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.
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 submission is read before it appears. The moderator 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.
What does the trust tier on a listing mean?
It is a score out of a hundred, shown as Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum. It is 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 listing. It is not a judgement about whether the asset is any good, and it is not a statement that the figures are true.
So are the revenue figures checked or not?
The owner declares them, and Indiemaker does not audit a business. What the platform does is ask how the figure is being evidenced, and record the answer on the listing: a payment-processor screenshot, an uploaded profit and loss summary, a traffic report, owner-supplied, or nothing.
That answer feeds the trust tier. 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 get the actual documents?
Ask the owner once you are talking. The files that cannot sit on a public listing live in the owner's data room, and they belong to the owner, so an unlock does not include them. The owner decides, case by case, what to share and with whom. The owner decides who sees each file and does not have to explain a refusal, 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.
We cannot tell you that an owner's revenue figure is true. 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: 6% of the agreed price, or 3% if the owner holds Seller Pro.
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. The unlock is held when you open the listing, not spent, and it is only used up if the owner replies within 72 hours. If they do not, it goes back to your allowance.
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.
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. 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.