Is Acquire.com Legit? The Fees, the Vetting, and What Buyers Actually Get

Short answer: Yes, Acquire.com is legit. It operates as a registered California entity, Acquire.com Brokerage Services, Inc. under DRE license 02167544, it was founded by Andrew Gazdecki, and its own site reports 500,000 or more founders and buyers on the platform. It publishes a complete seller rate card, which most venues in this market do not. The two things to understand before you rely on it: buyer-side vetting is thinner than the marketing implies, and the paid buyer membership starts at $390 with the individual tier prices left unpublished. Last updated July 2026. Educational only, not financial advice.

Is Acquire.com legit?

Acquire.com is a legitimate marketplace, not a scam. Three things support that: a named, public founder in Andrew Gazdecki, a registered corporate entity with a California Department of Real Estate license number printed on its own site, and a published fee schedule you can read before you commit a dollar. That last point sounds minor and is not. Of the eight venues where SaaS businesses actually change hands, only about half publish what they charge, and an unpublished rate card is where most bad experiences in this market begin.

The platform is built for startups and software rather than for websites, stores and domains. If you are selling a bootstrapped SaaS somewhere between $50,000 and a few million dollars, it is one of the two or three venues genuinely designed for that asset. The gap between what it markets and what it does is real but narrow, and it sits almost entirely on the verification side.

Who owns Acquire.com?

Acquire.com was founded by Andrew Gazdecki, who remains its public face. The operating entity named on the site is Acquire.com Brokerage Services, Inc., carrying California DRE license number 02167544. The platform started life as MicroAcquire and rebranded to Acquire.com, which is why you still see the old name in older articles and in search suggestions. Both refer to the same company.

How does Acquire.com work?

A seller creates a listing, pays a monthly fee to keep it live, and gets exposed to the registered buyer pool. Buyers browse public listings free, then pay for a membership to see detailed financials and contact founders directly. NDAs are automated, legal document builders are provided, and escrow is included at no extra charge on the seller side, which is unusual and genuinely worth money.

The economics are the cleanest part of the product. Sellers pay a small monthly listing fee and a closing fee only when a deal completes, and the closing percentage falls as the deal gets larger. There is no exclusivity term, so you are not locked out of running your own process at the same time.

How much does Acquire.com cost?

Read firsthand from acquire.com/pricing and acquire.com/seller-pricing in July 2026:

Who pays	Band	Recurring cost	Fee on close
Seller	Asking price below $250k	$25 a month to list	8% closing fee
Seller	Asking price $250k to $1M	$50 a month to list	7% closing fee
Seller	Asking price above $1M	$100 a month to list	6% closing fee
Buyer	Basic	Free	None
Buyer	Premium, startups up to $250k	Membership from $390, tier price not published	None
Buyer	Platinum, startups of all sizes	Membership from $390, tier price not published	None

Escrow is included for sellers rather than billed on top, and the site advertises a free valuation and a customer success manager. The advisory service, Guided by Acquire, is restricted to profitable SaaS doing $100,000 or more in revenue, so most micro listings will not qualify for it.

For context on the other end of the market, a seller on Flippa pays a non-refundable listing fee of $29 to $699 plus a flat 10% success fee. The full breakdown is in our Flippa fees guide, and we put the two platforms head to head in Flippa vs Acquire.com.

Is Acquire.com free?

Free to browse, not free to transact. Any buyer can view public listings and basic company information on the Basic plan without paying. Seeing detailed financials or contacting a founder requires a paid membership starting at $390. Sellers pay from the moment they list, at $25 a month and up, plus the closing fee when a deal completes.

What does Acquire.com actually verify?

This is the honest weak point, and it matters more than the fees. Acquire.com describes vetted buyer identities and available funds, which is a buyer-side screen. What it does not claim anywhere on its seller pages is an independent audit of the seller's reported numbers before a listing goes live.

