How to Buy a Micro-SaaS in 2026: A Practical Buyer's Checklist

A micro-SaaS acquisition looks simple from the outside. Find a listing, agree a price, wire the money, take over the Stripe account. In practice, most first time buyers overpay or inherit problems they could have caught in the first week of diligence. This checklist walks through the process end to end, in the order most acquirers actually run it.

1. Decide what you are actually buying

Before scrolling any listings, write down what you want from the deal. A steady cashflow business you barely touch? A growth base you can push with paid acquisition? A codebase to fold into an existing product? The answer changes what a good deal looks like and how much you can rationally pay.

2. Where to find listings

There are a handful of active venues. Acquire.com and Flippa cover the bulk of the market by volume. Microns and Tiny Acquisitions ship weekly indie drops. Startup Index sits over TrustMRR-verified listings and adds ROI and payback so you can rank a page of businesses by returns instead of picking whichever launched that week.

3. Verify revenue before anything else

Every listing you evaluate needs a payment-processor screen-share within the first serious conversation. Ask for a live Stripe or Paddle dashboard, sorted by month for the last twelve. Numbers on the listing that do not match the dashboard are the deal killer, and they are common enough that you must check every time.

4. Read the churn, not just the MRR

MRR tells you the size today. Cohort churn tells you the size next year. Ask for a customer cohort export. If monthly logo churn is above 5 percent, the business is a leaky bucket and any growth is just paid acquisition papering over retention.

5. Price the offer

Most micro-SaaS trades between 2.5x and 4x annual revenue, or 3x to 5x annual profit. Adjust down for churn above 3 percent, founder dependency, single-channel traffic, or a niche tech stack. Adjust up for verified growth, low churn, and diversified customers. Our valuation calculator wires this into a single fair price range.

6. Due diligence beyond the numbers

• Codebase review. Read the repo. Look at commit history, test coverage, and any TODOs from the seller.
• Infra dependencies. What SaaS does the business itself rely on? What breaks if the seller loses access?
• Legal. Trademark, terms of service, GDPR posture, and any past disputes.
• Customer concentration. If one customer is more than 15 percent of revenue, that is a discount.
• Traffic sources. Organic search is the highest quality. Paid ads means you inherit an ad account and a burn rate.

7. Structure the deal

Straight lump sum is fastest. Seller financing (part upfront, part over 6 to 12 months) is common on deals over 50k because it aligns the seller with a smooth transition. Earnouts based on retained MRR are useful when churn is unclear.

8. Use escrow, always

Escrow.com is the default. For deals under 10k, some buyers skip it. Do not skip it. The 500 dollar fee is cheap insurance against a seller who ghosts after payment.

9. Plan the transition

Get 30 days of seller support in writing. Migrate Stripe, domain, hosting, email provider, analytics, and any admin dashboards in a single documented sprint. Do not let the seller retain any access after transition period ends.

Ready to browse? Every listing on Startup Index shows the numbers you would compute yourself, up front. Filter by ROI or payback and start there.