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.
Profitability
Payback period, asking price relative to category multiples, and operating margin. Among the most heavily weighted axes on purpose: this is an acquisition site, not a popularity contest.
Growth
Short-term MRR trajectory, with bonus weight when historical snapshots confirm a sustained climb rather than a one-month spike. Decline is penalised but not fatal — sometimes the price already reflects it.
Product
Revenue-per-visitor and customer count blend with live-site signals: pricing reachability, presence of expected core pages, copyright freshness, homepage latency. A site that's still being maintained scores higher than one frozen in 2022.
Moat
Defensibility against the next year of AI-driven commoditisation, plus brand presence on independent review platforms (G2, ProductHunt, AppSumo, Trustpilot, Capterra). SaaS built on no-code rails get a discount for the lock-in.
Operability
How turnkey is the post-acquisition operation? We reward diverse marketing channels, Merchant-of-Record status, multiple cofounders, and an existing affiliate program. Solo founders and no-code lock-in get docked.
Risk
Inverse: higher = safer. Listing freshness (a SaaS relisted for 6+ months is a flag), payment provider trust, business age, customer concentration. Recent founding without proven retention gets penalised.
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. Affiliate commission is paid only by TrustMRR when an acquisition closes, never by the seller.
- ·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.
Limitations we're honest about
Profit margin and growth are self-reported (although TrustMRR verifies revenue via Stripe). 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.