Every "where should I sell my online business" thread gets answered with a list of names and zero context. Names aren't the hard part. The hard part is that the platforms differ wildly in fee structure, deal size, and how the price actually gets set — and picking wrong either costs you five figures in commission or leaves your listing rotting for six months.
I went through the current (August 2026) pricing pages of every major platform and put the numbers side by side. Here's the map, front-loaded:
The comparison table (verified August 2026)
| Platform | Listing fee | Commission / success fee | Sweet spot | Price mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flippa | $29–$699 (by tier & size) | 10% success fee (self-service) | $500–$50K, websites & small apps | Fixed price, offers, or auction |
| Acquire.com | $25–$100/month | 6–8% closing fee (tiered by size) | $100K–$2M SaaS with revenue | Negotiation with vetted buyers |
| Empire Flippers | $0 | 15% to $700K, then 8% to $5M, 2.5% above (blended) | $100K–$5M profitable businesses | Brokered negotiation |
| Microns | $0 | 6–10% (tiered) | $1K–$100K micro-SaaS | Fixed price + negotiation |
| ExitBid | $199 flat | 0% | $5K–$300K digital projects, incl. pre-revenue | 5-day timed auction |
| SideProjectors | Free (paid promo options) | 0% (classifieds-style) | Hobby projects, low-$ side projects | DIY — you handle everything |
Three structural things this table hides, which matter more than the numbers:
1. Fees are a bet on deal size
Run a $75,000 sale through each fee model:
- Flippa: ~$49 listing + $7,500 success fee ≈ $7,550
- Acquire.com: 8% closing + a few months of $25 ≈ $6,075+
- Empire Flippers: 15% ≈ $11,250
- Microns: 8% ≈ $6,000
- ExitBid: $199 (flat, no commission)
- SideProjectors: $0 — but you're finding, vetting, and closing the buyer yourself
Percentage fees are painless at $5K and brutal at $500K. Flat fees are the opposite: $199 is real money if your project sells for $2K. The break-even math is boring but decisive: below ~$5K, percentage platforms or free classifieds win; above ~$10K, flat-fee structures keep multiples of what brokers take.
Commission platforms will tell you the fee aligns incentives — the broker only earns when you sell. That's true for Empire Flippers, which actively brokers your deal, vets buyers, and manages migration. It's much weaker for self-service marketplaces where the platform's contribution is a listing page and a messaging thread; there, a success fee is mostly a tax on your own effort.
2. Revenue requirements silently exclude most projects
Acquire.com and Empire Flippers are built around profitable businesses — Empire Flippers vets P&Ls before listing, and Acquire's buyer pool expects MRR charts. If your project has revenue and clean books, they're strong options with deep buyer pools, and for $1M+ deals a broker earns their percentage.
But the majority of things people actually want to sell — the side project that never got marketing, the vibe-coded app with users but no billing, the Chrome extension with 10K installs — have no revenue to multiply. Your realistic options there are:
- Microns / SideProjectors — classifieds: you list, you wait, you negotiate alone with whoever shows up
- Flippa's low tier — works, but a $2K sale costs 10% + listing fee, and small listings drown in volume
- ExitBid — accepts pre-revenue explicitly (unlaunched MVPs, waitlist products, beta apps) and runs each listing as a timed auction
Disclosure of bias, since I build in this space: I think the pre-revenue segment is badly underserved. Every platform's valuation logic starts with "take your monthly profit and multiply it," and there are millions of AI-built and side projects for which that number is zero. That doesn't make them worthless — it makes them hard to price, which is a different problem.
3. The pricing mechanism is the actual product
This is the part almost nobody compares, and it's the biggest one.
Classifieds and negotiation platforms (Acquire, Microns, SideProjectors, most of Flippa) work like this: you pick an asking price, list, and negotiate down with whoever shows up. If exactly one buyer appears — the common case for small assets — that buyer knows they're the only bidder, and the "negotiation" is you discovering how far down they can push you. Listings routinely sit for months; a meaningful share never sell at all.
Brokered sales (Empire Flippers) fix the pricing problem with human expertise — a vetted valuation, a managed process — and charge 15% for it. Rational at $500K. Hard to justify at $20K.
Timed auctions (ExitBid, and Flippa's auction format) attack the problem structurally: a deadline plus visible competing bids means the price is set by the market you gathered, not by a formula or a lone negotiator. Auction theory is unambiguous here — one additional serious bidder does more for your final price than any amount of negotiating skill (Bulow & Klemperer's classic result). The catch: an auction needs enough eyeballs in a short window, which is why scarcity models (ExitBid caps concurrent listings at 14, 5-day format) exist — they concentrate demand instead of spreading it across ten thousand simultaneous listings.
If you take one thing from this section: ask not "where do I list?" but "who sets my price — a formula, a lone buyer, or competition?" That choice moves the outcome more than the fee schedule does.
Decision map
- Profitable SaaS, $250K+ → Empire Flippers or Acquire.com. The commission buys you vetted buyers and process. Real cost at $300K: roughly $21–45K depending on platform — check the math against a flat-fee route before signing.
- Revenue-positive, $10K–$250K → Acquire.com (patient, negotiation-driven) or ExitBid ($199 flat, auction-driven, faster clock). Flippa if you want maximum listing volume exposure and accept the 10%.
- Pre-revenue / side project / vibe-coded app → ExitBid (auction sets the price where formulas can't) or Microns/SideProjectors (free-ish, but you do the work and wait).
- Sub-$2K hobby project → SideProjectors or a "for sale" post in your niche community. Fees at this size eat the deal.
- Content sites / blogs specifically → Flippa and Empire Flippers have the deepest content-site buyer pools; multiples for content in 2026 average ~2.3x annual profit with top-quartile sites reaching ~4.7x (Flippa's own H1 2026 data) — the spread is the negotiation.
What I'd actually do
If your project makes money: get a valuation from two places minimum (they will disagree — that spread is information), then choose broker vs. marketplace based on whether the commission is buying real work.
If it doesn't make money yet: skip the valuation-formula rabbit hole entirely. A formula multiplying zero returns zero; what you need is a demand reading. List where buyers can compete for it in a bounded window, set a reserve at your walk-away number, and let the result tell you what the market thinks. Worst case, you've learned the real number — which is more than any calculator will tell you.
Numbers above pulled from each platform's live pricing page in August 2026 — fee schedules change, so verify before you commit. I work on ExitBid, the flat-fee auction platform mentioned above; the fee comparisons are sourced and the bias is disclosed, so weigh accordingly.
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