How much profit do I need to exit at $100,000?

What is the number?

A micro-SaaS needs roughly $33,000 of trailing annual profit to support a $100,000 price at the conventional 3× multiple. That is $2,750 a month, every month, for twelve months, in profit rather than revenue. The arithmetic is simply $100,000 divided by 3, and there is nothing clever hiding inside it.

Profit here means seller's discretionary earnings: what the business produced after real running costs, with your own pay and one-off personal spending added back. It is not revenue. A business at $2,750 a month of revenue is not a $100,000 business unless it costs nothing to run, which nothing does.

How does the multiple change the target?

The multiple you attract changes the profit target by a factor of two across the conventional range. Micro-SaaS trades at 2× to 4× trailing annual profit, so the same $100,000 price can be reached from very different places.

Plan against the 3× row. A founder who builds towards $2,080 a month because they have decided they deserve 4× will find out during diligence that they were pricing their own optimism. A founder who builds towards $2,750 and then earns 3.5× has a pleasant surprise instead of a stalled listing.

Which multiple will you actually get?

You get the multiple your evidence supports, and the evidence is the trailing twelve months plus how much of the business survives your departure. Twelve flat-or-rising months, annual churn under 10%, no customer above 10% of revenue and a documented handover is a 3× to 4× profile. Declining revenue, founder-delivered support and one acquisition channel is a 2× profile, regardless of how good the code is.

Most founder-run software sits in the middle. Assume 3× until a buyer gives you a reason to think otherwise, and build the profit to match.

What does that look like month by month?

Getting to $2,750 of monthly profit is usually a pricing and retention problem rather than a traffic problem. A business at $3,300 MRR with $550 of monthly running costs is already there. A business at $2,400 MRR with $550 of costs produces $1,850 a month, or $22,200 a year, which supports roughly $67,000 at 3×.

Closing that gap takes about $900 a month of additional profit. Raising prices for new signups, trimming the hosting and tooling bill, moving customers onto annual billing and cutting the churn that quietly refills the same bucket each month will usually get there before new acquisition does. A 15% price rise on a $2,400 MRR base is $360 a month before a single new customer arrives.

What moves a business from the bottom of the range to the top?

Retention moves it first, because churn compounds against you in both the profit line and the multiple. Dropping monthly churn from 6% to 2% does two things at once: it raises trailing profit over the following year, and it moves the business up the multiple range because the buyer can now believe the revenue continues. The same work is paid for twice.

Customer concentration comes next. A business where one account is 40% of revenue gets valued as though that account might leave, because it might. Spreading revenue so nothing exceeds roughly 10% is slow work, and it is usually worth half a turn of multiple or more.

Owner dependency is the cheapest of the four to fix. Write down how deployment works, where the DNS lives, how support requests get handled and what breaks in a normal month. A buyer who can read the operating record makes a firmer offer, because they are no longer pricing an unknown.

Acquisition is the last of them. Revenue arriving through organic search, integrations or referral carries over to a new owner, and revenue arriving through your personal audience does not. Buyers price the second kind as though it stops the day you hand over the keys, and they are usually right to.

How much of the $100,000 do you keep?

The headline price is not the amount that reaches your account, so work out net proceeds before you set a target. Platform and transfer costs, any professional fees you choose to take on, and whatever tax applies in your jurisdiction all come out of the figure. Deciding you want $100,000 in hand rather than $100,000 on a listing page can change the profit target by several hundred dollars a month.

For context on where these deals sit, Indiemaker carried 88 listings between $50,000 and $100,000 and 24 between $100,000 and $150,000 as at 14 September 2026. The $100,000 line is a real band with real buyers on the other side of it, not an aspiration.

What if you are not there yet?

If the business produces less than $25,000 of trailing annual profit, a $100,000 exit is not available this year at any conventional multiple. That is a sentence worth sitting with rather than arguing against. The gap is arithmetic, and arithmetic responds to work rather than to positioning.

If the business has under six months of history, no multiple applies at all yet. Wait for six to twelve months of consistent data, or price on asset value at a discount and accept a figure far below $100,000. Six patient months of retention data is usually worth more than any amount of listing copy.

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