Prices read from five providers, 6 October 2026

Technical Due Diligence for SaaS Acquisitions with Tech Due Diligence Cost and Checklist

Technical due diligence on a SaaS acquisition costs anywhere from $49 to $99 for an automated code scan on a micro SaaS, about $5,000 for a quick pre-LOI check by a specialist, and $15,000 to $30,000 for a standard fixed-fee review of a business doing $1 million or more in EBITDA. Multi-product targets run $25,000 to $50,000 and up. Turnaround ranges from same day for a scan to two to four weeks for a full engagement.

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Verified MRR, churn and growth on every listing · no buyer success fee · from $99 a month · cancel any month

Tech due diligence budget Published USD prices

Purchase price of the business

Target

The 0.1% to 0.3% rule of thumb puts this deal at .

Lowest published price shown as a share of the purchase price · our arithmetic · not advice

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

Those numbers are the published prices of five providers, read on their own pages on 6 October 2026 and listed below with the scope each one covers. One European firm puts the typical cost at 0.1% to 0.3% of the purchase price, which is a useful sanity check on a $5 million deal and useless on a $150,000 one, where a full review would eat several percent of the price.

Tech due diligence answers a different question from financial diligence. A quality of earnings report tells you whether the revenue is real. A technical review tells you whether the product that earns it can keep running, scale, and be maintained by someone other than the founder: code quality, architecture, security, open-source licences, hosting cost, deployment and the people who know how it all works.

This page is educational. It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and the providers named are not partners of Buyouts.

A code review tells you whether the product can keep earning. It cannot tell you whether it earns what the seller says. Check the revenue first, then pay for the code.

Read on each provider’s own page, 6 October 2026

What technical due diligence costs, provider by provider

Every price below is the provider’s own published figure. Euro prices are shown in euros because that is how the firm quotes them. Where a provider publishes a range rather than a fixed fee, the table gives the range.

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Provider and service	What you get	Published price	Turnaround
Ascertify, automated code audit	Static scan of the repository for exposed credentials, vulnerable dependencies, licence conflicts, unfinished features and maintainability. No penetration test, no financial or legal review. Aimed at deals under $100,000	$49 for the first 50 scans, then $99, with a 7 day refund	Same day
Async Advisor, pre-LOI sanity check	A short senior review before you commit to an offer	$5,000 fixed	48 to 72 hours
Async Advisor, standard review	Single-entity target with one core platform, $1M to $20M EBITDA	$15,000 fixed	5 business days
Async Advisor, multi-entity	Several products or entities	$25,000 to $40,000	7 to 10 business days
MEV, search fund and ETA deals	Code, architecture, key person and IP review with remediation costs, a 12 to 18 month roadmap and a lender-ready summary	$5,000 to $30,000 flat	2 to 4 weeks
VeryDiligent, red flag review	Early-stage assessment of the main risks	€10,000 to €15,000	5 to 7 business days
VeryDiligent, standard review	Architecture, code quality, security, infrastructure and engineering team	€20,000 to €30,000	2 to 3 weeks
madewithlove, standard engagement	Team and key person dependency, architecture, processes, documentation, security and AI tooling, with an executive summary and action roadmap	€15,000 to €30,000	10 business days
Buyouts Buyer Access	Verified MRR, churn, growth and customer count on every listing, full metric breakdowns and data room requests. Buyouts does not audit code	$99 a month, no buyer success fee	Before you make an offer

Sources: ascertify.io/due-diligence, asyncadvisor.com/tech-due-diligence, mev.com (technical due diligence for search funds, published 11 August 2026), verydiligent.com (pricing article dated 4 June 2026) and madewithlove.com (article dated 18 May 2026), all read on 6 October 2026. The 0.1% to 0.3% of purchase price rule of thumb is madewithlove’s. Big advisory firms quote by the hour and publish no fixed fee, so they are not in this table.

The tech due diligence checklist

Tech due diligence checklist for buying a SaaS business

These are the areas every provider above covers in some form, written as what to ask the seller for and what finding should change your price or your deal terms. On a micro SaaS you can run most of it yourself in a day with repository access; on a larger deal, hand it to a firm.

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Area	What to ask the seller for	Finding that should change the deal
Repository access	Read access to every repository, including infrastructure code and old branches	Code that only exists on the founder’s laptop or in a contractor’s account
IP ownership	Contractor and agency agreements with IP assignment clauses	Core code written by an outside agency with no signed assignment
Open-source licences	A dependency list with licences, or a licence scan	A copyleft licence (GPL, AGPL) inside code you will ship to customers
Secrets and credentials	Where API keys and passwords live	Keys committed in the repository history that were never rotated
Dependencies	Framework and runtime versions	An unsupported framework version that forces a rewrite within a year
Security	The last penetration test or security review and what was fixed	Open critical findings, or customer data stored without encryption
Hosting and cost	Twelve months of cloud invoices and the account owner	Hosting that grows faster than revenue, or an account in the seller’s personal name
Third-party APIs	Every paid API and its terms, including AI model providers	Gross margin that depends on one API price the seller cannot control
Deployment	How a change gets to production and who can do it	Manual deploys that only the founder knows how to run
Tests and monitoring	Test coverage, error tracking and uptime history	No tests on billing or data paths, no alerting
Data and privacy	Where customer data is stored and the privacy policy it was collected under	Personal data you cannot lawfully take over in the transfer
Key person	Who wrote and who maintains each part of the system	One person holds all the knowledge and is not staying after closing
Documentation	Setup instructions a new engineer could follow	Nobody outside the company can get the product running locally
Transfer plan	The list of accounts, domains and services that must change hands	Accounts that cannot be transferred, only recreated

Any red flag in the third column is a reason to renegotiate rather than walk away: a lower price, a longer transition period, an escrow holdback or a specific indemnity in the purchase agreement. Write the remediation cost into your offer, not into your first year of ownership.

