Where to Sell My Business in 2026: Marketplaces, Brokers and Fees Compared

by Amine Rahal | Aug 19, 2026 | Selling a Business

I have been writing about small business economics for a little over two decades, and the question that has changed the most in that time is not what a business is worth. It is where you go to sell it. Twenty years ago the answer was a local broker and a classified ad. Today you have open marketplaces charging a few hundred dollars, curated digital marketplaces taking fifteen percent, franchise broker networks with a thousand agents, and mid-market advisory firms that will not return your call under a million in revenue.

The honest version of the answer is that there is no best place to sell a business. There is only the right place for what you are selling and how big it is. Put a $90,000 Shopify store in front of a Sunbelt franchise office and nothing happens. Put a $12 million HVAC company on Flippa and you will get tyre kickers and a headache. Below is what each option actually costs, who it actually serves, and how to work out which bucket you are in.

The short version

Three questions sort almost everyone. What are you selling, what does it earn, and do you want to do the work yourself or pay someone to do it.

The one rule worth remembering. Marketplaces sell you exposure. Brokers sell you a process. If your business is simple enough that a buyer can understand it from a listing page, pay for exposure. If it needs explaining, pay for the process. The mistake I see most often is a seller with a complicated business buying a cheap listing and then wondering why nothing happens for six months.

The open marketplaces: you pay to be seen, not to be sold

These are classified sites. You write the listing, you field the enquiries, you negotiate, you close. Nobody takes a percentage. For a straightforward local business with clean books, this is the cheapest route by a wide margin, and it is how a large share of small business sales in America actually happen.

BizBuySell

The biggest one, and it is not close. Owned by CoStar Group since 2012, the same company behind LoopNet and Apartments.com. It is explicit about what it is not: their own FAQ says they are a marketing platform charging advertising fees, not a brokerage firm.

Listing prices on a six month term run $74.95 a month for Basic, $99.95 for Showcase and $199.95 for Diamond. Three month terms cost more per month, twelve month terms cost less. There is no commission at any point.

What makes BizBuySell genuinely useful even if you never list there is the quarterly data. Their Q2 2026 report put the median sale price at $349,250 on median revenue of $692,087 and median cash flow of $155,921, across 2,117 completed transactions, according to their own quarterly Insight Report. That is the closest thing the small business market has to a public price index, and it is worth reading before you set an asking price.

• Largest buyer audience of any US business-for-sale site, 50M+ annual visits by their own count
• No commission, so on a $400,000 sale you keep roughly $400,000 more than a 10% broker deal would leave you
• Publishes real transaction data quarterly, which almost nobody else does
• You do all the work: screening, NDAs, negotiation, coordinating diligence
• Volume of listings means a mediocre listing disappears
• Transaction volume was down 10% year on year in their own Q2 2026 report, so the buyer pool is softer than it was

BusinessesForSale.com

The main alternative, run by Dynamis, a family-operated UK company with US offices in North Carolina. Pricing is a flat one-off rather than monthly: $199 for one month, $299 for three, $399 for six, billed in a single installment, with a 20 day free trial that does not ask for card details. Their own line on fees is blunt: no commission, no hidden charges, choose a package and pay the one off fee.

They report over 55,000 active listings across 145 countries and 1.2 million monthly buyers. The international reach is the real differentiator. If your buyer might be overseas, this is where they are looking.

• Genuinely free trial with no card required, so you can test the water at zero risk
• Strongest international buyer pool of the open marketplaces
• Flat one-off pricing is cheaper than BizBuySell over six months, $399 against roughly $450
• Smaller US-specific audience than BizBuySell
• Publishes no median sale price or deal size data

BizQuest

Worth one line only: BizQuest is owned by the same parent as BizBuySell. LoopNet acquired it around 2010 and CoStar now owns both. Listing on both is not the diversification it appears to be. I tried to pull their current pricing directly and the site returned errors on every attempt, so I am not going to quote a number I could not verify.

