Where to Sell a Pre-Revenue Project in 2026

Selling something with $0 in revenue sounds like a hard sell. And honestly, it can be. But pre-revenue projects change hands all the time. Chrome extensions with 2,000 daily users. SaaS tools with a working MVP and a waitlist. Mobile apps that got featured once and still get organic downloads. The buyers are out there, they're just looking in different places than the people buying profitable businesses.

The real question isn't whether you can sell a pre-revenue project. It's where to put it so the right buyer actually sees it.

Who Actually Buys Pre-Revenue Projects?

Before picking a platform, it helps to know who's on the other side. Pre-revenue buyers fall into a few categories, and each one shops differently.

Technical operators looking for a head start. They can build, but they don't want to spend three months on auth, billing, and landing pages when someone already did that work. They'll pay $1,000-$5,000 for a clean codebase with a live product, even if it hasn't made a dollar yet.

Portfolio acquirers who buy cheap and monetize later. They might grab five projects under $2,000 each, bolt on ads or a subscription tier, and see which ones stick. Volume play. They care about traffic and domain authority more than current revenue.

Strategic buyers who need your specific niche. Maybe you built a Figma plugin that does exactly what their design team needs, or a Telegram bot that serves a community they're already in. These buyers will pay more than the project is "worth" on paper because the alternative is building it themselves.

Most pre-revenue deals land between $500 and $15,000. Some outliers go higher when there's real user traction or a strong technical moat. The point is: the buyer pool exists, but it's smaller and pickier than the market for profitable businesses. Your choice of platform matters more, not less.

Every Realistic Option, Compared

There are maybe six or seven places worth considering for a pre-revenue project in 2026. Some are obvious, some are underrated, and a couple are popular but probably wrong for this specific use case.

Flippa

Flippa is the biggest general marketplace for digital assets, and it's probably the most welcoming to pre-revenue projects. You'll find everything from $300 WordPress sites to $500K SaaS businesses, and the pre-revenue category is genuinely active. Buyers browse by asset type, price range, and metrics, so even a zero-revenue listing gets some eyeballs.

The downsides are well documented. Buyer quality is inconsistent. You'll get tire-kickers, lowballers, and people who ask questions they could answer by reading your listing. The 10% success fee adds up on smaller deals. And your listing competes with hundreds of others in the same price range, many of which are also pre-revenue.

Still works if your project is easy to understand at a glance. A clean screenshot, a few metrics (users, downloads, traffic), and a realistic price will do more than a wall of text about your vision.

ExitBid

ExitBid runs 5-day timed auctions with a flat $199 listing fee and zero commission on the sale. The format works differently than a traditional listing: you set a starting price, buyers bid against each other, and the auction closes on a fixed date. That time pressure can be useful for pre-revenue projects because it forces buyers to make a decision rather than sitting in a "maybe" pile for weeks.

The trade-off is straightforward. ExitBid is a newer, more focused marketplace. The buyer pool is smaller than Flippa's. But the buyers who are there tend to be operators and technical people who understand software assets, which is exactly who you want for a pre-revenue project. No one's going to ask what "MRR" means.

Worth considering if your project has clear upside that multiple buyers could see. Auction tension only works when more than one person wants the thing. If your project is extremely niche, a more targeted approach might make sense.

Acquire.com

Acquire.com has become the default recommendation for SaaS acquisitions, and for good reason. It's polished, the buyer pool is serious, and the process is well structured. But it leans heavily toward revenue-generating businesses. Their intake flow asks for MRR, growth rate, and financial metrics that a pre-revenue project simply doesn't have.

Can you list a pre-revenue project there? Technically, yes. Will it get the same attention as a $5K MRR SaaS? Probably not. The platform's sorting and recommendation logic tends to favor businesses with financial traction. Your listing might sit quietly while profitable businesses get all the buyer attention.

If your project has strong user metrics, an impressive tech stack, or a recognized brand in its niche, Acquire.com might still work. But if your main selling point is potential rather than current performance, you might feel invisible there.

Indie Communities and Forums

Reddit's r/SideProject, r/MicroSaaS, and Indie Hackers have active buy/sell threads. The reach is real, the friction is zero, and the buyer pool overlaps heavily with the technical operator crowd that actually wants pre-revenue projects.

The catch? No structure. No escrow by default. No moderation of buyer quality. You handle everything yourself: pricing, negotiation, due diligence questions, transfer. That's fine if you're comfortable with it. But if your project is worth more than a couple thousand dollars, the lack of a structured process starts to feel risky.

Good for testing the waters. Post your project, see what kind of response you get, gauge interest. If someone serious bites, you can always move the deal to a proper escrow service. But don't expect speed or consistency.

Direct Outreach

Sometimes the best buyer isn't browsing any marketplace. They're running a company that would benefit from what you built, and they don't even know your project exists.

Direct outreach works best when your project has obvious strategic value to a specific type of buyer. You built a Shopify app for a niche that a larger Shopify app company serves? Reach out. Your Chrome extension does something that a SaaS company's customers keep asking for? Email them. The conversion rate is low, but the deal quality can be significantly higher because there's no marketplace competition driving the price down.

This takes real effort. Identifying buyers, crafting personalized messages, following up. And for pre-revenue projects, you're essentially pitching potential, which is a harder sell in a cold email than "this makes $3K/month." But when it works, it tends to work well.

What Matters Most for Pre-Revenue Deals

Revenue-generating businesses sell on numbers. Pre-revenue projects sell on something else entirely. The buyer is making a bet, and your job is to reduce the perceived risk of that bet.

• Working product over wireframes. A live, deployed product is worth 5x what a "nearly finished" repo is worth. Buyers want to click around and see it work.
• User traction over projections. 200 real users beat a TAM calculation every time. Show sign-ups, active users, downloads, or waitlist numbers.
• Clean code over clever code. Buyers will look at the repo. If they can understand the architecture in 20 minutes, they're more likely to bid. If it takes a full day just to run locally, most will walk.
• Transfer simplicity. Can you hand this over in a weekend? Or does it require three weeks of migration and custom setup? The easier the transfer, the higher the price.
• Honest positioning. Don't pitch a $500 side project as "the next big thing." Buyers who purchase pre-revenue assets are sophisticated enough to see through inflated narratives. State what it is, what works, what doesn't, and what the buyer gets.

If you're not sure what your pre-revenue project might be worth, run it through a valuation calculator to get a baseline before listing anywhere.

Picking the Right Platform for Your Specific Project

One More Thing to Consider

Pre-revenue projects lose value over time. Code gets stale. Dependencies break. Users drift away. If you've decided to sell, the worst thing you can do is spend three months "getting it ready." List it now, while it works and while the traction is real. A slightly rougher listing today beats a polished listing for a project that's been abandoned for 90 days.

Buyers know what pre-revenue means. They aren't expecting perfection. They're expecting a working product they can build on. Give them that, put it where they can find it, and let the market do the rest.