Everything people ask before they put an asset on here.
Why a platform at all, why this one, and the places where the answer is that we cannot help.
You could do this in a direct message. Plenty of people do.
Why not just sell it in a direct message?
Because one interested person is not a price. A private thread gives you a single opinion of what your asset is worth, no second asset to read it against, and no account of what was said that either of you can rely on afterwards.
Deals do close that way. The ones that fall apart usually fall apart in the messages, over a number that was described one way in January and a different way in March.
What does Indiemaker actually do?
It puts every asset on the same fields, in the same units, so that any two of them can be read against each other.
From that you get a market you can cut by asking price, revenue, age and owner hours, a comparison that puts two assets side by side without reformatting either one, and a handover both sides tick off item by item. Payment moves once, through Escrow.com. We never hold it.
What can I see without an account?
Every listing, with its figures shown as bands rather than exact numbers. A band tells you an asset earns $500 to $2K a month, which is enough to rule it in or out.
Signing in, which is free, turns the bands into the actual figures and gives you five unlocks a month. An unlock opens one listing permanently: the full detail, the links to the product, who the owner is, and the ability to message them. Past the five it is $25 a listing, or $35 a month for Premium, which adds ten on top.
My project is small. Is it worth putting on here?
Listings run from $1,000 to $500,000, and the floor is there for a practical reason: below about a thousand dollars the escrow fees eat the deal.
A project that has stopped being interesting to you is often worth a great deal to somebody who would otherwise spend eighteen months building the same thing. The listing form asks for the things a new owner was going to ask for anyway.
It has stopped earning. Is there any point?
Yes, as long as it is priced as what it is. You can list an asset as pre-revenue, or as one that used to earn and no longer does, and it will not carry a multiple, because there is nothing to take a multiple of. What it is worth then is the build, the audience, and the months it saves somebody.
You don't pick the label. Indiemaker files every listing from the monthly revenue figure buyers see: Revenue at $500 a month or more, Early revenue from $1 to $499, and No revenue at $0, tagged Pre-revenue, Non-commercial or Stopped earning from your answer in the form.
Buyers discount that heavily. An asset with under six months of trading has the same problem from the other direction: too little history to annualise without flattering it.
A listing tells you about one asset. The question is what it looks like beside another.
How is this different from anywhere else I could list?
Comparability. Anywhere will show you an asset. What decides a deal is how that asset reads against another one, and that only works if both are described the same way.
Here the fields are identical, the units are identical, and any two listings can be put side by side without either being reformatted to flatter it. That common language is the product.
What happens to a listing before it goes live?
Every listing is reviewed before it appears. Our system checks every submission, and a person reviews any it is not sure about. The review screens for the patterns that make this market unpleasant: fabricated revenue, templates sold as finished products, metrics that do not reconcile with the asking price, copy-paste descriptions, known scam structures.
A submission comes back accepted, rejected, or with a specific list of fields that need more information. Anything ambiguous goes to a person rather than being waved through. Reviewed is not an audit: it confirms no figure, and anything marked verified on the platform was confirmed by an outside source such as Stripe, the domain registry or Escrow.com.
Is there a trust score on a listing?
Not one you will see. When a listing is submitted we work out a score out of a hundred for our own review, built from five things: how much of the owner's own identity is confirmed, how complete the listing is, what proof of revenue was supplied, how long the account has been here, and how the owner has behaved on the platform.
It is a measure of how much is known about a submission, not a judgement about whether the asset is any good or a statement that the figures are true, and it is not shown on listings. What a listing does show is any verified mark, each one confirmed by an outside source: Revenue Verified · via Stripe, Identity Verified · via Stripe Identity, Domain Verified · via DNS, and Verified by Escrow.
So are the revenue figures checked or not?
The owner declares them, unless they have connected Stripe, and Indiemaker does not audit a business. An owner whose revenue runs through Stripe can connect it read-only. We then read monthly recurring revenue and active customers from their account, and the listing carries Revenue Verified and says the figures were read from Stripe. That covers subscription revenue on that one account, as of the last time we read it, and nothing else.
For everything else, the platform asks how the figure is being evidenced and records the answer on the listing: a payment-processor screenshot, an uploaded profit and loss summary, a traffic report, owner-supplied, or nothing.
A listing that says the revenue is owner-supplied and nothing else is telling you something, and it is the first thing to look at.
How do I know the owner is who they say they are?
Look for Identity Verified. Once a listing is live, the owner can confirm who they are through Stripe Identity: a government ID and a matching selfie, checked by Stripe on its own page. Indiemaker never sees the document. It shows on the owner's profile and in the seller details on every listing they have.
It confirms a person, not a business: not that they own what they are selling, and not that the figures are true. Whether or not an owner has it, Escrow.com checks the identity of both sides before any money moves.
How do I get the actual documents?