The digital marketplaces: curated, and they take a cut

If you are selling something that lives on the internet, a different set of platforms applies. These vet what they list, which means you get rejected sometimes, and it means buyers trust what is on the shelf. That trust is what you are paying the commission for.

Empire Flippers

The most structured of the digital marketplaces. No fee to submit or list. The commission is tiered and blended: 15% flat under $700,000, dropping to 8% on the portion between $700,000 and $5M, then 2.5% above $5M. There is a minimum commission of $10,000, which is the part people miss. On a $40,000 sale that minimum is effectively a 25% rate.

To list you need at least $2,000 a month in net profit averaged over twelve months, plus a twelve month trading history and verified expenses. They take a two month exclusivity period. Their public scoreboard reports $604.2 million in lifetime sales across 2,665 listings sold, with 101 of those above $1M. Our full Empire Flippers review works through what that commission actually costs at each deal size, and what their vetting does not cover.

• Vetting is real, which is why their buyer pool takes listings seriously, around 650 NDAs signed weekly
• No upfront cost at all, so the risk sits with them until you sell
• Tiered commission means large deals are not punished the way a flat 15% would punish them
• The $10,000 minimum commission makes anything under about $67,000 expensive in percentage terms
• Two month exclusivity locks you in before you know whether it is working
• The $2,000 monthly profit floor rules out a lot of smaller sites

Flippa

The opposite philosophy: open, self-serve, and it will accept businesses that are not yet profitable. Below $100,000 you list yourself for $29 to $199 and pay a 10% success fee at closing. At $100,000 and above you get a dedicated broker, an upfront fee of $799 to $1,499, and the success fee steps down: 10% to $499,900, 9% to $999,900, 8% to $4.9M, 7% to $9.9M, 6% to $49.9M and 5% above that. Those rates are on their pricing page but only appear once you move the asking price slider, which is why they are so often reported as unpublished. Full detail in our Flippa review.

Their published median closing times are useful: 15 days under $50,000, 49 days between $50,000 and $250,000, and 73 days above $250,000.

One thing I will not soften. Flippa currently holds an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, with three complaints filed and a failure to respond to two of them. A pattern of not answering complaints is a reasonable thing to weigh before you hand a platform your escrow.

• Lowest barrier to entry anywhere, $29 gets you listed
• Accepts pre-revenue and unprofitable assets that Empire Flippers would reject
• Fastest median close of any platform at the small end, 15 days under $50k
• Fee disclosure is scattered: rates sit behind a slider, the Terms point to a Success Fee Page that 404s, and the sell page still advertises “from 3%”, which matches no tier
• BBB rating of F with unanswered complaints
• Open listing model means far more low-quality inventory to compete against

Acquire.com

Startup and SaaS focused, and the cleanest pricing of the lot. It scales by asking price: under $250k is $25 a month plus an 8% closing fee, $250k to $1M is $50 a month plus 7%, above $1M is $100 a month plus 6%. Free valuation, automated NDAs and escrow are included. They report $500M+ in closed deal volume across 2,000+ startups sold.

They hold ★★★★★ 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 195 reviews, which is the highest verified rating of any platform in this article.

• Fee structure is published in full and scales sensibly with deal size
• Best verified customer rating here, 4.5 on Trustpilot from 195 reviews
• Escrow and legal document tooling included rather than billed separately
• Heavily SaaS-weighted, so a content site or ecommerce store is a worse fit
• Their guided advisory tier only takes profitable SaaS above $100k revenue

Quiet Light and Website Closers

Both are brokerages rather than marketplaces, and neither publishes commission rates. Quiet Light targets businesses valued $250,000 to $25 million with at least $75,000 in annual profit, and reports 750+ businesses sold totalling over $500 million, with 85% of listings selling within 90 days. Website Closers reports $2.23 billion transacted across 2,345 businesses, takes no upfront fees or retainers, and carries an A+ BBB rating along with ★★★★★ 4.8 out of 5 from 206 reviews on Reviews.io.

With both, you will have to get on a call to find out what it costs. That is normal at this end of the market, but go in knowing that industry standard for sub-$5M digital deals sits around 8% to 12%.

