Where to Sell Your Startup 2026
Flippa, Acquire.com, Empire Flippers and Mergedeck do four different jobs. Fees, acceptance rates, deal sizes and who each one is actually built for.
Most founders research the sale of their company in the wrong order. They pick a platform first, then discover — three weeks and one listing fee later — that the platform was built for a different kind of business, a different size of cheque, and a different kind of buyer.
The four places below are not competitors in any useful sense. One is an auction floor. One is an introduction desk. One is a full-service broker who will not take you unless you pass a screen. One is a regional exchange where the buyers, sellers, advisors and funds are all separately listed and you can see who is actually in the market. Scoring them against each other on a single number would tell you nothing.
Here is what each one is for, what it costs, and who gets rejected.
Disclosure, up front: Maidensail and Mergedeck are related ventures. Read the fourth section with that in mind. The fee data on the other three is taken from their own published pricing and is linked at the bottom.
First, the thing nobody tells you
Two numbers frame this entire decision.
Globally, roughly 24,000 M&A transactions were announced in the first half of 2026 — about 9% fewer than a year earlier — while announced technology deal value hit $649 billion, the largest of any sector (FE International, mid-year 2026). Fewer deals, bigger cheques, and a visible flight to quality. Buyers are not short of capital: private equity is sitting on roughly $1.3 trillion of buyout dry powder. They are short of assets whose numbers survive contact with a data room.
Meanwhile enterprise SaaS public comparables traded at about 3.3x trailing twelve-month revenue in mid-2026, down from 4.9x at the end of 2025. If you are benchmarking your ask against a 2021 screenshot, you are benchmarking against a market that no longer exists.
The implication for platform choice is simple. In a buyer's market, distribution matters less than credibility. The platform that gets you in front of the right twenty buyers with clean numbers beats the platform that gets you in front of two thousand tyre-kickers.
1. Flippa — the open auction floor
What it actually is: a self-service, high-volume, pay-to-list marketplace covering websites, apps, e-commerce stores, content sites, SaaS and domains. You list, you set terms, buyers bid or make offers, and you handle most of the process yourself.
What it costs (published pricing, 2026):
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Entry listing | $29 flat, 60-day term |
| Boosted listing | $49 flat, 3-month term |
| Premium listing (with NDA protection) | $199 per 6 months |
| Higher-value tiers | $49 / $399 / $599 per 6 months |
| Buyer Premium subscription | $49 per month or $490 per year |
| Payment processing | from 1% (FlippaPay), from 1.2% (Escrow.com) |
Who it is for: sellers of smaller digital assets who want speed, price discovery and control, and who are comfortable running their own process. If your business is a content site, a niche app or a sub-$100K store, this is the widest net available.
Where it hurts: an open marketplace is an open marketplace. Anyone can register. You will field questions from people who have never bought anything and never will, and you will do the qualification work yourself. The low listing fee is not free — it is paid in your time.
2. Acquire.com — the curated introduction desk
What it actually is: a closed marketplace for startups, mostly SaaS, where the platform screens listings before buyers ever see them. Since 2020 it reports 5,000+ closed deals across 100+ countries, over $1 billion in closed transactions, and 500,000+ registered buyers.
The number that matters: Acquire approves roughly 13% of submissions. The screen favours "real revenue, real customers, and clean financials." A pre-revenue product with a nice landing page does not get through.
What it costs: a listing fee scaled to your asking price, plus a closing fee payable only on a successful sale. Its advisory tier, Guided by Acquire, targets SaaS businesses above $1M in annual revenue.
Timelines: the platform's own guidance is 90 to 120 days from listing to close as the realistic average, with many deals moving in 30 to 60.
Who it is for: founders of revenue-generating SaaS and internet businesses who would rather be introduced to pre-qualified buyers than run an auction. The rejection rate is the product. It is what makes a buyer open your listing at all.
Where it hurts: the buyer base skews US and Western Europe, and it skews SaaS. If you run a services business, a manufacturing unit, an NBFC, a franchise network or anything with physical operations, you are outside the pattern the buyers there are trained to underwrite.
3. Empire Flippers — the full-service broker
What it actually is: a brokerage with a marketplace attached. They vet the business, verify the financials and traffic themselves, build the listing, and manage the transaction. You are buying a process, not a page.
The screen: they report rejecting about 91% of submissions. Minimum thresholds include roughly $2,000 per month in net profit over a trailing twelve months and at least three months of traffic analytics.
What it costs — tiered success fee, no upfront listing charge:
| Deal size band | Commission |
|---|---|
| Below $700,000 | 15% |
| $700,000 – $5,000,000 | 8% on the slice in this band |
| Above $5,000,000 | 2.5% on the slice above |
Worked examples from their own published structure: a $600,000 sale costs $90,000 (15%); a $900,000 sale costs $121,000 (~13.4% effective); a $7,000,000 sale costs $499,000 (~7.1% effective). Buyers pay nothing.
Who it is for: owners of established, cash-generating content, e-commerce and Amazon FBA businesses who want the work done for them and will pay a double-digit commission for it.
Where it hurts: the effective rate on sub-$1M deals is heavy, and the vetting queue takes time. If your margin is thin or your books are informal, you will spend weeks getting to the starting line.
4. Mergedeck — the regional exchange
What it actually is: a marketplace built around the way deals actually originate in India and the wider emerging-market corridor — where the counterparty is as likely to be a family-owned manufacturer, a licensed NBFC, a franchise group or a listed acquirer as it is a SaaS buyer.
