SAASALE vs Acquire.com: Which marketplace is right for buying or selling a SaaS business in 2026

If you are looking to buy or sell a SaaS company, SAASALE and Acquire.com are two of the most active marketplaces in the space. They serve overlapping audiences but solve the trust problem in fundamentally different ways. This comparison breaks down pricing, revenue verification, deal scoring, and the buyer and seller experience on both platforms so you can decide which one fits your situation.

TL;DR

SAASALE is a SaaS acquisition marketplace operated by Stakyo, LLC (Delaware, USA). It verifies revenue through direct integrations with 17 payment providers, attaches an AI Deal Score to every listing, and launched with a pre-tracked catalog of 495 projects sourced from SaaS Radar. Listings cost $49 one-time (free for pre-tracked projects), commission is 3.7–5.6% split 50/50 between buyer and seller, and closing runs through Escrow.com with a 30-day inspection period.

Acquire.com (founded 2020 as MicroAcquire, rebranded in 2023) is one of the largest dedicated startup acquisition marketplaces, with over 2,000 closed deals and more than $500M in transaction volume according to its public materials. Sellers list for free and pay a 4% closing fee on completed deals. Buyers pay $390 per year for Premium access (startups up to $250k TTM revenue) or upgrade to Platinum for full catalog access.

Pick SAASALE if you want verified revenue from a wide range of payment providers, an AI scoring layer to filter listings quickly, low upfront costs, and the option to browse the catalog without a paid buyer subscription.

Pick Acquire.com if you want the largest established buyer network, hands-on M&A advisory (the Guided by Acquire program), and you are listing a startup with at least $100k TTM revenue.

At a glance

What is SAASALE?

SAASALE is a marketplace for buying and selling SaaS companies, operated by Stakyo, LLC, a Delaware-registered limited liability company. The platform launched in 2026 with a focus on three things competitors do not consistently combine: verified revenue from a broad set of payment providers, an AI-driven deal score in every listing, and a meaningful starting catalog so buyers do not land on an empty marketplace.

The verification layer is the most distinctive piece. SAASALE supports read-only API key integrations with 17 payment providers — Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, RevenueCat, DodoPayment, Superwall, Creem, Chargebee, Recurly, Maxio, Adapty, Apphud, Qonversion, Glassfy, PayPal, and SumUp. Sellers connect their provider, and the platform pulls revenue history, active subscriptions, and MRR directly from the source. Verified metrics are stored and displayed in the provider's native currency, so a project earning in euros shows euro figures rather than being silently converted to dollars.

Every listing carries an AI Deal Score, which combines 65% verified data with 35% AI agent analysis across six metrics: PMF (active subscribers), Freshness (revenue retention proxy), Volume (last 30 days revenue), GEO Leverage (LLM recommendation potential), Saturation (niche competition density), and Replaceability (how easily ChatGPT or similar tools could replace the product). The score is recalculated automatically when a seller adjusts price.

The 495 pre-tracked projects in the catalog were imported from SaaS Radar, the underlying analytics system that has been monitoring publicly verified SaaS revenue since 2024. Founders of pre-tracked projects can claim ownership through payment provider verification (a one-time read-only key) and either list for sale or set the project to stealth.

Closing runs through Escrow.com. The buyer funds escrow, the seller transfers the assets, and a 30-day inspection timer begins only after the buyer marks the assets received — there is no automatic timeout while transfer is in progress, which removes a common source of pressure when handing over Apple Developer accounts, App Store listings, or other multi-week transfers.

What is Acquire.com?

Acquire.com is a startup acquisition marketplace founded in 2020 by Andrew Gazdecki, originally launched under the name MicroAcquire and rebranded to Acquire.com in 2023. The platform has facilitated more than 2,000 acquisitions and over $500M in transaction volume, with a user base its team has stated includes more than 500,000 entrepreneurs.

The catalog is curated rather than open. Every listing is reviewed by the Acquire.com team before going live, and listings are anonymous by default — buyers see business descriptions, market context, and standardized financials, but the company name and full details are gated behind seller approval. To unlock founder contact and detailed metrics, buyers sign an NDA and the seller approves the request.

Revenue verification on Acquire.com runs through payment integrations (Stripe is the most common) supplemented by uploaded documents that the team and serious buyers review during due diligence. There is no automated scoring layer; the platform provides standardized financial display, performance dashboards, and templated deal documents, but evaluation is done by buyers themselves or — in the case of larger deals — by Acquire's in-house M&A advisors under the Guided by Acquire program.

Acquire.com offers an end-to-end deal flow that includes templated Letters of Intent, virtual data rooms, and integrated escrow through Escrow.com (free to sellers as part of the platform's offering). Sellers also get a dedicated acquisition expert at no cost to help optimize listings and navigate offers.

