The other side of the table
Who buys an app or SaaS business at $20K a month
Bending Spoons bought AOL in January 2026 and Eventbrite in March. At $20K a month the buyers are smaller and less famous, and most of them say on their own websites how big a business they want.
Where each buyer says it buys
Monthly revenue, as each buyer states it on its own website. Ranges given in ARR are divided by 12. A line that fades has no published ceiling.
Apps: holding companies and rollups
Pocket Fund, a holding company based in Mumbai, buys mobile apps from $1K to $150K in monthly revenue and SaaS from $5K to $300K. Bluethrone works by what it calls the 5K rule: at least $5K a month and 5,000 downloads. Its own apps have 82 million downloads between them, and it says a valuation takes 10 days.
Kodeon, from Toronto, publishes no range. Since late 2023 it has collected more than 30 life-improvement apps, and in August 2026 it closed its fourth and largest deal: Breethe, a mental wellness app with over $50 million in lifetime revenue, for a price in the eight figures. Breethe had nearly sold five years earlier, to a public company, until COVID stopped it.
RevenueCat asked ten app buyers for the top three things they look at. No two gave the same list. All of them brought up retention, and even there the bar moves: Jon Walsh of Kodeon calls 60–70% a decent range for annual subscription retention, while Reflective Apps has some apps as low as 25%. Traffic splits them too. Quiet calls 75% paid and 25% organic a good mix, and Zach Tobin of Product Growth would ideally buy 100% organic.
B2B SaaS: small private equity funds
XO Capital publishes the most exact brief we found: B2B SaaS with at least $10K MRR and ideally $30K to $60K, gross margin of 80% or more, 50 or more customers, and lifetime deals under half of revenue. It says it closes in about 30 days. Alleyway Capital buys profitable subscription software from $200K to $2M ARR that is at least three years old. Its site puts 10 days on the offer and a month on the close.
A SaaS business at $20K a month is inside both windows, close to the bottom. saas.group, which buys bootstrapped SaaS companies, starts at $1M ARR, about $83K a month.
The buyers in the headlines
Tiny, the holding company Andrew Wilkinson co-founded, owns 21 businesses and does deals from $5M to $300M. The median search fund deal falls in the same range.
The fleece vest is the uniform of a search fund: one or two people with a group of investors behind them, looking for one company to run for five to ten years.
At 7 times EBITDA, which puts profit at about $2.1M a year. The median company had 34 employees.
Companies in your own market
A competitor, or a company that wants your users or a feature it lacks, rarely publishes a window. In RevenueCat's interviews these strategic deals come out as rare and dependent on a lot of matchmaking. They are also the deals where buyers pay a premium.
Deals Tonic sells apps and SaaS businesses from $20K a month off-market. We keep a registry of buyers, with what each one says it buys and what it has actually bought. Send the link and the monthly revenue, and we come back with the buyers whose window you are in.
Sources: buyer criteria from the websites of Pocket Fund, XO Capital, Alleyway Capital, saas.group and Tiny, checked 23 September 2026. Bluethrone's homepage, and its blog post on selling an app to a company, April 2024. RevenueCat, "What app buyers really want in 2026: insights from 10 acquirers", interviews by Evelin Herrera of EHVM App Capital, published 18 December 2025 and updated 11 September 2026. BetaKit on Kodeon and Breethe, 19 August 2026. Stanford GSB, 2024 Search Fund Study, June 2024. Bending Spoons acquisition dates from its website.
The shortlist for yours
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Andrew Levenko
I run off-market M&A for online businesses: fintech, martech and consumer apps. Operator before that, scaled payments to $50M GMV. Based in the UAE.