The broker networks: a thousand agents, wildly different experiences

Transworld and Sunbelt are the two names you will hear if you ask a local accountant. Both are franchise networks, which is the single most important fact about them. You are not hiring Transworld. You are hiring whoever owns the Transworld office in your county, and the quality range across offices is enormous.

What a Transworld franchise actually quoted us

Neither network publishes fees, so I asked one directly. A Transworld Business Advisors franchise in Ontario put this in writing in March 2026:

“We work on success fees. You pay us only when the business sells, and it is 12% of the selling price for the 1st million, 10% for the 2nd million, 8% of the 3rd million and so on.”

That is a declining scale, and 12% sits at the top of the main street range. Three things came out of that exchange worth knowing before you talk to any franchise broker.

There are usually upfront working fees. Their explanation: part of the fee is charged upfront because launching a sale costs money, in listing fees on industry sites, marketing spend and management time. It is credited against the final payout.

The rate is not negotiable, but the upfront can be. I pushed back and said another firm had quoted 10%. The answer was that rates are set by corporate, the advisor has no say, and they do not compete on price. What I did get was the upfront working fees waived entirely, with the 12% left intact. If you negotiate with a franchise broker, that is where the give is. We collected the same detail from eight companies in our guide to what business brokers actually charge.

You agree the asking price before you sign anything. They value the business off three years of P&L, you discuss it, and if you cannot agree on a number you can walk away before any exclusivity attaches. Only then does the marketing agreement and its exclusive mandate come into force. Worth confirming in writing with whichever office you use.

One thing that surprised me. This broker did not come from a referral or a cold list. He found the business because it was listed on an open marketplace and messaged me through it. If you list on BizBuySell or BusinessesForSale.com, expect brokers to approach you as well as buyers. It costs nothing to hear the pitch, but know that is what is happening.

Those Trustpilot numbers are almost meaningless at three reviews and one review respectively, and I would not weigh them heavily either way. The more useful signal is that neither network publishes what it charges, and neither publishes a corporate-level complaint record you can inspect. Look up the specific office you would be working with on BBB before you sign anything. That profile exists and it is the one that matters.

One Sunbelt franchise office does publish an industry fee guide, and it is a fair description of the market: 10% to 12% on main street deals with a $10,000 to $20,000 minimum, and lower middle market work at 4% to 6% or on a Double Lehman scale, sometimes with a $5,000 to $15,000 retainer.

Baton, the hybrid

Worth knowing about because it prices differently from everyone else. Baton is a New York advisory firm with a marketplace attached. Their free tier gets you a valuation and an anonymised teaser listing at no cost. Their seller plan is $1,000 a month, credited back to you at closing, with a three month minimum, and a success fee of 6% on the first $5M and 2% above that, dropping to 3% if you bring your own buyer. They require $100,000 in adjusted annual cash flow and typically work on businesses valued $1M to $10M. A+ with the BBB, though with zero customer reviews on file.

I will flag one inconsistency: their marketing page leads with free to start while the pricing page discloses the $1,000 monthly retainer. Both are true, they describe different tiers, but the framing is generous to itself.

Earned Exits, and where it actually fits

Full disclosure before anything else: Earned Exits is a partner of this site, and I earn a commission if you engage them. That is exactly why I want to be precise about who they are wrong for, and why I published a full Earned Exits review covering their fees, track record and regulatory history rather than a recommendation.

They are a national brokerage and M&A advisory working with companies doing $1M to $40M in revenue. Current listings on their site run from roughly $1.3M to $16M in asking price, across HVAC, waste management, powersports, water services, IT and manufacturing. They report $2.1 billion in combined transactions, a 93% closing rate for clients whose financials are what they call buyer ready, and a typical process of about 117 days with a buyer identified inside 60 days once the numbers are in order.

If you are selling a $60,000 content site or a $250,000 corner cafe, they are not the right call. Go back up this page to Flippa, BizBuySell or Empire Flippers. Earned Exits is built for owner-operated companies in the lower middle market, and the economics only work in that band.

