Pre-Revenue Market Pulse, October 2026: 597 Sale Submissions, $400,000 Median Ask

This is an interim update between quarterly editions of ExitBid's market data, covering the first full month since the Q3 2026 Pulse. The full Q4 edition follows in January 2027.

Key numbers: Autumn report, Q3 Pulse and October update

Earlier columns are shown exactly as published. The last column counts each business once, as explained in the method below.

Where does this data come from?

This data comes from the listing form on ExitBid, an auction platform for online businesses. Founders enter their revenue band, business age, user count, asking price, business type, stage and industry when they submit a business for sale. ExitBid counts every submission from March 1 to October 31, 2026 (UTC), whether or not it was approved or reached an auction.

• Revenue bands: Pre-rev, $1–$1k, $1k–$5k, $5k–$25k and $25k+ a month. "Pre-revenue" means the seller reported zero monthly revenue at submission.
• Asking price: the starting price the seller entered, in US dollars.
• Percentiles: the value at position floor(n × p) in the sorted list, the same method as the live JSON file.
• Excluded: 15 listings drafted with ExitBid's Listing Generator, since their fields aren't entered by the seller. That tool launched after the Q3 snapshot, so no earlier edition contains them.
• Repeat submissions: the series counts submissions, as earlier editions did, so a business submitted more than once counts more than once. 89 of the 597 rows are repeats. Some are deliberate resubmissions, and some came from a checkout-form behavior fixed on October 23. The "unique businesses" figures keep only the first row for each seller and business name.

What share of online businesses for sale are pre-revenue?

There's no market-wide figure. On ExitBid, 73.1% of submissions that reported revenue were pre-revenue as of October 31, 2026 (316 of 432), or 71.5% counting each business once (259 of 362). Another 165 submissions left the revenue field blank.

The monthly share has leveled off near the top of the series: 83.7% in September (108 of 129) and 82.0% in October (123 of 150). ExitBid accepts pre-revenue projects by design, so this share overstates the wider resale market. The comparison below shows by how much.

By self-reported stage (n=535): MVP 55.0%, Early Revenue 27.3%, Growth 13.1%, Mature 4.7%.

What is the median asking price for a pre-revenue business?

The median asking price for a pre-revenue business on ExitBid is $400,000 as of October 31, 2026 (n=314), or $300,000 counting each business once (n=257). The middle half of asks runs from $100,000 to $1,400,000.

Newer asks are higher. Pre-revenue submissions received in October have a median ask of $650,000 (n=122), against $490,000 in September (n=107). Counting each business once, that's $500,000 (n=97) against $400,000 (n=85).

• 100 of 314 pre-revenue asks are $1,000,000 or more.
• 16 of 314 are under $10,000.
• The most common asks are round numbers: $50,000 and $500,000 (21 each), then $100,000 (19).

How do these numbers compare with other marketplaces?

The median pre-revenue ask on ExitBid ($400,000, or $300,000 per unique business) is higher than the $195,800 median ask on Acquire.com, where the median listing has $121,500 in trailing revenue. It's also 80 times the $5,000 median ask in the TrustMRR for-sale pool. The datasets measure different populations, which is why public figures for "what a small software business costs" disagree so widely.

Flippa's is the only sold-price row, and it's an average of 14 deals. BigIdeasDB is a vendor compiling listing data, not the marketplaces themselves. None of the other sources publishes a pre-revenue share, so the ExitBid share can't be checked against a like-for-like number.

Do pre-revenue asks fit marketplace price limits?

Most don't. Only 5.1% of pre-revenue asks on ExitBid (16 of 314) fall below Flippa's $9,999 limit for assets with no revenue stream, and 12.7% (40 of 314) fall below Acquire.com's $25,000 limit for pre-revenue SaaS. This compares prices only, since each platform has other eligibility rules.

Flippa's help pages don't all give the same Projects & Concepts maximum, and rules change, so check each platform's current seller pages. Our eligibility matrix covers the wider set of marketplaces.