Claim on the platform	What is actually checked	What you still have to do
Vetted buyers	Buyer identity and stated available funds	Nothing, this one protects sellers and works
Startup financials shown to members	Seller-submitted figures, presented as given	Reconcile every number against source systems yourself
Free valuation for sellers	A platform estimate to help set an asking price	Treat it as an anchor, not an appraisal
Automated NDAs and legal builders	Real, and they remove genuine friction	Have counsel read the final purchase agreement
Escrow included	Real, and it is a meaningful cost saving	Confirm the release conditions before funding

Compare that to a curated brokerage, which requires revenue screenshots, verified expenses and analytics access before anything publishes. Acquire.com trades that gate for speed and a much lower cost. Neither model is wrong. You just need to know which one you are in, because on a self-serve marketplace the diligence burden sits entirely with the buyer.

Is Acquire.com a scam?

No. The defining pattern of a scam marketplace, taking money for an asset that never transfers, does not describe how this platform operates. Funds move through escrow, the corporate entity is registered and licensed, and the founder is a public figure with a long trail of on-the-record interviews. Complaints that circulate tend to be about deal quality and buyer membership value, not about theft.

The most common genuine grievance from buyers is straightforward: they paid for a membership, unlocked financials, and found the underlying businesses thinner than the listing implied. That is a consequence of self-serve listing rather than fraud, and the same complaint attaches to every open marketplace. It is still a real cost to weigh before you buy a membership.

Is Acquire.com legit according to Reddit?

Reddit sentiment is broadly positive on legitimacy and mixed on value. The recurring themes are consistent with what the platform's structure predicts: sellers like the low cost, the included escrow and the absence of an exclusivity term, while buyers debate whether the paid membership pays for itself given how many listings turn out to be pre-revenue or barely profitable. Treat forum threads as a read on deal quality rather than on whether the company is real, because the corporate registration settles that question on its own.

Acquire.com and Acquisition.com are not the same company

Worth stating plainly, because the search suggestions conflate them constantly. Acquire.com is the startup and SaaS marketplace founded by Andrew Gazdecki, formerly MicroAcquire. Acquisition.com is Alex Hormozi's holding and education company, which does not run a marketplace at all. If you are reading reviews or complaints, check which name is on the page before you draw a conclusion about either.

What are the Acquire.com alternatives?

For software specifically, the closest self-serve comparisons are Flippa at the open end and Buyouts for AI SaaS. For curated, brokered transactions, Empire Flippers and Quiet Light sit in the mid-market and FE International handles the advisory end. Our Acquire.com alternative page covers the direct comparison, and all eight venues are lined up with their published fees in the SaaS marketplaces roundup. If you are weighing the other two open venues on trustworthiness, see is Flippa legit and is Empire Flippers legit.

How to run diligence on an Acquire.com listing

Assume nothing in the listing has been independently checked, because the platform never claims it was. Ask for live read-only access to the source systems rather than exported summaries: the payment processor for recurring revenue, the analytics property for traffic, and the business bank account for actual cash movement. Our guide to verifying MRR before buying a SaaS walks through the reconciliation in order.

Spend most of your remaining time on two things. First, churn, because a listing showing flat MRR can be hiding heavy churn masked by heavy acquisition spend, and that reverses the moment you stop paying for ads. Second, whether the growth story is actually achievable by you. A product with solid traffic and a weak signup rate is often a fixable problem rather than a broken business, and if the numbers hold up, the fastest post-close win is usually to audit the landing page copy and checkout flow before touching anything in the product itself.

Then test concentration in both directions. One customer at 30% of revenue and one acquisition channel at 70% of signups are the two findings that most often turn a promising listing into a pass, and neither shows up in a headline MRR figure.

The bottom line

Acquire.com is legitimate, reasonably priced and structurally honest about what it is: a self-serve marketplace with a published rate card, included escrow and no lock-in. Sellers get the best deal in the market at $25 a month plus 6% to 8% on close. Buyers get a real platform with a genuine caveat, which is that listing financials are seller-submitted and the membership costs $390 or more before you can see them.

If the asset you are trading is AI SaaS specifically, the trade-off tightens, because a generalist startup marketplace prices AI software against every other kind of startup. On Buyouts every listing carries verified MRR, ARR, growth and churn before it publishes, each deal shows a published AI-aware multiple, buyers are capital-qualified before they enter the pool, and closes run through escrow at a 3% to 5% success fee. Listings and metrics shown on this site are illustrative product UI, valuation content is educational rather than a guaranteed price or return, and Acquire.com and Acquisition.com are trademarks of their respective owners, referenced here only for comparison.