How much is my SaaS business worth?

What is the short answer?

Your SaaS business is worth a multiple of its trailing twelve months of profit, and for founder-run software that multiple usually sits between 2× and 4×. Take the profit the business actually produced over the last twelve months. Multiply it. That is your realistic range before anything else gets argued about.

The profit figure buyers work from is seller's discretionary earnings: revenue less the costs the business genuinely needs, with your own pay and personal spending added back. Most founders overstate it on the first pass, usually by adding back a cost the next owner will still have to pay.

Why annual profit rather than monthly revenue?

Annual profit is the unit every experienced buyer works in, so quoting anything else puts you behind before the conversation starts. Prices sometimes get described as "36× MRR". That is the same arithmetic in a form that makes comparison harder, and buyers notice. Someone weighing your business against four others is holding a column of annual profit figures beside a column of multiples, so give them the numbers in that shape.

Trailing means the twelve months behind you, not the twelve ahead. Projections carry no weight in a transfer this size. If your last quarter was your best, show it and let the buyer draw the conclusion.

What multiple applies to which kind of asset?

Different asset types carry different conventional ranges, all of them applied to trailing annual profit.

These are market conventions, held deliberately low. Buyers pay for predictability rather than for cleverness, and the range reflects how much of it they can see.

What moves you up or down the range?

Four things decide where you land: retention, growth, customer concentration and how much of the business runs without you. Low churn and twelve flat-or-rising months put a product at the top of its band. Founder-handled support, one channel producing most of the signups, or a single customer worth a third of revenue put it at the bottom, and a buyer will say so plainly.

How customers arrive matters more than most founders expect. Revenue that comes through organic search, word of mouth or an established integration transfers cleanly to a new owner. Revenue that comes because you post daily on X does not transfer at all, and it gets priced as though it stops on completion day.

What does that look like on a real business?

A SaaS at $3,000 MRR with $600 a month of hosting, tooling and support costs produces roughly $28,800 of trailing annual profit. At the conventional 2–4× that is about $57,600 to $115,200. Where it lands inside that spread has very little to do with the product itself.

Take the same cost base to $4,000 MRR and annual profit is around $40,800, which at 3× prices the business near $122,000. The extra $65,000 of price came from $12,000 of extra annual profit, not from a better description of the product. That is the whole mechanic, and it is why the months before a listing are better spent on retention than on copywriting.

What if the business is under six months old?

A business with less than six months of history cannot be valued on a clean multiple, and a number built from three months of data is closer to a guess than a valuation. Buyers discount youth heavily, because early figures cannot be told apart from a launch spike. Either wait until you have six to twelve months of consistent data, or price on asset value at a discount and accept a figure well below what a multiple would suggest.

Asset value means the code, the domain, any content, and whatever customer relationships transfer. It is a real number. It is rarely a six-figure one.

What should you do before naming a price?

Work through it in this order:

1. Pull twelve full months of revenue from your payment processor, not from memory.
2. Calculate SDE with only the add-backs a buyer will accept.
3. Apply the conventional range for your asset type.
4. Decide where inside that range you sit, and write down the evidence for it.
5. Prepare your answer to "why are you exiting", because it comes up every time.

For a sense of the band, Indiemaker carried 155 businesses listed at $50,000 or above as at 14 September 2026, with 112 of those between $50,000 and $150,000. At conventional multiples, clearing that band takes somewhere around $25,000 to $50,000 of trailing annual profit. If you are short of it today, you now know exactly what the gap is worth closing.

Related: what-multiple-does-a-micro-saas-sell-for, how-to-calculate-sde, why-is-my-valuation-lower-than-expected