How do pre-revenue asks compare with actual sale prices?

This update contains no sale-price data, and asks shouldn't be read as prices. The closed pre-revenue sales ExitBid has been able to verify cluster around $500 to $4,500, drawn from a small set of public comparables rather than a statistical sample. Against that range, a $400,000 median ask is about 89 times the top figure.

Flipagora's analysis of the Q3 data calls this distance the pre-revenue gap. The October figures don't show it closing.

How old are businesses when they're listed for sale?

43.4% of businesses submitted for sale on ExitBid were under three months old as of October 31, 2026 (259 of 597). Among pre-revenue submissions the share is 53.2% (168 of 316).

For contrast, Flippa reports an average asset age at sale of 2.5 years for AI Apps & Tools, 3+ years for apps and 6+ years for SaaS in the first half of 2026. That's age at sale on a revenue-focused marketplace, against age at submission here. 71.3% of ExitBid submissions under three months old ask $100,000 or more (184 of 258).

How many users do businesses have when they're put up for sale?

67.0% of ExitBid submissions report fewer than 100 users (400 of 597), rising to 83.5% among pre-revenue submissions (264 of 316). 30.8% of priced submissions with fewer than 100 users ask $1,000,000 or more (123 of 399), or 29.0% counting each business once (98 of 338).

Does first revenue raise the asking price?

Not in this data. Businesses earning $1 to $1,000 a month have a median ask of $300,000 (n=67), no higher than the $400,000 for pre-revenue businesses (n=314). Counting each business once, both medians are $300,000. Asks rise in the $1,000 to $5,000 band, to $1,000,000 (n=29), though that group and those above it are small.

What do founders ask for different types of pre-revenue business?

Telegram bots ask far less than other software. The median pre-revenue Telegram bot asks $30,000, against $400,000 for SaaS. Types with at least 20 priced pre-revenue submissions are shown, and the smaller ones are in the CSV.

The gap between columns matters here. Repeat submissions move the mobile app and AI medians a lot, so treat those two as rough. SaaS and Telegram bots hold steady under both counts.

Across all 597 submissions, SaaS is the largest type (272), followed by mobile apps (80), Telegram bots (53) and AI tools and agents (44). AI/ML is the largest named industry (101 submissions).

How many businesses were submitted in October 2026?

ExitBid received 203 submissions in October 2026, the largest month in the series, or 161 unique businesses. That's about 6.5 a day, against 171 and 5.7 a day in September as published in the Q3 Pulse. Unique businesses rose about 15%, from 140 to 161.

Part of this curve is ExitBid's own growth as a platform, so it doesn't measure market growth by itself. The Q4 edition will show whether the pace held across the full quarter.

What can't this data tell you?

• It's one platform. ExitBid accepts pre-revenue projects and markets itself to them, so it attracts them. Its intake isn't a census of online businesses for sale.
• Fields are self-reported. The figures are as sellers entered them, before any review.
• Asks aren't prices. No figure here measures what a buyer paid.
• The source has an interest. ExitBid earns listing fees from sellers, including pre-revenue ones.
• Small groups swing. Treat any cut with fewer than about 30 submissions as a rough signal.

Why do snapshots and the live file sometimes differ?

Asks cluster on round numbers, so one submission can move a percentile a long way. On the Q3 date the published median was $320,000 while the live file showed $300,000, as Flipagora noted. In that window, $300,000 and $320,000 sit next to each other in the sorted list, so a shift of one position separates them.

Sellers can also edit or remove submissions, so a total won't always equal the previous total plus new rows. Published editions stay frozen. Always quote a figure with its date and denominator.

How to cite this data

The data is published under CC BY 4.0. Cite it as: ExitBid (exitbid.io), Pre-Revenue Market Pulse, October 2026, data through October 31, 2026.

• Download this snapshot as CSV (frozen, every table on this page plus smaller groups)
• Live aggregates as JSON (refreshed hourly, runs ahead of this snapshot)