Where they are a good fit, the differentiators worth knowing: a free valuation with no obligation, a three person dedicated team per client rather than a single agent, and an add-backs process that reworks your financials to show true seller discretionary earnings before a buyer sees them. That last one is not a gimmick. Most owner-operated companies understate their real earnings through legitimate personal expenses run through the business, and getting that presentation right is often worth more than anything that happens in the negotiation.

On fees, their own referral page gives the clearest indication they publish: a typical company they sell is around $10 million and their commission on that sale is around $1 million. Call it roughly 10%, paid at closing, with no retainer. Their consulting packages are refunded in full out of the commission if you go on to list with them.

• Free valuation with no obligation and no retainer, so the cost sits with them until close
• Specialised in the $1M to $40M revenue band rather than trying to serve everyone
• Add-backs work on financials before going to market, which is where most value is won or lost
• No independent Trustpilot or BBB profile I could locate, so there is no third-party complaint record to inspect
• Wrong fit for anything under roughly $1M in revenue
• Colorado licensed and nationally operating, but no IBBA or CBI certification is published

How to choose in about five minutes

Work down this list and stop at the first one that describes you.

Two things nobody tells you. First, you can list on an open marketplace and hire a broker later, but not the other way round: most broker agreements claim any buyer who came through their listing period. Second, an exclusive longer than six months is a bad trade at any commission rate. If they cannot move it in six months, the problem is the price or the business, and another six months of exclusivity will not fix either.

What this costs you in real money

Same business, $500,000 sale price, three routes:

That $75,000 gap is not an argument against brokers. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying. A broker who gets you $560,000 instead of $500,000 has more than paid for themselves. A broker who gets you the same price you would have got yourself has cost you a year of your life and a tenth of your business. The question is never whether the fee is high. It is whether this particular person will beat the price you could get alone.

Two guides worth reading before you list

Before you go state by state, these two cover the parts that apply no matter where you operate.

• How Much Can You Sell Your Business For? (2026 Valuation Guide)
• How to Sell a Business in 2026? (Guide + Comparing Options)

What actually changes from one state to another

Three things, in order of how much money they move.

What does not change anywhere

This is the part owners underestimate. In twenty years I have never seen a deal fall apart over which state it was in. I have seen plenty die over these:

• Books that do not reconcile. If your financials do not tie to your tax returns, every number you quote becomes negotiable.
• Customer concentration. One client at 40 percent of revenue takes a chunk off your multiple before anyone opens the lease.
• Owner dependence. If the business cannot run for three weeks without you, a buyer is purchasing a job rather than an asset.
• Waiting too long. The best time to prepare is a year before you want to sell. Most owners start the month they decide.

The SBA’s guide to closing or selling a business is a solid free overview of the process, and the Tax Foundation’s state income tax data is the cleanest place to check where your state sits before you model an after-tax number.

Where you are selling from: all 50 state guides

Each guide covers the local filing steps, the state tax picture, what buyers in that market tend to look for, and a city by city view where it makes a difference. Pick your state:

A note on timing and inflation

One thing I would push back on gently: owners often anchor to what a similar business sold for in 2019 and assume that number still applies. It rarely does in either direction. Multiples move with borrowing costs, and the nominal price of everything has shifted underneath us. If you want to sanity check an old comparable against today, run it through our CPI inflation calculator first, and if you are tracking where costs are heading, the CPI release schedule tells you when the next read lands.

If debt is part of the picture

A fair number of owners reading this are selling partly to clear personal or business debt, and that changes the order of operations. Settling debt before a sale can protect your proceeds, but doing it badly can damage your credit right when you need financing to close. If that is your situation, our two minute debt relief quiz maps the options against your actual numbers, and the ranked list of debt relief companies shows who we rate and why.

