How to value an app that makes money

Price ≈ a year's profit × a multiple. Most small online businesses sell for between one and five times a year's profit. One large marketplace reports its typical sale at about 2.3 times, and its best ones at 2.6 to 3.4 times.¹ Subscription software tends to sit higher: across confirmed sales on Acquire.com, the middle figure was 3.9 times profit in both 2024 and 2025.²

Those ranges come mostly from sales in US dollars. There's little public data on sales in Nigeria yet, so treat them as a starting point and let real offers tell you the rest.

For small, owner-run projects, buyers use seller's discretionary earnings (SDE): the profit before tax and interest, with a few things added back.³

• Add back what you pay yourself, because the buyer can decide what to pay whoever runs it.
• Add back one-off costs that won't happen again, like a redesign or a lawyer for a one-time contract.
• Take out anything that isn't really the business, like your personal phone bill or a laptop for something else.

Use the last 12 months, and be ready to show each add-back. A buyer will take off anything you can't back up, and the multiple applies to every naira they take off.

You'll see three different multiples quoted online, and mixing them up is the easiest way to get your price wrong.⁴ If you run the project yourself and it's small, which is almost every app and website on Prow, buyers use SDE. Bigger companies with a management team, usually past about $5 million a year, get valued on EBITDA, which is profit before interest, tax and depreciation. Revenue multiples are for software that's growing fast and pouring its profit back into growth. Put one on a small app that's growing slowly and you'll ask for far more than anyone will pay.

Two apps can make the same profit and still sell for very different prices. What buyers are really pricing is how sure they can be that the money keeps coming after you leave.

So they pay more when revenue repeats every month and few customers cancel, when it's growing (above 30% a year gets attention), and when most of each sale is profit rather than cost. They pay more when the project runs without you, when no single customer matters too much, and when the numbers come straight from the source rather than a spreadsheet. Having two or three serious buyers at the same time helps more than any of it.⁴

They pay less for anything that could disappear the week after the sale. If most of your users come from one Instagram page, or one client pays a third of the bills, or revenue has been sliding for three months, expect the number to drop.

Our free “What's my project worth?” calculator does this sum for you and shows the reasons behind the range. If your project doesn't make money yet, read what a project is worth with no revenue instead.

On Prow: revenue connected from Stripe shows as verified on your listing, which is exactly the kind of proof that keeps buyers from marking your price down.

• You've worked out 12 months of SDE, with every add-back backed up.
• You know your multiple range and why yours sits where it does.
• You've fixed what lowers it, if you have time: one channel, one big customer, depending on you.
• Your revenue is checked at the source.
• You have a range, and you'll let offers settle the final number.