a public scoreboard of outcomes	Aug 2026
Flippa	Free, or $49 a month	SaaS, websites, apps and ecommerce	States it vets stated financials above $50,000	Jul 2026
Microns.io	Not published	Micro SaaS, extensions, plugins and directories	No verification policy published	Aug 2026
Website Closers	No buyer fee published	Technology and internet businesses, broker-led	Broker-led sell-side representation, rate not published	Aug 2026
FE International	Not published	SaaS and technology, broker-led	Not published	Jul 2026
saas.group	Not a marketplace, it buys directly	B2B SaaS from $1M to $10M ARR, product-led, 5+ years old	Its own diligence, with an offer stated in under 2 weeks	Aug 2026
Quiet Light	Not verifiable, the site returns a bot challenge	Online businesses including SaaS	Not verifiable	Aug 2026
BizBuySell	Not verifiable, the site blocks automated access	Main street and online businesses, some software	Not verifiable	Aug 2026

Acquire.com buyer pricing and the Empire Flippers scoreboard were read from their own pages on 22 August 2026. saas.group criteria were read from its own site on 22 August 2026. Flippa figures were read from its pricing page in July 2026; that page now sits behind a bot challenge, so the July date is stated rather than refreshed. Quiet Light and BizBuySell block automated access, so their rows say so. Trademarks belong to their owners. Listings shown on Buyouts are illustrative product UI.

Published research, our conversions

What software companies actually sell for, by segment

The single most common mistake a first-time buyer makes in this market is comparing two multiples that are not measured the same way. Public and private software M&A is quoted against annual revenue. The small online end is quoted against average monthly net profit over the trailing twelve months. A 26.4x and a 3.4x in the table below are not 8x apart, they are measuring different things.

Swipe to see every column →

Software segment	Priced against	Multiple	Sample	Source, read firsthand
Public SaaS companies	Annual revenue	3.4x median	Aventis SaaS Index, end-of-month data	Aventis Advisors, March 2026
Private SaaS M&A, all deal sizes	Annual revenue	4.5x median, 2.4x lower quartile, 8.1x upper quartile	543 disclosed deals since 2015, median deal size $80M	Aventis Advisors, 1 April 2026
Private SaaS M&A, profitable targets	EBITDA	23.0x median, 12.8x to 47.1x quartiles	232 disclosed deals, median deal size $181M	Aventis Advisors, 1 April 2026
Private SaaS M&A, most recent reading	Annual revenue	3.1x as of March 2026, down from 3.8x in 2025 and a 2.9x low in 2024	Same 543-deal sample	Aventis Advisors, 1 April 2026
Non-SaaS software: on-premise, API and SDK, components	Annual revenue	About 21% below the SaaS median in 2024, after a peak of 5.3x in 2021	Same Aventis sample	Aventis Advisors, 1 April 2026
Small online software businesses	Average monthly net profit over the trailing twelve months	26.4x typical, 28.3x premium, 37.0x premium above $1M, 14.1x distressed	2,670 businesses sold across all categories	Empire Flippers scoreboard, 31 August 2026
The same small businesses, converted (our math)	Annual net profit	2.20x typical, 2.36x premium, 3.08x premium above $1M, 1.18x distressed	Same scoreboard	Our arithmetic, dividing the row above by twelve

Aventis Advisors figures are from its SaaS Valuation Multiples study, published 1 April 2026 and read firsthand on 22 August 2026. Empire Flippers multiples are from its public scoreboard, read 1 September 2026, which on that date also reported $604,659,848.01 in total sales volume, 2,670 listings sold, 181 current listings, an average of 125 days from listing to sold and an average 95% of asking price achieved. The final row is our own arithmetic on the Empire Flippers figures, not a claim they make. Multiples describe completed transactions in a sample and are not a quoted price for any specific business. Valuation content here is educational and is not investment advice.

Side by side

Buying AI SaaS on Buyouts versus a generalist software marketplace

A fair look at what each does well. Both are useful. Here is where they differ.

Feature	Buyouts	Generalist marketplaces and brokers
What is listed	AI SaaS only, so every listing is the same kind of asset	SaaS, on-premise vendors, agencies, apps and websites in one catalog
Metrics on the listing	Verified MRR, ARR, growth and churn	Usually seller-reported, verified by the buyer during diligence
Valuation basis	An AI-aware model with published multiples	Annual revenue at the top of the market, monthly profit at the bottom
What a buyer pays	Browsing free, membership planned and not yet on sale	Free to $49 a month, or a membership from $390, and nothing published at eight of ten venues
Who you are bidding against	A vetted, capital-qualified buyer pool	An open pool, which means more competition and more tire-kickers
Best for	Buyers who want AI software with the numbers already checked	Buyers who want the widest possible choice of software model

Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each marketplace for the latest. Trademarks belong to their owners.