Pricing breakdown

SAASALE pricing

For sellers:

• Listing fee: $49 one-time. Free if your project was already in the pre-tracked SaaS Radar catalog at launch.
• Closing commission: 3.7–5.6% of the sale price, split 50/50 between buyer and seller (so the seller pays roughly 1.85–2.8% effectively, depending on deal size and tier).
• Escrow: handled through Escrow.com; their standard transaction fees apply on top.
• AI Reports (optional): $29, $99, $149, or $249 packages, paid by whichever party orders the report.

For buyers:

• Browsing the catalog: free, no subscription required.
• Buyer alerts (saved searches with notifications): free.
• API access: free at 100 requests/day, $49/month for the Pro tier.
• AI Reports: same packages as for sellers — $29 to $249 depending on depth.
• Closing commission: same split as the seller side (50/50).

Acquire.com pricing

For sellers:

• Listing fee: free since the June 2023 pricing change.
• Closing fee: 4% of the total purchase price, due at closing. Listings active before June 7, 2023, are exempt from the closing fee.
• Guided by Acquire (premium advisory for SaaS startups with at least $100k TTM): 6% closing fee instead of 4%, with no upfront cost.
• Escrow: free through Acquire's partnership with Escrow.com.

For buyers:

• Free tier: browse public listings without contacting founders.
• Premium: $390 per year, billed annually. Access to startups up to $250k TTM revenue, including the ability to chat with founders and view full listing details after seller approval.
• Platinum: a higher-tier annual subscription that unlocks startups of all sizes (Acquire.com lists the price on its pricing page; it is materially higher than Premium and aimed at PE, VCs, and acquirers pursuing larger deals).

Side-by-side cost comparison

Take a representative deal: a SaaS business sold for $50,000.

On SAASALE, assuming the project was not pre-tracked:

• Seller listing fee: $49
• Total commission at, say, 5%: $2,500, split 50/50 → seller pays $1,250, buyer pays $1,250
• Escrow.com fees: roughly $400–$700 depending on payment method
• Seller's net before Escrow.com fees: $48,701

On Acquire.com, same $50,000 deal:

• Seller listing fee: $0
• Closing fee at 4%: $2,000, paid by seller
• Escrow.com fees: covered by Acquire.com
• Buyer must hold an active Premium subscription ($390/year) to engage with the listing, since this falls under the $250k TTM bracket
• Seller's net: $48,000

For most small-to-mid deals, the seller-side cost is comparable. The split changes meaningfully on the buyer side: SAASALE charges no buyer subscription, but adds half the commission to the buyer at closing. Acquire.com charges an annual buyer membership but no transaction fee on the buyer side.

Revenue verification: how each platform proves the numbers

This is where the platforms differ most.

SAASALE verifies revenue through direct read-only API integrations with 17 payment providers. When a seller connects their provider, the platform pulls 30-day and lifetime revenue, active subscription count, MRR (where applicable), and the provider's native currency. Numbers are refreshed on an ongoing basis through a sync-metrics cron job, and historical snapshots are stored so buyers can see whether the numbers have been stable over time. Because verification covers Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, RevenueCat, Chargebee, Recurly, PayPal, SumUp and others, projects built on European or app-store-native infrastructure can verify natively without exporting numbers into a Stripe account.

Acquire.com uses payment integrations (Stripe is the most common) and relies primarily on uploaded documents and manual due diligence for the rest.

Practical implication: if your SaaS runs primarily on Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, or RevenueCat, SAASALE will surface verified numbers automatically. On Acquire.com, the same project would show as listed with documentation rather than with platform-verified figures from those providers, and buyers rely more heavily on due diligence to confirm.

Deal scoring and decision tools

SAASALE's AI Deal Score is unique among SaaS marketplaces. Each listing carries a single 0–10 score combining six weighted metrics:

• PMF (27%) — based on active subscriber count from verified payment data
• Freshness (20%) — last-30-days revenue divided by total revenue, used as a retention proxy
• Volume (18%) — last-30-days revenue absolute size
• GEO Leverage (14%) — AI agent assessment of whether the product fits LLM-driven recommendation queries
• Saturation (11%) — AI agent count of identical competitors in the niche
• Replaceability (10%) — AI agent assessment of whether ChatGPT or similar can replace the product

Pre-filters automatically classify zero-revenue and zombie projects (subscribers but no recent revenue) as PASS without spending AI tokens. Scores recalculate when a seller changes the asking price.

In addition, SAASALE displays a DataForSEO trust badge on the SEO Analysis block of each project page, signaling that organic traffic and keyword data come from a verified third-party source rather than a self-reported number.

Acquire.com does not offer an automated scoring layer. Buyers evaluate listings on standardized financial metrics, traffic data, and the platform's curation. For larger deals, in-house M&A advisors provide hands-on guidance through the Guided by Acquire program, but this is human review rather than an algorithmic score.

If you are running a buy-side process across many listings — say, a holdco evaluating a hundred candidates per month — the SAASALE score is meant to be an early filter. If you are evaluating a small number of larger targets where human due diligence is the primary tool anyway, the absence of an automated score on Acquire.com is less of a disadvantage.

