How do I exit a software business?
The short answer
Exiting a software business means preparing twelve months of evidenced financials, pricing on trailing annual profit, listing it, answering a buyer's diligence, signing an asset purchase agreement, and transferring the stack, the customers and the payment account. Preparation decides the price. Everything after that is process.
What does exiting a software business actually involve?
Exiting a software business is the transfer of a working asset to an operator who will run it, and in the $50,000 to $150,000 band that transfer is an evidenced process rather than a negotiation over a good story. The buyer is acquiring four things: trailing profit, a codebase, a customer base and a set of accounts. Your work across the whole exit is making each of those easy to check and easy to move. Very little else shifts the price.
The shape is consistent every time. Prepare, price, list, field enquiries, answer diligence, sign, transfer, support the new owner briefly. Founders who find the process painful have usually skipped the first step and are attempting it live, in front of a buyer, under time pressure.
What has to be true before you start?
Three conditions decide whether an exit is worth starting now: twelve months of trading history, profit you can evidence from source, and a business that survives a fortnight without you. Under six months of history cannot be priced on a clean multiple at all, so either wait for six to twelve months of consistent data or price on asset value at a discount. Profit you cannot evidence gets discounted to the part you can. A business that needs you every day gets priced as a job that pays rather than as an asset.
If one of those is missing, the honest move is to fix it before listing rather than to list and hope a buyer does not notice. They notice in the first call.
What are the stages, in order?
The sequence rarely varies:
- Pull twelve full months of revenue from your payment processor and calculate seller's discretionary earnings with only the add-backs a buyer will accept.
- Apply the conventional range for your asset type to trailing annual profit, and decide where inside it you honestly sit.
- Write the listing around evidence: revenue history, cost base, traffic sources, customer counts, the stack.
- Field enquiries and qualify. Not everyone who asks is an operator with capital.
- Answer diligence with read-only access to the accounts that hold the truth.
- Agree terms and sign an asset purchase agreement that lists every asset by name.
- Move funds through escrow, then transfer the stack, the domain, the repositories and the customer relationships.
- Support the new owner through a defined handover period and then step away.
Steps one to three take most of the effort and decide most of the outcome. Steps four to eight are logistics, and logistics go smoothly when the paperwork behind them is already right.
What does a buyer actually receive?
A buyer receives the assets named in the purchase agreement, which is why the naming matters more than founders expect.
| Asset | What transfer means in practice |
|---|---|
| Codebase | Repository ownership moved, full commit history intact, no personal accounts left in the loop |
| Domain | Registrar transfer completed, DNS documented, renewal dates handed over |
| Hosting and infrastructure | New accounts under the buyer's billing, environment variables and secrets rotated |
| Payment processing | New processor account, subscriptions migrated, existing customers billing without interruption |
| Customers | Contact records, contract terms, support history and any notice obligations |
| Third-party services | Email, analytics, error tracking, any paid API, each moved or re-created |
| Intellectual property | Assigned in writing, including anything a contractor built |
Anything not on that list stays with you by default, and a buyer who discovers a missing item after completion has a legitimate grievance. Write the list before you need it.
What does the process cost?
Costs at this size fall into escrow, legal and platform fees, and they are modest against a six-figure figure. Escrow on a six-figure transfer is conventionally a low single-digit percentage of the amount held. A lawyer producing or reviewing an asset purchase agreement for a deal this size is a fixed fee rather than an hourly open cheque, and it is money well spent on a transaction of this value.
The larger cost is the one nobody invoices: the weeks of your attention that diligence and handover consume. Budget for it honestly rather than promising a buyer availability you will resent giving.
What goes wrong, and what prevents it?
Most failed exits at this size fail for one of two reasons: numbers that cannot be corroborated from source, or a business that turns out to depend on the founder personally. Both are visible early, and both are fixable before a listing goes live. Revenue screenshots without matching processor access stall deals. Revenue that arrives because you post daily under your own name stalls them harder, because a buyer can see that it stops on completion day.
The third failure is a price set from ambition rather than from trailing profit. A business producing $30,000 of annual profit priced at $180,000 will attract enquiries, arguments and no offer. Price it on the convention and the conversation is about the business instead of the arithmetic.
Where should a business in this band be listed?
A business in the $50,000 to $150,000 band belongs on a curated platform where listings are moderated and buyers arrive expecting to do genuine diligence. As at 14 September 2026, Indiemaker carried 155 businesses listed at $50,000 or above, representing $20.3m of combined asking value, with 112 of those priced between $50,000 and $150,000. That is the company your listing keeps, and it sets the standard your preparation has to meet.
The practical advantage of a moderated platform is filtering. Serious operators spend their time on listings that have already cleared a bar, which means the enquiries you field are more likely to become offers and less likely to become a fortnight of unpaid tyre-kicking.
Related: what-do-i-need-before-i-list, what-buyers-check-before-making-an-offer, how-long-does-an-exit-take
See what a business at this level is listed at.
Everything on sale between $50,000 and $150,000, on the same fields.