Fixed-fee pre-purchase due diligence for people buying SaaS and ecommerce businesses under $100k.
You are not buying the asset — you are buying the distribution, and here is what it actually earns once the real costs are in.
Written by an ex-PwC auditor and private debt analyst.
A listing at asking price, on of stated annual revenue.
| If the margin is | Annual profit | You are paying |
|---|---|---|
| 70% | $20,160 | 2.2× profit |
| 50% | $14,400 | 3.1× profit |
| 35% | $10,080 | 4.5× profit |
| 20% | $5,760 | 7.8× profit |
Same listing, same revenue, same asking price. The marketplace verified the revenue figure and did not verify the margin — so you are paying a multiple of revenue while the professional market pays a multiple of profit. Those are different denominators, and the listing does not let you tell which row you are in.
Flippa, Acquire.com and the rest connect to Stripe and confirm that the money arrived. That is a real service, and it is the beginning of the question rather than the end of it. Nothing in a listing tells you what it costs to run the business, how fast customers leave, whether one account carries the revenue, or how many hours the owner puts in before any of it works.
Converting a revenue multiple into a profit multiple is half an hour of work for someone trained to do it, and effectively impossible for a first-time buyer reading a listing page. That single conversion is the product.
Know what it is worth before you wire.
Small online businesses are rarely bought for their code, and the market data says so: across verified micro-SaaS, revenue tracks time in business and domain rating far more closely than it tracks anything about the product itself. None of those measure the software.
So the section other reports treat as an appendix is the one written in full at every tier: where the traffic comes from, how concentrated the channel is, whether it is owned or rented, how old the domain and the backlinks are, and whether any of it survives the founder walking away.
How the nine sections are built · Buying SaaS · Buying ecommerce
A call before a price is a sales process, and it serves you worse than a €390 scan that arrives in 48 hours and tells you something. Pay, send the listing, read the report.
€390
A desk read of everything knowable from outside: the listing claims, traffic and domain history, distribution durability, and the asking multiple placed against a range of margin scenarios.
€690
Everything in the scan, plus the sections that can only be written once the seller hands over figures — and the profit-multiple conversion that turns an asking price into a number you can compare.
€1,200
Full diligence, plus a valuation model with three price points, a negotiation brief, and a call to work through both.
Judgement is the product, and a section list demonstrates none of it. So the work gets published: full teardowns of real listings, either anonymised while live or examined after the sale closed, with the arithmetic shown rather than summarised.
The first teardown publishes shortly. Rather than open with a worked example of a business that does not exist, this section stays empty until there is real work in it. The RSS feed will carry it.
Send the listing URL and whatever the seller has already given you. The €390 scan runs on public data alone and needs nothing from the seller at all.