The structural difference is that all four sides of the market are listed, not just the sell side. At the time of writing the platform shows roughly 380 active listings and 1,300+ verified users. You can browse live buy-side and sell-side listings — businesses for sale, active buyers with stated mandates, empanelled M&A advisors and investors — instead of guessing whether demand exists for what you are selling. Listings are admin-verified before publication, messaging is in-platform and confidential, and profiles are role-based (seller, buyer, advisor, investor).
Why the regional framing is not a footnote: India recorded 710 M&A and PE/VC deals worth roughly US$20 billion in Q1 2026 — a 5% increase in volumes — of which 271 were domestic M&A transactions, the highest quarterly domestic volume in recent years, plus 56 outbound deals worth about US$3.9 billion, a record (Grant Thornton, via India Briefing). Crucially, the overwhelming majority of these deals were below US$100 million. That is not a footnote to the global market; it is a mid-market deal engine that most global platforms are not built to serve, and it is the reason a Bangalore SaaS business, a Delhi NBFC and a UK EV-charging platform can sit on the same board.
Who it is for: founders selling into or out of India, buyers with a defined mandate who want to be found rather than to hunt, and advisors looking for mandates. Also anyone whose business is perfectly good but structurally invisible to a US-SaaS-shaped screen.
Where it hurts: it is a marketplace, not a broker. The listing gets you discovery and qualified conversations. It does not do your diligence, clean your books, or negotiate for you — and in an Indian transaction, the diligence and the structuring are where the value actually leaks.
The one-line version
| Platform | Job it does | Best fit | Cost shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flippa | Price discovery at volume | Small digital assets, self-driven sellers | Low flat listing fee |
| Acquire.com | Pre-qualified introductions | Revenue-generating SaaS, global buyers | Listing fee + success fee |
| Empire Flippers | Done-for-you brokerage | Established content/e-commerce, $2K+/mo profit | 15% / 8% / 2.5% tiered |
| Mergedeck | Two-sided regional exchange | India-linked and mid-market deals, all four roles | Marketplace listing |
Venue, introduction desk, broker, exchange. Pick by the job, not by the logo.
A realistic first month
Week 1 — make the business legible. Twelve months of monthly revenue, gross margin and net profit in one sheet. Customer concentration: what share does your largest customer represent? Churn and retention, stated the same way twice. A one-line description a stranger can repeat.
Week 2 — build the data room before you need it. Incorporation documents, cap table, statutory filings, tax returns, key contracts, IP assignments from every contractor who ever touched the codebase. The single most common reason a signed LOI dies is that the data room contradicts the listing.
Week 3 — choose one primary platform, not four. Listing the same business in four places with four different numbers is the fastest way to look unserious. Pick the venue whose buyers underwrite businesses like yours, and use the others, if at all, for reach.
Week 4 — answer the three questions every buyer asks. Why are you selling? What breaks if you leave? What has to be true for this to be worth what you are asking? Write the answers down. If you cannot, you are not ready to list — you are ready to fix something.
What none of them do for you
No marketplace fixes an unclean number. Escrow protects the transfer of money; it does not protect you from a valuation that collapses in week three of diligence.
Nor do they handle structure. Share sale versus asset sale, earn-out versus upfront, indemnity caps, escrow holdbacks, regulatory approvals, withholding on the consideration — these sit outside every platform on this list. In cross-border deals they are frequently worth more than the headline multiple. A deal that closes at a lower number with clean structure very often nets the seller more than a higher headline that leaks 20% to tax, indemnities and a two-year earn-out that never vests.
Budget for that work separately, and budget for it early. AI-assisted diligence is now cutting deal timelines by 10–30%, which sounds like good news until you realise it means buyers find your problems faster.
FAQ
How long does it actually take to sell a small startup? Plan on 90 to 120 days from listing to close as a base case, faster if your financials are already verified and the cheque size is small. Anything under 30 days usually means either a pre-existing relationship or a distressed price.
Do I need revenue to list? On Acquire.com and Empire Flippers, effectively yes — the screens are built around trailing profit and verified traffic. Flippa will accept smaller and earlier assets. A regional exchange like Mergedeck will list pre-revenue and asset-led businesses, but buyer interest still follows evidence.
Which platform gives the best price? None of them "gives" a price. Price comes from competitive tension between qualified buyers. The platform's only job is to manufacture that tension. Choose the one whose buyer base already understands your model.
Is a 15% commission ever worth it? When the broker does the vetting, the packaging and the buyer management, and the alternative is you doing it badly for six months — often, yes. On a sub-$300K deal, the arithmetic gets much harder to defend.
Can I list on more than one platform? Yes, and most exclusivity terms are broker-specific, so read them. But run one process. Two live processes with inconsistent numbers is a diligence red flag, not a distribution strategy.
What should I do before I list anything? Launch properly, document your traction, and build a public footprint a buyer can verify without asking you. A startup with a permanent, indexed page, real user signals and a consistent metrics story is a materially easier asset to sell than one that exists only inside a pitch deck.
The framework
Sell-side platforms do one of four jobs: discovery at volume, curation, execution, or market-making. Flippa does discovery. Acquire.com does curation. Empire Flippers does execution. Mergedeck does market-making across four roles in a corridor where mid-market volume is actually growing.
Match the job to your business, and the fee stops feeling like a cost.