Buyer experience

On SAASALE, browsing is open. You can land on /acquire, filter by category, asking price, deal score, traffic, or revenue, and see verified financials in the public card before clicking through. There is no buyer subscription wall. If you want push notifications when listings match your criteria, the Buyer Alerts feature is free. Saved projects, comparison, and AI-generated reports (paid à la carte) are available without committing to a recurring subscription.

When you find a project you want to engage with, you send an offer (which can be moderated by AI before reaching the seller, reducing low-quality offers) and the deal moves through a structured flow: offer → negotiate → LOI → due diligence → APA → escrow → closed. Each stage has its own UI, system messages in the deal chat, and document generation (NDA, LOI, APA) handled client-side in the browser so that no document content leaves your device until you sign.

On Acquire.com, the free tier lets you see public listing summaries. To contact a founder or view full listing details, you upgrade to Premium ($390/year) for startups up to $250k TTM, or Platinum for full catalog access. Once subscribed, you request access to a listing, the seller approves, and you can chat through the platform, request a data room, and use templated LOIs to make offers. Larger deals often involve direct support from Acquire's M&A team.

Seller experience

On SAASALE, listing a project starts with verifying revenue through one of the 17 supported providers. You generate a read-only API key, paste it into the seller form, and the platform pulls your verified numbers and currency. You then set an asking price, write a description (with an optional AI-generated draft), choose categories, and pay the $49 listing fee unless your project was pre-tracked from SaaS Radar (in which case listing is free). The AI Deal Score is computed automatically and updated whenever you change the price.

You can also list as stealth, in which case the project is excluded from the public catalog, the sitemap, and all structured data — useful if you want to gauge interest privately or test pricing before going public.

On Acquire.com, you sign up, complete the listing application (financials, integrations, business description), and submit it for team review. Once approved, the listing goes live anonymously by default. You receive a dedicated acquisition expert who helps optimize the listing and respond to buyer inquiries. You pay nothing until closing, at which point 4% (or 6% with Guided by Acquire) is deducted from the buyer's payment through Escrow.com.

Catalog size and quality

Acquire.com is the larger and older marketplace, with thousands of completed deals over five years and a large pool of active and historical listings. The breadth of catalog and the maturity of the buyer network are real advantages, especially for sellers in the higher revenue brackets where serious institutional buyers are looking.

SAASALE is newer but did not launch empty. The 495 pre-tracked projects sourced from SaaS Radar give the catalog meaningful starting depth, and any project verified through a supported payment provider can list. The catalog is open: anonymous browsing surfaces verified numbers immediately, which speeds up the early-stage filtering buyers need to do before deciding which deals to pursue.

For high-volume buyers who want a continuous deal flow with automated scoring, SAASALE's open and filterable catalog is built for that workflow. For sellers with $250k+ TTM businesses who want maximum buyer reach and institutional attention, Acquire.com's larger network and curated buyer base remain hard to match.

Escrow and closing process

Both platforms route closings through Escrow.com. The mechanics are similar: buyer funds escrow, seller transfers assets, buyer confirms receipt, escrow releases funds. Both platforms provide deal documents (LOI, APA, NDA), and KYC for the actual money movement is handled by Escrow.com on both sides.

The differences are in the timer and the closing fee mechanics:

SAASALE uses a buyer-controlled receive trigger. The 30-day inspection timer starts only after the buyer marks the assets as received in the platform — meaning that if the asset transfer takes three weeks (transferring an Apple Developer account, for instance), the timer does not start ticking during transfer. The buyer chooses when to start the clock. This is a deliberate architectural choice to avoid auto-release pressure when transfers genuinely need time.

Acquire.com uses Escrow.com's standard inspection mechanics. The closing fee is deducted automatically from the buyer's closing payment by Escrow.com on Acquire's behalf, simplifying the seller's net calculation.

Which platform should you choose?

A few practical heuristics:

Choose SAASALE if:

• You sell or buy in non-Stripe payment ecosystems (Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, RevenueCat, Chargebee, PayPal, SumUp, etc.) and want native verification rather than uploaded documents.
• You are a buyer evaluating many candidates and want an algorithmic first-pass filter.
• You want to browse without a subscription and only pay when you transact.
• You are listing a small-to-mid SaaS where $49 is a reasonable entry price.
• You value transparency: open catalog, public scoring, native currency display, structured deal flow.

Choose Acquire.com if:

• You are listing a SaaS startup with at least $100k TTM revenue and want hands-on M&A advisory.
• You want maximum exposure to a large established buyer network including PE and high-net-worth individuals.
• You are a buyer pursuing a small number of larger targets and the $390/year Premium subscription is a non-issue.
• You prefer a curated, anonymous-by-default catalog and a guided experience over self-service.

Use both if:

• You are a serious acquirer running a buy-side process. Listing your search criteria across both platforms maximizes deal flow and gives you complementary data — SAASALE's automated scoring on smaller listings plus Acquire.com's curated higher-TTM pipeline.

FAQ

Last updated April 2026. Pricing and feature details may change — check both saasale.com and acquire.com for current terms.