Frequently Asked Questions

Flippa Review (2026): Real Fees From 10% to 5%, the $50,000 Vetting Cliff and an F at the BBB

by Amine Rahal | Aug 19, 2026 | Selling a Business

Disclosure. We have no affiliate or partnership arrangement with Flippa and earn nothing if you use them. I am, however, a paying Flippa customer right now, with a business listed and a broker I am working with weekly. That gives me first-hand detail you will not get from a desk review, and it also gives me a reason to think well of them. Weigh the positive parts of this review with that in mind. The criticism further down is the same criticism I would make either way.

Correction, 19 August 2026. An earlier version of this review said Flippa does not publish its success fee. That was wrong, and the error was mine. Flippa does publish a full tier table on its pricing page, but only inside an interactive slider that does not render for anything that reads the page without running JavaScript. The rates are below. What remains fair criticism is set out honestly further down.

Flippa charges a success fee of 10% falling to 5% depending on your asking price, plus either a self-service listing package or an upfront brokerage fee. The full table is below, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

I have been writing about small business economics for over two decades, and I want to be straight about how I got this wrong the first time. Flippa’s Terms of Service point sellers to a “Success Fee Page.” That page, flippa.com/success-fees, returns a 404. The help centre article on pricing gives no percentages and links to the pricing page. And on the pricing page the numbers only appear once you drag a slider. Every one of those things is still true. But the fee is there, and I should have found it.

Flippa’s success fees, in full

Verified directly from flippa.com/pricing on 19 August 2026. Move the asking price slider on that page and the fee changes with it.

Two structural points that matter more than the headline rate.

The model changes at $100,000. Below that you are on self-service: you pay $29 to $199 for a listing, you run the sale yourself, and Flippa takes 10% at the end. At $100,000 and above you get a dedicated M&A broker, and the upfront fee jumps to $799 or more.

The fee is not blended. Unlike Empire Flippers, where 15% applies only to the first $700,000 and the rate steps down on the portion above it, Flippa’s rate appears to apply to the whole purchase price at the band you fall into. On a $1,000,000 sale that is 8% of the lot, or $80,000.

What is still wrong with the disclosure. Flippa’s sell page says in one place that “success fees start from 5%” and in another that sell-side fees start “at 3%.” The 5% matches the $50M+ tier. The 3% matches no published tier at all. And the Terms of Service still send sellers to a Success Fee Page that does not exist. Publishing the numbers behind a slider while three other Flippa pages point somewhere else is not good disclosure, even though the numbers are real.

Flippa at a glance

Listing costs, escrow and buyer verification

Everything below is published plainly and has been for a while.

Above $100,000 you are into brokerage rather than self-service, and the upfront fee replaces the listing package: $799 at $100k to $249.9k, $899 to $999.9k, $1,299 to $9.9M and $1,499 above that, each for a six month brokerage term.

Payment processing. FlippaPay runs from about 0.5% to 1% depending which Flippa page you read, and holds funds in a regulatory trust account administered by licensed payment partners until you approve release. Escrow.com is the alternative at 3.25% up to $5,000, then a sliding scale down to 0.89% above $25,000, with Flippa applying a 20% discount to the variable portion.

Buyer verification is a $5 card hold, rising to an additional $500 authorisation for bids or offers of $5,000 or more.

The $50,000 vetting cliff

Flippa markets trust hard. There is a verifications team, integrations with Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Google Analytics and AdSense, and badges on listings. Here is what those badges actually mean, from Flippa’s own help centre.

“Data Verified” means only that data from a third party platform has been connected to the listing. It is a plumbing confirmation, not an audit. Nobody has checked whether the numbers make sense.

“Vetted by Flippa” is the real one. Flippa checks revenue via platform access or a live screen share, primary expenses via invoices, and traffic via analytics. It applies only to listings of $50,000 and above.

So the entire $29 to $199 self-serve band, which is most of the marketplace by volume, gets no Flippa vetting at all. And even above the cliff, the Terms of Service state that for “Vetted by Flippa” listings, Flippa “makes no warranties or representations as to the accuracy and completeness.”

Flippa also publishes the size of the team doing this work. Their safety page says the marketplace integrity and listing review team is ten people, and that each revenue-generating asset gets a 25 point check before going live. Their own throughput figure is over 20,000 assets a year.

