How do I acquire a micro-SaaS?

What does acquiring a micro-SaaS involve?

Acquiring a micro-SaaS means taking outright ownership of the code, the domain, the customer relationships, the billing account and whatever search position the business has accumulated, in one clean upfront transfer. At $50,000 to $150,000 you are buying something a founder built and ran for years, typically producing $20,000 to $60,000 of annual profit. The work splits into four parts that happen in order: deciding what you want, proving the numbers are real, agreeing a price, and moving the assets into your name without breaking the product on the way.

Most failed acquisitions at this size fail in part two or part four. Almost nobody fails at part three.

What should you fix before you look at a single listing?

Fix your budget, your weekly capacity and your technical boundaries before you look, because those filters remove most of the market before it can waste your time. Write down the maximum cash you will part with including diligence and transfer costs, the hours a week you can genuinely give the business after close, and which stacks you are prepared to own. A Rails app on Postgres is a different life from a browser extension whose continued existence depends on one reviewer at a large company.

Then decide what you want the acquisition to do for you. A buyer who wants a cash-producing asset they touch four hours a month should look for boring, documented, organically acquired revenue. A buyer who wants something to grow should look for a product with good retention and a founder who ran out of interest rather than out of customers. Those are different businesses, and they are rarely the same listing.

How does the process run, in order?

The sequence below is the one that holds up at six figures. Each step exists because skipping it costs money later.

1. Set criteria: price band, stack, category, minimum trailing history, maximum owner dependency.
2. Source listings and shortlist five to ten that fit, not fifty that nearly fit.
3. Make contact and ask the four screening questions below before you read the full prospectus.
4. Confirm revenue on a live screen-share of the payment processor, with you naming the date ranges.
5. Sign a mutual NDA if the seller wants one, then request the diligence pack.
6. Run technical, financial and legal diligence over two to three weeks.
7. Submit a written offer with a price, an asset list and a transfer timetable.
8. Sign an asset purchase agreement covering IP assignment, representations and the handover period.
9. Fund escrow, complete the transfer, confirm control of every asset, then release.
10. Run the handover period with the seller on call for an agreed number of days.

The four screening questions, asked early, are: why are you exiting, what did the last twelve months of revenue actually collect, what breaks if you disappear tomorrow, and who else has access to the production systems. Vague answers to any of them are a reason to stop reading rather than a reason to dig.

What should you pay?

Micro-SaaS trades at 2× to 4× trailing annual profit as market convention, so the first job is working out the profit rather than the revenue. Take twelve months of collected revenue, subtract hosting, tooling, processing fees, contractors and anything else the business genuinely needs, then add back the seller's own pay and one-off personal spending. That figure is seller's discretionary earnings, and the multiple attaches to it.

Pay towards the bottom of the range where revenue depends on the founder's audience, one channel or one large customer. Pay towards the top where retention is strong, acquisition is organic and the operating record is written down. A business with under six months of trading history cannot be priced on a clean multiple at all, and buying one at a multiple means paying for a pattern that has not yet proved it exists.

What does diligence actually need to cover?

Diligence at this size needs to cover money, customers, code, and the legal right to sell, in that order of importance. Money means the processor dashboard rather than a spreadsheet, cross-checked against bank deposits. Customers means churn by cohort, concentration by account, and where new signups come from. Code means reading it, running it locally, and finding out what the seller has been quietly ignoring.

The legal part is the one buyers at this level skip and then regret. Ask who wrote every part of the codebase, whether contractors signed IP assignment, what open-source licences are in the dependency tree, and whether any customer contract prohibits assignment to a new owner. A business the seller does not fully own is not a business you can fully buy.

What goes wrong after the money moves?

Transfers go wrong when the buyer releases funds before confirming control of every asset. Payment processors, registrars, cloud accounts and third-party APIs each have their own transfer mechanics, and several of them cannot be reversed cheaply once started. Build an asset checklist into the purchase agreement, tick every line yourself, and release escrow only when the list is complete.

The other common failure is a handover that ends too early. Fourteen to thirty days of seller availability, written into the agreement with a defined response time, covers the first billing cycle and the first production incident under your ownership. That is when you find out what the operating documentation left out.

Where should you look?

Look where the counterparties are pre-screened and the listings carry comparable data, because sourcing is where most of the risk enters a deal. Indiemaker carried 112 listings between $50,000 and $150,000 as at 14 September 2026, which is enough inventory to be selective rather than grateful. Approaching founders cold works too, and it costs months of outreach to produce one conversation that a curated listing would have handed you in an afternoon.

Related: where-to-find-software-businesses-50k-to-150k, how-to-verify-a-sellers-revenue, due-diligence-for-a-100k-deal