A software engineer and a business buyer reviewing a codebase together on two monitors in a small office

Pay for the code review after the revenue checks out

A technical review is the most expensive diligence item most SaaS buyers commission, and it is wasted money if the revenue underneath it is not real. The order that saves the most is simple. Confirm MRR, churn and customer count first, sign an LOI with a diligence period long enough for the review, then put an engineer on the repository.

Every listing on Buyouts carries verified MRR, churn and growth before you make an offer, so the first gate is already done when you open the deal room. What we do not do is read the code. That part belongs to an automated scan on a small deal and to a specialist firm on a large one, and the table above shows what each costs.

Side by side

What Buyouts verifies against what a technical due diligence firm checks

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

Feature	Buyouts	A technical due diligence firm
MRR, churn and growth	Verified on every listing before you make an offer	Out of scope, that is financial diligence
Code quality and architecture	Not reviewed	The core of the engagement
Security and open-source licences	Not reviewed	Scanned and reported with severity
Key person dependency	Tech stack and reason for selling are on the listing; ask the rest through a data room request	Assessed through interviews with the engineers
When it happens	Before the LOI, while you are still choosing a deal	After the LOI, during exclusivity
Price	$99 a month for Buyer Access, no success fee	$5,000 to $50,000 and up per deal

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

Scan before the LOI, review after

An automated scan costs less than a lunch meeting and catches the expensive surprises: committed secrets, abandoned frameworks, licence problems. Run it as soon as the seller grants read access. Save the paid human review for the exclusivity period, when you are close enough to closing to justify the fee.

Size the review to the deal

At 0.1% to 0.3% of price, a $5 million deal justifies a $15,000 review comfortably. A $150,000 micro SaaS does not. For small deals, an automated scan plus a few hours of a trusted engineer’s time on the checklist above covers most of the risk.

Key person risk is a technical finding

The most common deal-changing result is not bad code. It is that one person understands the system and is leaving. Every firm above interviews the team for this reason. Price it as a longer transition agreement or a holdback, not as a hope.

Keep reading on the parts of a deal this page touches: the full M&A due diligence checklist, the SaaS due diligence checklist for buyers, what a quality of earnings report costs, key person risk in a SaaS acquisition, how to verify MRR before buying a SaaS, writing the diligence period into your LOI, using a holdback when the review finds a problem.

Good questions

Technical due diligence, answered

Published prices on 6 October 2026 ran from $49 to $99 for an automated code scan, $5,000 for a pre-LOI check, $15,000 for a fixed five-day review of a single-platform business and $25,000 to $40,000 for multi-entity targets. European firms quote €15,000 to €30,000 for a standard review. One firm puts it at 0.1% to 0.3% of the purchase price.

A standard review covers code quality, architecture and scalability, security, open-source licences, infrastructure and hosting cost, deployment and testing processes, documentation, and the engineering team, especially key person dependency. Good reports end with a deal recommendation, itemized remediation costs and a 12 to 18 month roadmap.

An automated scan returns the same day. A pre-LOI check takes 48 to 72 hours. A standard review takes five to ten business days once the seller grants access, and a full engagement on a complex target takes two to four weeks. Delays in getting repository access are the most common reason it runs long.

At minimum: repository access, IP assignment from every contractor, open-source licences, secrets in the code history, dependency versions, the last security review, twelve months of hosting invoices, third-party API costs, deployment process, tests and monitoring, data and privacy, key person dependency, documentation and the list of accounts to transfer.

You need some, but not a $15,000 engagement. On a deal under $100,000, an automated code audit at $49 to $99 plus a few hours of your own or a trusted engineer’s time on the checklist covers the risks that actually kill small deals: secrets in the code, abandoned frameworks, missing IP assignment and a founder-only deploy.

Specialist technology due diligence firms, software consultancies with a due diligence practice, and the technology advisory arms of large accounting firms. On small deals, buyers often hire an independent senior engineer for a few days, or use an automated code audit service, and do the interviews themselves.

Code the buyer will not own because a contractor never assigned the IP, copyleft licences in shipped code, credentials committed to the repository, a framework past end of life, hosting costs growing faster than revenue, no tests on billing, and one engineer who holds all the knowledge and is leaving after closing.

No. SOP 50 10 8.1 requires a business valuation on many change of ownership loans and a quality of earnings report on purchases of $3,000,000 or more, but no technical review. Lenders underwrite cash flow, not code. The review protects you, not the bank, which is why it is the buyer who decides whether to pay for it.

The buyer, in almost every small and mid-market deal, because the buyer chooses the firm and owns the report. Some sellers commission vendor due diligence before a sale to speed things up, but a buyer should treat a seller-paid report as a starting point and still run at least an independent code scan.

A code audit reads the code: quality, security and licences. Technical due diligence also covers what the code does not show, such as architecture limits, hosting cost, how releases work, the engineering team and who holds the knowledge. A code audit is one input to technical due diligence, and on a micro SaaS it may be most of it.

Run a quick scan or pre-LOI check before you commit to a price, then the full review during the exclusivity period after the LOI is signed. Make sure the LOI gives you enough diligence time and repository access, and that the purchase agreement lets you adjust price or walk away if the review finds something material.

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Listing figures are published by their sellers and self-reported · valuation content is educational, not a guaranteed sale price or return · trademarks belong to their owners