Ten people, twenty thousand assets. That is roughly eight assets per person per working day, at a 25 point check each. Both numbers are Flippa’s. Draw your own conclusion about how deep the check can be.

What happens when a deal goes wrong

This is where I would want a buyer to pay attention.

Flippa’s dispute process opens 48 hours after an auction ends or an offer is accepted, and the other party gets 72 hours to respond. Flippa reviews and can resolve in either party’s favour or “without fault,” and says it typically resolves without fault absent evidence of improper conduct.

The critical sentence: Flippa will not process a dispute once payment has been made via PayPal, or once funds have been released from Escrow.com or FlippaPay, unless both parties agree to unwind the deal. Release the money and the platform’s dispute machinery is finished.

After that, Flippa points you to independent legal advice or arbitration, referencing the ICDR for cross-border matters. Flippa’s own 2025 data says 85% of its transactions are cross-border. So for most disputes, the realistic fallback is international arbitration over an asset that might have cost $8,000.

The Terms also state Flippa is “not a party to any transaction,” and excessive disputes may result in sanctions including a permanent ban.

The ratings, and why they contradict each other

A 4.2 on one platform and a 1.8 on another is not a contradiction. It is a bimodal distribution, and it is exactly what you would expect from a high-volume open marketplace. Most transactions go fine. A minority go badly, and the people they go badly for are very motivated to write about it.

The BBB complaints, which are the best-documented material available

• April 2025, unanswered. A buyer purchased an ecommerce fashion brand and roughly $70,000 of the previous owner’s outstanding balance landed in their account. When the buyer raised it, Flippa deferred to the broker and seller to sort out directly.
• November 2024, unanswered. A complainant won an auction, the seller refused to complete, the complainant left negative feedback on the seller’s page, and Flippa deleted the complainant’s account.
• May 2024, resolved. A listing did not sell. Flippa charged $60 to relist despite the dashboard saying “relist for free”, and applied a 90 day exclusivity clause.

Two of the three went unanswered, which is why the rating is an F. The pattern in the first two is the same one the Terms describe: Flippa positions itself outside the transaction, and the dispute lands between buyer and seller.

What I could not verify, and will not repeat

Search for “Flippa scam” and you will find a great deal. Most of it does not survive contact.

The tiered success fee figures that circulate everywhere, usually 10% then 7.5% then 5%, trace back to competitor blogs with no primary source. Several of the most prominent “Flippa problems” articles are published by competing marketplaces. There is a dedicated anonymous complaint site that names no victims, no dates and no losses, and carries a disclaimer that its content may be incorrect and includes satire. None of that is evidence.

What I can tell you is what I looked for and did not find: no lawsuit, class action, court judgment, FTC action or regulatory enforcement action against Flippa. I am not saying none exists. I am saying I could not find a record of one.

What I have actually experienced, buying and selling on Flippa

I have been in the internet industry since the nineties, and I have been buying and selling domains on Flippa for years. It is one of the oldest marketplaces still standing in this business, and longevity counts for something in a category where platforms appear and vanish inside a single cycle. For domains and smaller digital assets it has been a reliable place to transact, and I say that as someone who has been on both sides of the table there more than a few times.

Right now I am going through the process again, and this time with a real business rather than a domain.

The current sale, and what the $799 actually bought

I have a digital agency listed. The asking price puts it in the $100,000 to $249,900 band, which is the tier where Flippa stops being self-service and gives you a dedicated M&A broker. The upfront cost for that was $799 for a six month brokerage term, with the 10% success fee payable at closing on top.

I want to be specific about what that money has bought, because “you get a broker” is vague and the difference between a good one and a bad one is most of the outcome.

• My broker responds within hours, not days, and has done consistently for months.
• He writes the outreach messages to buyers, and when I asked him to handle a tricky reply about seller financing, he drafted the response and set the expectation with the buyer for me.
• When I asked to pause the listing while I explored an offer that came from outside the platform, he arranged it, and told me plainly where I stood on the exclusivity clause rather than letting me find out later.
• He pushes back. When I suggested dropping the price, he told me not to yet, because no buyer had objected to it, and the problem was volume rather than pricing. He was right.

