Where should you actually sell your side project?

You opened your editor on a Sunday. By Thursday you had working auth, a real database, and something you'd actually pay for. Then life happened, and the project has been sitting in a tab ever since. This is about the part nobody tells you: getting paid for it is harder than building it.

Not because your project is bad. Because the exit is broken. The obvious places to list it were each built for someone who isn't you — a domain flipper, a venture-backed SaaS, a bargain hunter — and by the time you read their fine print, a surprising slice of your sale price has quietly evaporated. So I sat down and actually read the pricing pages. Here's the honest version, one marketplace at a time.

Marketplace 01Flippa

The giant. Great if you're selling a $2M content site. Rough if you're selling a Chrome extension.

Flippa has been around since 2009 and it's enormous — tens of thousands of live listings at any moment. That's the pitch and the problem. Your legit little AI app shows up in the same feed as parked domains and sites with, let's say, creatively reported traffic. Buyers know this, so they show up skeptical and they lowball on reflex.

Then there's the tab. You pay to list — before you've earned a dollar — and it's non-refundable whether you sell or not. Then Flippa takes a success fee on top, and their pricing page puts that at a flat 10%. Escrow and payment processing ride along as extra percentages on top of that.

If you've got a big, clean, revenue-heavy asset and the patience for a noisy marketplace, Flippa can absolutely move it. For a $6k side project, you're paying premium-marketplace prices to stand in a very crowded room.

Marketplace 02Acquire.com

Formerly MicroAcquire. Polished, serious — and it's climbed a long way upmarket.

Acquire.com is a genuinely nice product. But the "micro" is doing less work than it used to. The room is full of buyers hunting six- and seven-figure SaaS with real MRR, and the fee structure has grown up to match. On their own seller-pricing page today, a deal under $250k carries an 8% closing fee and a $25/month listing fee for as long as you're listed. (It's 7% and 6% as the deals get bigger.)

The part that stings the most for an early-stage project is on the buyer's side. To message founders and see the private details, buyers pay a subscription — $390/year for the mid tier, $780/year for the top one. That paywall is great for filtering tire-kickers on a $500k deal. On your $10k project, it just means the indie operator who'd have loved your code never pays to walk through the door.

Marketplace 03Little Exits

Formerly Tiny Acquisitions. The friendliest room in the building — with a turnstile at the door.

I like Little Exits. It has real indie-hacker energy, it's genuinely built for small projects, and the community is warm in a way the big platforms aren't. Credit where it's due.

Here's the catch, and it's a real one: on Little Exits, the buyer pays to reach you. Full access — the analytics, direct messaging, the ability to actually make an offer — sits behind a $249/year membership, or a $9.99 one-time "Sneak Peek" for a week. So the person who stumbles onto your listing, likes it, and wants to send one message… hits a paywall first. Plenty of them just close the tab.

Their exact cut on the seller side isn't posted publicly, which is its own quiet tell. But the structural thing to understand is this: a marketplace that charges buyers admission is, by design, a smaller room. Fewer people through the door means fewer offers on your project — the cost just shows up as silence instead of a line item.

Notice the pattern: each one either takes a big cut, or charges your buyers to reach you, or both. Somebody always pays a toll — the only question is who, and how much.

The mathWhat the seller's cut actually looks like

Fine print is easy to skim past, so here's the same thing as a picture. This is the platform's cut of a clean $10,000 sale — shorter bar is better, because it's money that stays in your pocket.

Marketplace 04What an honest exit looks like

So here's the version we built, because we wanted it to exist and it didn't.

On Vertos, listing is free — always, no upfront gamble. When your project sells, we take a flat 5%, and not a cent before. Every deal runs through Stripe-powered escrow: the buyer pays in, the code stays locked, and the two release together the moment the handoff is confirmed. Nobody walks away with both the code and the money. And buyers get in free — no $390-a-year turnstile between your listing and the person who wants it.

We're not the right home for a $2M content empire — Flippa is better at that, honestly. But if you shipped something real, moved on, and just want a fair, low-friction way to hand it to the next builder? That's the entire reason we exist.

Thanks for reading this far. Go get paid for the thing you built.
— The Vertos team