How Much Does It Cost to Sell a SaaS Business?

Short answer: selling a SaaS business usually costs 3% to 15% of the sale price in platform or broker fees, plus $2,000 to $15,000 in legal, escrow and preparation costs. A self-serve marketplace like Flippa charges an upfront listing fee plus a 10% success fee. A brokered marketplace like Empire Flippers charges nothing upfront and takes a blended commission of about 15% on a typical sale. On a $300,000 exit that is roughly the difference between $30,000 and $45,000 before you pay anyone else. Last updated July 2026. Educational only, not investment or legal advice.

How much does it cost to sell a SaaS business?

Founders almost always budget for one number, the commission, and then get surprised by the other four. The full cost of an exit breaks into five buckets: the platform or broker fee, the money you spend getting the business ready to be diligenced, legal, escrow and payment processing, and the deferred cost of whatever you agree to do after close. Only the first one gets advertised.

Cost	Typical amount	When you pay it
Marketplace or broker fee	3% to 15% of sale price	On close, sometimes partly upfront
Listing fee (self-serve venues)	$0 to $1,500	Before you sell, usually non-refundable
Preparing financials and the data room	$500 to $6,000	Before listing
Attorney (asset purchase agreement review)	$1,500 to $8,000	At signing
Escrow and payment processing	Roughly 0.5% to 1.5%	At close, often split with the buyer
Migration and transition support	Usually your time, 30 to 90 days	After close

Add it up on a real deal. A $300,000 SaaS sold through a 15% broker costs about $45,000 in commission, maybe $4,000 in legal, $2,500 in escrow, and a few thousand in accounting cleanup. You net somewhere near $248,000 before tax. The same sale at a 4% success fee nets closer to $281,000. The fee structure is not a rounding error, it is the largest single line item in your exit.

What does Flippa charge to sell a business?

Flippa is self-serve, and it charges you before you sell. Its published pricing splits listings into price bands, each with tiered packages: for businesses priced under $10,000 an Entry listing is $29 for a 60 day term, a Boosted listing $49 for three months, and a Premium listing $199 per six months. In the $10,000 to $49,900 band, listings run $49, $399 or $599 per six months depending on the package, and in the $50,000 to $99,900 band they run $129, $399 or $699. On top of that Flippa applies a 10% success fee on the bands published on its pricing page, and payments run through FlippaPay from 1% or Escrow.com from 1.2%.

The important detail is that the listing fee is spent whether or not the business sells. If your product does not find a buyer in six months, you have paid for advertising, not for an exit. In exchange you get speed, control over your own asking price, and the lowest headline percentage of the major venues. These figures come from Flippa's own pricing page, checked in July 2026, and marketplace pricing changes, so confirm the current rate card before you budget.

What commission does Empire Flippers take?

Empire Flippers works the opposite way. There is no listing fee at all, and the entire cost sits in a blended commission you only pay if the business sells. Per its own seller FAQ, the commission is a flat $10,000 on sale prices below $66,666.66, a flat 15% on sale prices from $66,666.66 up to $700,000, 8% on the portion above $700,000 up to $5 million, and 2.5% on anything above $5 million. Their documentation puts it plainly: at the 15% tier you receive 85% of the final sale price.

Because it is blended, the effective rate falls as the deal gets larger. A $500,000 sale costs a flat 15%, or $75,000. A $2 million sale costs 15% of the first $700,000 plus 8% of the remaining $1.3 million, which works out to $209,000, an effective rate closer to 10.5%. That structure is designed to make larger businesses cheaper to sell in percentage terms, which is worth knowing if you are deciding whether to sell now or grow for another year first.

What the commission buys is real work: the business is vetted before it goes live, the numbers are verified by their team, buyers are qualified, and migration is handled. If you have never sold a company and do not want to run the process yourself, that is a defensible 15%. If your revenue is already clean, verifiable and recurring, you are paying for verification you could have supplied yourself. The full head-to-head is laid out in our Flippa vs Empire Flippers comparison.

How much do business brokers charge to sell a SaaS company?

Traditional brokers handling small software deals commonly quote around 10% to 15% of the sale price, and many carry a minimum fee in the $15,000 to $25,000 range, which means a $120,000 business can end up paying an effective rate well above the quoted percentage. Above roughly $5 million, advisors typically move to a stepped scale where the percentage drops as the deal size climbs, often with a monthly retainer against the eventual success fee.

Three questions decide whether a broker is worth it on a software deal. Do they have buyers who specifically want SaaS, or a general list? Will they verify your MRR themselves, or ask you to produce it? And is the fee exclusive, meaning you owe it even if you find the buyer yourself? The last one catches founders out constantly. We compare the two models in more detail in SaaS broker vs marketplace, and the broker side specifically on our SaaS business brokers page.

What does it cost to prepare a SaaS business for sale?

This is the bucket nobody quotes you, and it is where a surprising amount of value gets won or lost. A buyer who cannot verify your revenue in an afternoon will either discount the price or walk. Getting to that point usually means a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of accountant time, and some of your own.