The results as of today, taken from my own seller dashboard:

Forty two buyers signing an NDA on a service business in the low six figures is real deal flow, and it arrived without me writing a single outreach message. That is what the fee is for.

The honest caveat: the business has not sold yet. Volume of interest is not the same as a closed deal, and I have said elsewhere in this review that a lot of NDAs with no offers is a normal and frustrating stage. I will update this section when it closes, or when it does not.

None of that changes the criticism in this review. The fee disclosure is still scattered across four pages that point at each other, the Manager Agreement I signed still refers to a “Pricing Schedule” that is not attached to it, and nothing under $50,000 is vetted. Good service from an individual broker and sloppy platform disclosure are perfectly capable of coexisting, and here they do.

What Flippa is genuinely good at

Having spent this long on the problems, the balance matters.

Nothing else in this market gets you listed for $29. Nothing else accepts pre-revenue and unprofitable assets. Empire Flippers would reject the overwhelming majority of what sells on Flippa, and a broker would not return the call.

The speed is real. A published median of 15 days to close under $50,000 is faster than any curated alternative, and it is a direct consequence of the open model. Their 2025 data reports transaction value up 36% year on year, six and seven figure deals up 30%, and 400,000+ weekly active buyers.

At the top end they run a genuine advisory arm: 15 in-house M&A advisors with CM&AA accreditation plus a network of over 200 third party brokers, supporting $100k to $50m+ businesses. Their largest publicised deal is a $35 million portfolio of 36 apps. The VIP programme for businesses over $10 million exists, though its price is not published either.

Pros and cons

• Cheapest entry anywhere: $29 gets a real listing in front of a large buyer pool
• Success fees are genuinely tiered and drop with deal size, from 10% down to 5% above $50M
• Accepts unprofitable, pre-revenue and tiny assets that every curated marketplace rejects
• Fastest published median close in the market at the small end, 15 days under $50,000
• FlippaPay holds funds in a regulatory trust account with a two-step buyer release
• Genuine M&A advisory tier with accredited advisors for larger deals
• From my own live listing: the $799 broker tier produced 42 signed NDAs without me writing a single outreach message
• Listing fees are refundable if no qualified buyer makes contact within 30 days
• Fee disclosure is scattered: the rates sit behind a slider, the Terms point to a Success Fee Page that 404s, and the sell page still advertises “from 3%”, which matches no published tier
• Nothing under $50,000 is vetted by Flippa, and vetting above that is disclaimed in the Terms
• A ten person integrity team against 20,000+ assets a year, both their own figures
• BBB rating of F with two of three complaints unanswered
• The dispute process ends the moment funds are released, with international arbitration as the fallback
• Documented cases of complainants having their accounts removed

Should you use Flippa?

The single most useful piece of advice I can give a Flippa buyer is about timing, not diligence: the dispute process dies the moment you release funds. Everything you intend to check, check before that click. There is no chargeback culture here and no platform arbitration afterwards.

Questions to settle before you list or bid

• Sellers: confirm your success fee in writing. The published tier is 10% up to $499,900, but your signed Manager Agreement refers to a “Pricing Schedule” rather than stating a rate, so get the number on paper.
• Sellers: is there an exclusivity period, and what happens if it does not sell?
• Buyers: is this listing “Vetted by Flippa” or only “Data Verified”? Below $50,000 it is neither.
• Buyers: can I get direct read access to analytics and payment platforms, not screenshots?
• Buyers: what exactly am I confirming when I click release, and what recourse remains afterwards? (None through Flippa.)

Related reading

• How to sell a business in 2026, the full process from preparation to closing
• Earned Exits review, the mid-market broker route for offline companies
• How much do business brokers charge, real 2026 fees from eight companies compared
• How much can you sell your business for, the multiples buyers are paying in 2026
• Selling a business in Tennessee, an example of how state rules change the net

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