# What happens to Stripe when you sell a SaaS business

> Stripe can copy your customers and their saved cards to another account, but not a single subscription. Which route applies depends on who buys, and how to move subscriptions without billing anyone twice.

Source: https://dealstonic.com/sell-saas-stripe-subscriptions/
Author: Andrew Levenko, Off-market M&A
Publisher: Deals Tonic, off-market M&A for apps and SaaS from $20K in monthly revenue
Updated: 2026-09-24

Stripe can copy your customers and their saved cards to another account. It will not copy a single subscription. Whether that matters depends on who is buying.

## The buyer takes your company

If the buyer acquires the company that owns the Stripe account, the account stays where it is and only the people change. The current owner adds the buyer to the team as a Super Administrator and then transfers ownership from the team settings. Customers, cards and subscriptions do not move, because nothing has to.

## The buyer takes the business, not the company

In an asset sale to a company in the same country, Stripe asks the current owner to contact support first, to confirm which details will change. The new owner's personal details go in through the Dashboard once Stripe enables editing, not by email.

The rest is changed in the account settings: the bank account for payouts, the descriptor and phone number on card statements, the business details on receipts, the owner's email, the legal business name and the tax ID.

## The buyer is in another country

A Stripe account cannot change its country. The seller transfers ownership, the buyer opens a new account in their own country, and Stripe support moves the data across. A buyer who wants your customers inside an account they already run gets them the same way, through a copy.

Cards, US bank accounts and SEPA mandates saved as payment methods can be copied, the last only between accounts with the same SEPA creditor ID. Bacs Direct Debit and Canadian pre-authorized debits cannot. If expired cards go into the copy, the recipient's Card Account Updater, when it is turned on, may try to refresh them, and Stripe suggests leaving them out to avoid the fees.

## Rebuilding the subscriptions

The subscriptions are recreated in the new account from a CSV exported from the old one, through Stripe's Billing migration toolkit. Products and prices go into the new account first, and the CSV points each subscription at its new price. Each new subscription has to start at least 24 hours after the upload and waits in a scheduled state until then. For the first 10 hours the migration can still be cancelled.

Customers cannot cancel a scheduled subscription from their portal, only a live one. Stripe's advice is to watch the first charges after go-live for declined cards and to reach customers with failed payments outside email too.

Deals Tonic sells apps and SaaS from $20K a month off-market. Which of the three routes a deal takes is settled with the buyer before the purchase agreement, since the third one adds days of work on both sides.

Sources: Stripe Support, "Transfer a Stripe account to a different entity due to a business sale or acquisition", "Change the owner of a Stripe account" and "Transferring a Stripe account for a business acquired by a legal entity in a different country". Stripe Docs, "Copy customer and payment method data across Stripe accounts", "Migrate subscriptions to Stripe Billing" and "Migrate subscriptions to Stripe Billing using toolkit". All checked 24 September 2026.