How we rank the best SaaS deals on TrustMRR
TrustMRR is the cleanest source of verified-revenue SaaS for sale, but their own ranking is mostly chronological or by single-axis filters. Buyers waste hours scrolling through listings that look great on one metric and rotten on another.
Our composite MRRdeals Score fixes that. Each listing gets a 0-100 grade computed from seven independent signals you can inspect on every detail page. The breakdown shows you exactly where a listing is strong and where it isn't.
Value
Payback period at the stated margin, asking price relative to the median multiple of the same kind of business in its category (mobile apps are compared with apps, web SaaS with web SaaS), and operating margin. The most heavily weighted axis on purpose: this is an acquisition site, not a popularity contest.
Growth
The revenue trend over the last ~90 days, measured on our own daily snapshots rather than a single 30-day figure. Growth is capped so a one-month spike can't carry a listing, and erratic revenue is penalised. Decline costs points but isn't fatal: sometimes the price already reflects it.
Traction
How much real usage sits behind the revenue: paying customers, revenue scale and traffic (store ratings for mobile apps), measured on log scales so a $500/mo app isn't crushed by a $50K/mo one, plus basic live-site health.
Moat
Defensibility against the next wave of AI-driven commoditisation, organic search presence, and how recurring and B2B the revenue is. Thin AI wrappers and SaaS built on no-code rails get a discount.
Operability
How turnkey the post-acquisition operation is: diverse marketing channels, Merchant-of-Record status, an existing team. A small weight: it matters, but less than what the business earns.
Risk
Inverse: higher = safer. Business age, breadth of the customer base (ten customers is a concentration risk), recurring vs one-off revenue, and a known payment provider.
Market
Structured market read across TAM, saturation, three-year trend, AI-disruption risk, and hype cycle, combined with our category momentum signal. Niches we judge to be saturated or fading lose points; under-served growing categories gain them.
Why we keep the exact recipe private
We publish what each of the seven axes measures, but not their exact weighting nor the way a proprietary modifier (up to a few points either way) reorders the final ranking.
This is deliberate. If every input and every coefficient were public, sellers could engineer their listings — pad a metric here, shave a friction there — to maximise the ranking rather than the underlying business. The opaque part of the formula keeps the MRRdeals Score honest.
- ·What we will say: the modifier blends real-time category momentum (heating, neutral, cooling) with a small set of internal signals around buyer demand and listing freshness.
- ·What we won't say: the exact axis weightings, the formulas behind each sub-score, or the calibration of the modifier. Those evolve internally and we may retune them when we spot gaming attempts.
The system is deterministic — same inputs always produce the same output — and applies to every listing equally. No one buys a higher position.
What we explicitly don't do
- ·We don't pay-to-rank. No listing can buy a higher position. Referral commission is paid only by the marketplace (TrustMRR or Empire Flippers) when a deal closes, never by the seller to rank.
- ·We don't hand-curate. Scoring is deterministic: same input, same output. Financial signals recompute regularly; the site-derived signals are calculated once at ingest.
- ·We don't hide deals. Every TrustMRR listing flows through. Lower scores mean lower visibility, never censorship.
Which listings get a score
Only listings that are for sale, show an asking price and bring in at least $100 per month of verified revenue (MRR, or cash collected over the last 30 days for one-off sales). Below that, payback and multiple are noise: a $15/mo app asking $5,000 is a 28-year payback that tells you nothing. Roughly six in ten TrustMRR listings sit under that bar, mostly side projects with no revenue at all. We keep them out of our rankings, grids and sitemap, so every deal you see here has numbers worth modelling.
Empire Flippers listings
Our Empire Flippers section also carries a MRRdeals Score, in a separate ranking. Empire Flippers audits each business and prices it on annual net profit, not on payment-provider MRR, and most of its listings are Amazon, e-commerce and content businesses rather than SaaS. So the score is built for that data: profit multiple and margin against similar businesses, profit trend, month-to-month stability, track record, owner hours and trademark. A score there is never compared with, or mixed into, the TrustMRR rankings above.
Limitations we're honest about
Profit margin and growth are self-reported (although TrustMRR verifies revenue through the payment provider). The Product, Moat and Market signals are captured at ingest — they don't auto-update if the seller redesigns the landing page next week. Recently listed SaaS have no historical snapshot yet. Treat the MRRdeals Score as a strong shortlist signal, not a substitute for due diligence.
Found a flaw or have a better weighting idea? Email us at hello@mrrdeals.com.