• Clean monthly financials, 24 to 36 months. Cash basis is fine at this size, but it needs to be consistent, and it needs to reconcile to your payment processor and your bank. Expect $500 to $3,000 if a bookkeeper has to rebuild it.
• Separated personal and business expenses. Every add-back you claim will be questioned. Documented add-backs survive diligence, undocumented ones become a price reduction.
• A revenue export a buyer can reconcile. Stripe or Paddle exports at the subscription level, matched to your own MRR figure. If your records only exist as PDF bank and processor statements, running them through a document data extraction tool and handing your accountant a spreadsheet is far cheaper than paying hourly for retyping.
• A data room. Contracts, the tech stack inventory, customer concentration, churn by cohort, traffic and acquisition sources, any trademark or domain assets. Our SaaS due diligence checklist lists what buyers ask for, so you can assemble it before anyone asks.
• Transferability review. Anything registered to your personal email, tied to a personal card, or dependent on an API key in your name is a close-day problem. Fixing it in advance costs nothing but a weekend.

Founders who do this work usually recover the cost several times over, because a business a buyer can verify quickly gets a better multiple than an identical business a buyer has to reconstruct. If you want to see how the numbers move before you spend anything, run the business through the SaaS valuation calculator.

Do I pay legal fees to sell a SaaS business?

Yes, and you should. On a small software deal the paperwork is usually an asset purchase agreement rather than a stock sale, and having an attorney review it typically runs $1,500 to $8,000 depending on complexity and whether there is an earnout. Each side pays their own counsel. Sellers occasionally try to save this by signing the buyer's template unchanged, which is how people end up with uncapped indemnities and personal liability that outlives the sale by years. The structural difference between the two deal types is covered in asset purchase vs stock purchase.

Who pays the escrow fee when selling a business?

Escrow usually costs somewhere in the region of 0.5% to 1.5% of the transaction, and on most small deals it is either split or absorbed by the platform. Flippa publishes FlippaPay from 1% and Escrow.com from 1.2%. Empire Flippers coordinates the close as part of its commission. Whoever pays, do not skip it: escrow is what stops a buyer from taking the code before the money moves, and it is the cheapest insurance in the entire transaction.

Can you sell a SaaS business without paying a commission?

You can, and some founders do, by selling to a customer, a competitor, or someone in their own network. You save the fee entirely. What you take on instead is sourcing the buyer, verifying they can actually pay, negotiating without a comparable set, drafting the agreement, and running the escrow and migration yourself. It works best when the buyer is already known to you and the price is not really in dispute.

The failure case is predictable. A founder spends four months talking to three interested parties, none of whom were capital-qualified, then arrives at a marketplace with a stale set of numbers and less leverage than they started with. If you go direct, set a deadline, and verify funds before you open the data room. How long each path actually takes is broken down in how long it takes to sell a SaaS business.

Which selling option costs the least?

Here is the same $300,000 sale run through each route, using published rates as of July 2026.

Route	Platform cost on $300k	Paid upfront?	What you get for it
Direct to a known buyer	$0	None	Nothing. You run the entire process.
Buyouts	$9,000 to $15,000 (3% to 5%) plus a $149 to $1,500 listing tier	Listing tier only	Verified metrics, published multiple, vetted buyers, escrow
Flippa	About $30,000 (10%) plus the listing fee already spent	Listing fee	Reach and speed, you verify and negotiate
Empire Flippers	$45,000 (15%)	None	Vetting, marketing, buyer qualification, migration
Traditional broker	$30,000 to $45,000, subject to a minimum fee	Sometimes a retainer	A managed process and the broker's own buyer list

Cheapest is not automatically best. A broker who finds a buyer willing to pay 4x when a self-serve listing would have cleared at 3x has earned the difference several times over. The right way to read this table is as a floor: whatever route you pick should add more value than it costs, and you should be able to say out loud what that value is.

How much will I actually walk away with?

Take the sale price, subtract the platform or broker fee, subtract legal and escrow, subtract any preparation costs you have already spent, and then subtract tax, which on an asset sale is usually the largest deduction of all and depends entirely on your entity structure and how the purchase price is allocated across the assets. Talk to a CPA before you sign, not after, because how the allocation is written into the agreement changes your bill.

Then account for the part that is not money. Most deals include a transition period, commonly 30 to 90 days of support at no additional charge, and many include an earnout that pays out only if the business hits agreed targets under new ownership. An earnout is not proceeds until it lands. Value the guaranteed cash separately from the contingent cash, and negotiate the contingent part as if you might never see it.

The takeaway

Fee structure is the biggest controllable variable in a software exit, and it is decided before you list, not after you have an offer. Work out what verification, marketing and buyer sourcing you genuinely need, then pay for that and not for the rest. If your recurring revenue is already clean and verifiable, a metrics-verified marketplace does the same job as a 15% brokered process for a fraction of the cost. Our full fee schedule is published on the pricing page, and you can start a listing from sell my SaaS business.