Through the owner's data room, once you have unlocked the listing. The files that cannot sit on a public listing live there, and they belong to the owner. Unlock the listing and accept the owner's NDA. Files the owner has not marked sensitive open straight away. The sensitive ones you request, and the owner approves each request, for 30 days by default, and does not have to explain a refusal. Any walkthrough video plays on the listing once you have unlocked it. It works the same on every plan, and every download is logged.
Can I ask the owner questions before I commit?
Yes, through messages on the platform, and the thread stays on the record. Messaging opens when you unlock the listing, and from that point there is no cap on it and nothing is ever locked away. If a negotiation runs six weeks, it runs six weeks. A thread with no new message for seven days drops out of your active inbox and you both get one reminder; either of you brings it back by replying.
Keep the conversation here rather than moving it to email. A thread nobody else holds is the thing that turns a disagreement into one person's word against another's.
If you cannot audit the numbers, what am I getting?
An account of the deal that neither side can quietly rewrite. The listing as it was published, the full message thread, every offer and counter-offer, the terms you agreed and the handover checklist, all dated, all held by somebody who is not either of you.
Unless the owner has connected Stripe, we cannot tell you that their revenue figure is true. Either way, we can make sure what they told you about it is written down.
Why should I trust any of this?
On what you can check, rather than on a figure we put on a page. We do not publish deal counts, transaction totals or completed transfers. The commitment that keeps the market data anonymised keeps individual deals private, and a platform that advertises its own volume has an obvious reason to flatter it.
What is here to judge instead: a written statement of what we check and what we do not, a stated source for every number on a listing, market data published as anonymised shares of the whole rather than counts chosen to impress you, and a rule that nothing on this site asserts a figure we cannot back. Anything unbuilt is labelled as an idea.
What it costs, and what happens after somebody says yes.
What does it cost?
There is no charge to put an asset on the platform. Indiemaker takes a success fee on a completed transfer, set by the agreed price: 8% under $10,000, 7% from $10,000, 6% from $100,000. Premium takes two points off each band, so 6%, 5% and 4%.
It comes out of the owner's proceeds rather than being added on top of what the buyer pays, and the rate is fixed at the moment the sale is created and never recalculated afterwards. The buyer pays the agreed price plus Escrow.com's own fee, which is charged at cost and does not come to us.
What if the owner never replies?
Nothing is lost, as long as you wrote to them. The unlock is held when you open the listing, not spent. Message the owner within 72 hours, and if they do not reply within 72 hours of your message, it goes back to your allowance. If you never send a message, the unlock is used.
Your account shows this as, for example, three of five available, one pending.
Do owners need unlocks?
No. Replying to a buyer, responding to an offer and negotiating cost an owner nothing, on every plan, always.
Does enquiring about a domain use an unlock?
No. Domains are a different kind of asset with nothing hidden to open, so enquiring is free, up to ten a day.
Do you hold the money, or take a side?
No to both. Funds sit with Escrow.com under their terms, and Indiemaker can neither release nor withhold them. We do not represent either party or negotiate on anyone's behalf.
The success fee is a percentage, so a higher price does earn us more. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What we will not do is put ourselves inside the negotiation, which is where that incentive would actually do damage.
The transfer happens once, upfront. There are no instalments, deferred amounts or earn-outs on this platform.
Escrow.com can't serve every country, and we check where you live and bank before you list or make an offer. Where sales work.
Can I buy or sell from any country?
Not quite, and it is the bank that usually decides. Every sale closes through Escrow.com, which can't send money to or take it from banks in about forty countries, among them Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt and Ukraine. For those, where you live doesn't matter: a founder in Pakistan with a bank account in the UAE buys and sells normally.
Sanctioned countries are different. Escrow.com can't serve anyone who lives in or banks in Russia, Iran, Belarus, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Myanmar or South Sudan, whatever other account they hold, so we can't list projects from there.
We ask where you live and where you bank when you start a listing and when you make an offer, so you find out before you put the work in. Your answers sit in your payout settings. The full lists.
What happens once an offer is accepted?
A sales agreement is generated and both parties are identity-checked by Escrow.com before money moves. The buyer funds escrow, the owner hands over, and the two of you work a checklist together: access credentials, domain and DNS, billing and third-party accounts, and the data, codebase or content itself. The owner marks each item done and the buyer confirms it.
Many owners also agree to stay reachable afterwards, for anything from a fortnight to ninety days. That period is agreed as part of the deal rather than assumed. How ownership transfer works.
What if the asset is not what was described?
Escrow.com's process has an inspection period after the handover, fixed by Indiemaker at 48 hours. The buyer accepts or rejects, and a rejection opens a return and refund path with the funds still held rather than disbursed.
That protection belongs to the escrow provider rather than to us. Indiemaker cannot reverse a transfer or move funds in either direction. What we can do is remove a listing, remove an owner, and hand either of you the complete record. Where a small deal ends up with a lawyer or in a small-claims process, that file is usually the whole case.
Read the assets, not the argument.
Every listing is open without an account, with its figures shown as bands.