How to buy a SaaS business

Marketplaces (SellBuyStartups, Acquire, MicroAcquire), brokers (FE International, Empire Flippers for larger), and off-market via Twitter/founder networks. Off-market gets you better prices but 4x the sourcing time.

Financial: reconcile Stripe against P&L, month by month. Look for one-off spikes, discount codes hiding real ARPU, and free plans padding the user count. Technical: run a security scan, check dependency versions, ask for a Loom of the deploy pipeline. Legal: verify the seller actually owns the IP and every contractor signed an assignment.

Cash (up to ~$300k for most solo buyers). Seller financing (10–40% deferred, standard for micro-deals). SBA 7(a) for US buyers with a business plan and 10% down. Acquisition-specific lenders (Boopos, Flippa Capital) for e-commerce and SaaS up to $2M.

A serious buyer looking at how to buy a SaaS business works off a written question tracker in six buckets — financial, commercial, technical, legal, team, and platform. If any bucket has two red flags, the deal usually re-trades or dies. Great sellers preempt this by publishing the answers before diligence starts.

Reconcile 24 months of P&L to bank statements line by line. Export Stripe/Paddle at raw-event level, not the dashboard summary. Have every contractor's IP assignment in a single PDF. Sit for a 60-minute recorded ‘objection interview' with a friendly buyer before you publish — it's the cheapest diligence rehearsal you'll ever run.

The 2026 median on how to buy a SaaS business is 80% cash at close, 10–15% seller note over 18–24 months at prime + 2.5%, and 5–10% in escrow for 3–6 months. Straight cash usually costs the buyer a 5–10% premium — worth it for speed on small deals but painful in a competitive process.

Earn-outs align incentives on paper and poison transitions in practice. Only use them tied to metrics the buyer cannot easily manipulate (existing-customer renewal, gross bookings, delivered volume). Keep any earn-out under 20% of price and under 18 months, or plan on litigation.

On how to buy a SaaS business, the first 30 days after close should be about not breaking anything. Run the seller's cadence, ship no new features, change no vendors, send no ‘new owner' email the seller didn't co-sign. You paid for a working machine — don't take it apart on day two.

Days 31–60 are the audit: read 12 months of support tickets, sit on a sales call, watch a churn call, look at the actual bank-statement expense pattern. Days 61–90 are your first small change — one process improvement the previous owner had been meaning to make. That rhythm becomes your operating model.