A quarter of the startups in this dataset are for sale: 2,196 of 8,817. Nearly half of them have no revenue at all.
The numbers come from startups that connected a live payment account (Stripe, RevenueCat, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle or Dodo) to a public verification service. Revenue is read from the payment processor. Asking prices are set by the sellers.
The market is mostly cheap
| Asking price | Percentile |
|---|---|
| $1,800 | 25th |
| $6,000 | 50th (median) |
| $28,000 | 75th |
| $120,000 | 90th |
| $1,250,000 | 99th |
| $10,000,000 | highest listed |
Half of everything on the market is priced under $6,000. The listings that circulate on social media, the six-figure exits and the million-dollar acquisitions, sit in the top decile and above.
1,020 of the 2,196 listings, or 46%, have monthly recurring revenue of $0. Whatever those sellers are pricing, it is not a revenue stream. Some are selling a domain, a codebase, an app-store listing, or an audience. The buyer has to work out which, because the listing rarely says.
The multiple runs backwards
Valuation normally rewards size. Bigger, steadier revenue earns a higher multiple, because it carries less risk. This market does the opposite.
| Monthly revenue | Listings | Median multiple |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | 208 | 3.9× |
| $1 – $100 | 292 | 5.6× |
| $100 – $1,000 | 389 | 2.8× |
| $1,000 – $10,000 | 289 | 2.4× |
| $10,000+ | 79 | 2.3× |
A product earning under $100 a month asks 5.6× annual revenue. A product earning over $10,000 a month asks 2.3×. The smallest products carry more than double the multiple of the largest ones.
Two things are happening, and they compound. Sellers of tiny products price on hope rather than on cash flow: 12× of $40 a month is $480, so the multiple can be almost anything without the price looking absurd. Sellers of real revenue face buyers who run the arithmetic, and those buyers pay for cash flow.
For a buyer, the practical version is that below roughly $1,000 a month the multiple reflects what the seller hopes the product could become. Above it, the multiple reflects what someone will pay for the cash flow that exists.
To apply these band multiples to a specific number, the SaaS valuation calculator runs the arithmetic and shows where the resulting asking price sits among the 2,196 listings.
Most of this revenue is not growing
Growth over the trailing 30 days, across 6,825 startups with data:
- 64% recorded no change at all.
- Of the 2,431 that moved, the median change was −1.9%.
- 54% of the ones that moved went down.
The median indie startup whose revenue changes at all is shrinking. Only the top decile grew by 100% or more, and at these revenue levels a 100% gain is often one customer.
This matters for the multiples above. A 3× multiple assumes the revenue will still be there in three years, and for most of these listings the trend points the other way. It is the same picture the mortality data shows from a different angle: 30.7% of all 8,817 products earned money at some point and have since stopped.
Customers pay about $6 a month
Among 306 startups that report both a revenue figure and a customer count, median revenue per customer is $6.37 a month (interquartile range $2.73 to $29.29).
| Category | Startups | Median revenue per customer |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | 18 | $63.92 |
| SaaS | 17 | $19.62 |
| Artificial Intelligence | 74 | $5.53 |
| Developer Tools | 26 | $4.37 |
| Mobile Apps | 33 | $4.19 |
A marketing tool earns ten times per customer what an AI tool does. Reaching $1,000 a month takes 16 customers on the marketing side and 181 on the AI side.
The sample here is small, and the five categories shown cover 168 of the 306, so treat the category rows as indicative rather than settled. What survives the small sample is the ordering, which lines up with the category monetisation rates in the revenue data: the categories that charge more per customer are the ones where more products clear $1,000 a month.
That ordering is a pricing question before it is a product question, and it is answerable before the build. Willingness to pay is what separates a $63 customer from a $4 one.
Method, and what this data can't tell you
Source. Public revenue profiles from TrustMRR, where founders connect a payment provider so revenue can be verified independently. Snapshot: 8,817 startups, of which 2,196 carry an asking price. August 2026.
Asking price is not sale price. Every price here is what the seller wants. The dataset does not record what anything sold for, or whether it sold. Real transaction prices are usually lower.
Multiples are as published. Where a multiple appears, it is the seller's or the platform's figure. The inversion described above is an inversion in asking multiples, which is a claim about seller behaviour rather than about market value.
Counting notes. The multiple table covers 1,257 of the 2,196 listings, since not every listing publishes a multiple. The revenue-per-customer figures cover the 306 startups that report both fields, and the five categories shown cover 168 of those.
Selection. These founders chose to connect a payment account to a public verification service. That skews indie and bootstrapped, with no venture-funded companies, and probably skews towards founders comfortable publishing numbers.
One correlation to distrust. Startups on RevenueCat show better revenue figures than startups on Polar or Dodo. RevenueCat serves mobile apps, which monetise better; Polar and Dodo are newer, so their users are younger products. The provider is standing in for category and age, and reading it as a payment-processor comparison would be wrong.
Sources
TrustMRR — public revenue profiles The underlying data. Founders connect Stripe, RevenueCat, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle or Dodo so their revenue is read from the processor and published on a public profile, alongside an asking price where the founder is selling. Every figure here is an aggregate computed over the August 2026 snapshot. The per-company figures belong to TrustMRR and to the founders who chose to publish them.
Companion reports from the same snapshot: the revenue distribution across all 8,817 startups, and the mortality report on which of them ever took a payment.
Cite this
46% of indie startups listed for sale have no revenue, and asking multiples run backwards: products under $100/month ask 5.6× annual revenue while products over $10,000/month ask 2.3×. — Scoutr, Indie Startup Acquisition Report 2026 (n = 2,196 listings), from TrustMRR public revenue profiles
If you reference these numbers, a link back lets your readers reach both this analysis and the underlying profiles.