Why founders and buyers pick Buyouts

One deal room built specifically for AI SaaS

The SaaS premium is real, and smaller than you think

Buyers assume a non-SaaS software company is a second-class asset. The data does not support that. Aventis compared SaaS against on-premise vendors, API and SDK platforms and software component companies, and found the SaaS premium ran above 40% from 2015 to 2020, then compressed. By 2021 non-SaaS medians had risen to 5.3x revenue as capital chased a thinner supply of targets, and by 2024 SaaS was valued only about 21% above its non-SaaS peers. Two forces are closing the gap: buyers went looking for value outside the crowded SaaS bracket, and on-premise vendors have been converting to subscription pricing, which makes their revenue look progressively more like SaaS revenue. For a buyer, a licensed-software company with sticky enterprise contracts and a half-finished cloud migration can be the better purchase precisely because fewer people are bidding on it.

Two multiples, two different meanings

This market quotes prices in two incompatible units and almost nobody flags it. At the top, software M&A is priced on annual revenue: 4.5x is the median across 543 disclosed deals, 3.4x is where public SaaS trades as of March 2026. At the small online end, price is quoted against average monthly net profit over the trailing twelve months, which is why a listing can advertise 26.4x without anyone blinking. Divide by twelve and that 26.4x is about 2.20x annual profit by our arithmetic, which is an ordinary small-business price. Get this wrong in either direction and you either walk away from a fairly priced deal or talk yourself into a wildly overpriced one. Before you compare two software companies for sale, check which unit each listing is quoting and convert both to the same basis.

Most of this market will not tell you what it costs

We tried to read a buyer-side rate card at every venue in the table above. Only Flippa and Acquire.com publish one. Two venues block automated access entirely, and the rest publish nothing a buyer can read before booking a call. That matters commercially, because an unpublished rate is a negotiated rate, and the party who has negotiated it a hundred times is not you. It is also why so much writing about this market repeats figures that do not survive checking. The widely repeated claim that Acquire.com charges sellers a flat 4% is a good example: its own seller pricing page, read on 22 August 2026, states $25 a month plus 8% below $250,000, $50 plus 7% up to $1,000,000, and $100 plus 6% above that. When a number about this market has no primary source behind it, assume it was copied from another article that also had none.

Good questions

Buying a software company, answered

About ten venues list them in the US. Acquire.com and Flippa are open marketplaces with the most choice and published buyer pricing. Empire Flippers, Quiet Light, FE International and Website Closers are curated or broker-led, with more pre-checking and no published buyer fee. Microns.io serves the micro end. saas.group buys directly rather than listing. Buyouts covers AI SaaS with verified metrics. Pick by how much verification you want done for you before you see the numbers.

It depends entirely on size. Private SaaS M&A has a median of 4.5x annual revenue across 543 disclosed deals since 2015, with a median deal size of $80M, according to Aventis Advisors. Small online software businesses are priced differently, on a multiple of average monthly net profit, where Empire Flippers reports a typical 26.4x, which is roughly 2.20x annual profit by our arithmetic. A one-person SaaS doing $10,000 a month in profit sits nearer the second number than the first.

Set a budget and decide which software model you can actually operate, then choose a venue that vets to the level you need. Sign the NDA, request the profit and loss statement plus read-only access to the payment processor and analytics, verify revenue at source rather than from a spreadsheet, check who owns the code and the trademarks, agree price and structure, sign an asset purchase agreement, and move money and assets through escrow. Budget months rather than weeks, especially if a lender or an earnout is involved.

Work out which basis applies first. Above roughly $5M in enterprise value, software is normally valued on a multiple of annual revenue or EBITDA, where the medians are 4.5x revenue and 23.0x EBITDA in the Aventis sample. Below that, it is normally valued on a multiple of owner profit. The drivers that move a software business up or down within its band are recurring revenue share, net revenue retention, gross margin, customer concentration and whether the business runs without its founder.

Public SaaS traded at a median 3.4x annual revenue as of March 2026. Private SaaS M&A sits at a 4.5x median, with a lower quartile of 2.4x and an upper quartile of 8.1x, so the spread is wide and the median alone tells you very little. Profitable targets traded at a 23.0x median EV/EBITDA across 232 disclosed deals. Non-SaaS software, meaning on-premise and API or SDK businesses, ran about 21% below the SaaS median in 2024.

Revenue quality and price. SaaS revenue recurs by default, which is why it commands a premium, though that premium narrowed to about 21% by 2024. On-premise and licensed software often carries lumpy license revenue plus a stable maintenance stream, so the underlying earnings can be more durable than they look while the headline multiple is lower. The practical risk in an on-premise purchase is a half-finished cloud migration you inherit and have to fund.

