Nobody tells you the worst part of selling something you built: the moment a buyer asks "so, what's your price?" and your mind goes completely blank. Ask for too much and you get silence. Ask for too little and you'll feel it for years. So let's take the guessing out of it.
The good news is that valuing a small digital project isn't mystical. Buyers aren't reading tea leaves — they're running one simple piece of arithmetic, adjusting it for how nervous your project makes them, and landing on a number. Once you can run the same math, you stop negotiating from a place of hope and start negotiating from a place of "here's why."
Step 01The one formula that runs everything
Almost every small online business — a micro-SaaS, a content site, a Shopify store, a newsletter — gets valued the same way. You take how much money it makes, and you multiply it by a number.
"Yearly profit" has a proper name in deal-land: SDE, or Seller Discretionary Earnings. It's your net profit plus anything you were paying yourself out of the business — a fair chunk of the founder's salary, the subscriptions only you use, that conference you expensed. Add those back, because the next owner won't have them. SDE is the honest picture of what the project throws off in a year.
The multiple is the interesting half. It's not a fixed number — it's the market's confidence score. A boring, stable, hands-off project earns a high multiple. A fragile, you-shaped, could-vanish-tomorrow project earns a low one. Same profit, wildly different price, entirely because of risk.
Step 02The 2026 benchmarks
So what multiple should you expect? It depends heavily on what kind of project you built, because different models carry different risk. Here's roughly where the market sits this year.
The gold standard, because the revenue recurs. Under ~$1M ARR it's usually 4–6× annual profit (SDE), or read another way, about 2.5–4× ARR. Low churn and real growth push you to the top of that range.
$5k/mo SaaS, healthy margins ≈ $126k–$168kBlogs and content sites are quoted on a monthly multiple — typically 35–45× the average monthly profit (that's only ~3–3.7× a year). The multiple lives or dies on where your traffic comes from.
$3k/mo profit ≈ $90k–$135kPhysical products carry inventory, suppliers, and thinner margins, so they trade lower — roughly 1.5–3.5× annual SDE for sub-$5M businesses. Clean supplier relationships and diversified sales channels help.
$40k/yr SDE ≈ $60k–$140kOne thing to notice: SaaS beats content beats commerce, and it's not close. It's the same reason a landlord pays more for a building with a signed ten-year lease than an empty one — recurring, predictable money is simply worth more per dollar.
Step 03Run it yourself — a worked example
Let's price a real-ish one. Say you've got a little B2B SaaS doing $5,000 a month, it's been roughly flat for six months, margins are healthy, and it eats about three hours of your week.
Ten minutes, no spreadsheet, no broker. This won't be the exact number you sell for — but it puts you in the right stadium, and that's most of the battle.
Step 04But mine has no revenue yet
Here's the part the valuation calculators quietly skip, and it's the one that matters most for early-stage builders: what if there's no profit to multiply?
A pre-revenue project can't be valued on a multiple, because zero times anything is zero — and yet these projects sell every day. They sell because a buyer isn't paying for last month's profit; they're paying for a head start. When there's no earnings to anchor to, value comes from four other places:
Honestly? For a pre-revenue project, the truest answer to "what's it worth" is "what someone will pay for it." That sounds unsatisfying until you realize it's freeing: you don't have to guess a perfect number. You can list it, invite offers, or run a short auction and let the market tell you — which is exactly what these tools are for.
Step 05Five levers that move your number
Two projects with identical profit can be worth double or half of each other. The gap is risk, and most of it is fixable before you ever list. These are the levers buyers price on:
Your multiple isn't a grade on the project you built. It's a measure of how confidently the next person can own it without you. Sell the confidence, not just the code.
Step 06A reality check before you list
Two last truths, gently. First: an asking price is a hypothesis, not a fact. The market has the final say, and a fair number that sells this month beats a dream number that sits until you give up on it. Second: these benchmarks are a starting line, not a guarantee — your churn, growth, traffic mix, and how transferable the thing is will swing the real figure more than the category ever will.
So do the napkin math, fix the cheap levers, price it honestly — and then let real buyers do what they do best: tell you what it's actually worth.
Don't guess the price.
Let the market find it.
List your project free on Vertos, take offers at a fixed price, or run a live auction and let buyers set the number. Flat 5% only when it sells, Stripe escrow on every deal.
List your project →Now go price it like you mean it.
— The Vertos team