At most venues, no. Only two of the ten we checked publish a buyer-side cost: Flippa lists a free tier and a $49 a month option, read July 2026, and Acquire.com lists a free basic account with paid membership starting at $390, read 22 August 2026. Everywhere else the seller pays the commission and nothing is published for buyers. Escrow, legal review and any quality-of-earnings work are separate and normally fall to the buyer.

Empire Flippers reports an average of 125 days from listing to sold on its public scoreboard, read 31 August 2026, which is the best public benchmark available because almost nobody else publishes one. From a buyer perspective, four to eight weeks from first contact to close is realistic on a small, clean, well-documented deal. Add months if there is SBA financing, an earnout, enterprise contracts with change-of-control clauses, or a code escrow arrangement to unwind.

Verify revenue at the source with read-only access to the payment processor and the analytics, then reconcile it against bank deposits for the same period. After that, check the things a profit and loss statement hides: who owns the code, the repositories, the domain and the trademarks, whether any of it is encumbered by contractor agreements without IP assignment, whether customer contracts contain change-of-control clauses, how concentrated revenue is in the top few accounts, and whether the product ships without the founder.

Sometimes, and the rules are specific. Under SBA SOP 50 10 8, effective 1 June 2025, a business acquisition requires a minimum 10% equity injection. A seller note counts toward that injection only if it is on full standby for the entire loan term, and it cannot exceed 50% of the equity injection. A partial change of ownership requires personal guarantees from all equity holders for at least two years. Lenders differ widely on whether they will finance a business whose assets are entirely intangible.

Three groups. Individual operators and search-fund style buyers take the smallest deals, usually below $1M. Software holding companies buy in the middle: saas.group publishes the clearest criteria we found, targeting B2B SaaS from $1M to $10M ARR that is product-led and at least five years old, with an offer inside two weeks. Above that, strategics and technology private equity dominate, which Aventis notes explicitly in its 2026 outlook. Most acquirers in the middle band publish no threshold at all.

The arithmetic looks good and the risk sits in one place. At the typical small-business multiple of about 2.20x annual profit by our conversion, a software company returns its purchase price in a little over two years if profit holds flat. Whether profit holds is the entire question. Customer concentration, a single key person, platform dependence on one app store or one integration, and undocumented code are what turn a good multiple into a bad purchase. This is educational information, not investment advice.

Buying converts time into money and building converts money into time. A purchase at roughly 2.20x annual profit at the small end gives you revenue, customers and a working product on day one, and you pay a premium for skipping the years where most software fails to find customers at all. Building costs less cash and far more time, and the base rate of failure is high. Buy if you can verify the numbers and operate the product; build if your edge is the product itself.

The public listing venues concentrate well below the M&A headlines. Aventis reports a median deal size of $80M in its disclosed-multiple sample, but those are advised transactions that rarely appear on a marketplace. On the venues a self-directed buyer can browse, asking prices commonly run from a few thousand dollars up to a few million. Empire Flippers reported 181 current listings across all categories on 1 September 2026, which is a useful reminder that live supply at any moment is thin.

Use revenue, and then discount hard for the reason profit is missing. Revenue multiples exist precisely for this case: many software companies reinvest ahead of earnings, which is why 4.5x revenue is the private M&A median. The judgment call is whether the absence of profit is a choice or a symptom. Growing fast with a healthy gross margin and controlled acquisition cost is a choice. Flat revenue with thin margins and heavy support load is a symptom, and no revenue multiple rescues it.

More comparisons

See how Buyouts compares

vs A main street SBA acquisition

SBA loan to buy a business

What an SBA 7(a) business acquisition loan actually requires, what the fees cost in FY2026, and the change of ownership rules that replace themselves on 1 October 2026.

vs A main street business

How to buy a business

The eight stages of a US business acquisition, each one costed and timed, with the closing stack worked out on a real purchase price.

vs The letter of intent

Letter of intent to buy a business

Every clause in an LOI, whether it binds you at signature, and what each marketplace actually requires before a seller stops taking other offers.

vs The purchase agreement

Asset purchase agreement

What a definitive purchase agreement costs, what every clause does, and which structure the SBA will actually finance.

vs M&A due diligence

M&A due diligence checklist

Every workstream in an acquisition diligence process, the documents that actually prove each claim, and what the deal room vendors will and will not tell you about price.

vs Earnout agreement

Earnout agreement

The three mechanisms that move a purchase price after the handshake, what each one costs to paper, and the sample size that tells you how rare earnouts really are.

See how buying works See how selling works See pricing

The deal room for AI SaaS, not a yard sale

Buy with verified metrics, published multiples and escrow-backed closes, or list your AI SaaS to a pool of vetted, capital-qualified buyers.

Listings, metrics and buyers shown are illustrative product UI · valuation content is educational, not a guaranteed sale price or return · trademarks belong to their owners