If you want to sell your WordPress business, the work comes down to four things: a price buyers will pay, numbers they can check, the right buyers seeing it, and a clean handover. Most sales that stall do so on the first or the last. We’ve run FlipWP, a marketplace for WordPress plugin, theme and SaaS businesses, since 2021, and this guide is what we tell sellers before they list.
Is now the right time to sell?
The best time to sell is while revenue is flat or growing, not after a year of decline. Buyers price on the trend as much as the total: a plugin making $40K a year and growing is worth more than one making $50K a year and shrinking.
The usual reasons people sell are good ones:
- You’ve moved on to another product or a job, and the plugin gets a few hours a month
- Support has grown faster than you can handle alone
- You want the cash for something else, or just a break
- The product needs a team (marketing, a second developer) that you don’t want to build
If any of those is true, sell before the neglect shows up in the numbers. A plugin that hasn’t had an update in a year, with a support forum full of unanswered threads, sells for less and takes longer to sell.
Decide what kind of exit you want
Before you talk to buyers, know which of these you’re after, because it changes who you should talk to:
- Clean exit: you hand everything over and walk away after a short transition. This is what most small plugin and theme sales look like.
- Stay on for a while: you agree to a paid transition period (often one to three months) to answer the buyer’s questions, help with support and pass on what’s in your head.
- Join the buyer: a larger WordPress company buys the product and hires you to keep working on it. This is usually only on the table for bigger products, and it means talking to that company directly.
What is your WordPress business worth?
Most WordPress product businesses we see sell for 1.5 to 2.5 times annual revenue. We use revenue rather than profit because most plugin and theme businesses have low running costs, so the two are close. Brokers and general marketplaces often quote a multiple of profit instead, which is why their numbers look higher: check which one you’re comparing against.
What moves you up or down that range:
| Pushes the price up | Pushes it down |
|---|---|
| Recurring revenue (annual licences or subscriptions) with good renewal rates | One-off sales, lifetime deals |
| Revenue growing over the last 12 to 24 months | Revenue falling |
| A free version on wordpress.org with a large, steady install base | Sales that depend on one marketplace or one affiliate |
| Clean, documented code that another developer can pick up | Code only you understand |
| Low support load | A support queue that needs a full-time person |
| A brand people search for | A generic name in a crowded category |
Three times revenue or more is possible, but it needs a strong case: a large install base, high recurring revenue, or a product that fits a particular buyer’s portfolio. When a listing goes quiet, an asking price well above this range is often why.
Products with little or no revenue still sell. A free plugin with tens of thousands of active installs can be worth something to a buyer with a premium add-on to sell, and we list pre-revenue products too.
Get your numbers ready before you list
Every serious buyer will ask for the same things, so have them ready before the first enquiry. It shortens the sale and it shows you’re serious.
- Monthly revenue for the last 24 months, straight from where it’s earned: Freemius, Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, Stripe or PayPal. Screenshots of the dashboard are fine to start; buyers will want read-only access or exports later.
- Renewal or churn rate for licences and subscriptions
- Refunds and chargebacks
- Costs: hosting, the licensing platform’s fees, tools, contractors, ads
- Active installs and their trend, if there’s a free version on wordpress.org
- Traffic to the product site and where it comes from
- Support volume: tickets a month and how long they take
- What’s included: the code, the domain, the product site, the customer list, trademarks, social accounts
Separate the product’s revenue from anything else that runs through the same account. If your plugin’s sales share a Stripe account with your consulting work, export the plugin’s payments on their own.
Where to sell your WordPress business
There are four main routes, and the right one depends on the size of the business and how much of the work you want to do yourself.
A WordPress marketplace (FlipWP). Your listing goes to buyers who are specifically looking for WordPress products and already understand licensing, wordpress.org and renewals. You deal with buyers directly. It suits most plugin, theme and WordPress SaaS businesses, from a few thousand dollars up to seven figures.
A general marketplace. Flippa has the largest pool of buyers, and listings are public, so you’ll get more enquiries but more of them from people who don’t know WordPress. Acquire.com is a good fit for SaaS products with steady recurring revenue.
A broker. Brokers such as Empire Flippers and FE International value the business, find buyers, run the negotiation and manage the handover. They take a percentage of the sale price, which on a small deal is a large share of what you get. They’re worth it for larger deals or if you don’t want to handle the sale yourself.
Straight to an acquirer. Several WordPress companies buy plugins regularly to add to their portfolios. If your product fits one of them, you can approach them directly. You’ll get one bid rather than several, so you need a clear sense of the price you’ll accept.
These aren’t exclusive. Plenty of sellers list in more than one place, and we don’t ask for exclusivity.
How selling on FlipWP works
- Talk to us about the price. Send us your revenue and some context, and either your asking price or a request for help setting one.
- Pay the listing fee and fill in the listing form. The fee depends on the asking price: $99 up to $20K, $199 up to $100K, and $499 above that.
- We write the listing, with our own commentary for buyers, and send you a private preview to approve.
- It goes out in our Monday email to our buyer members and is listed on the site. Listing details are only visible to members, so your figures aren’t public.
- Buyers contact you directly. You run the conversations and negotiate yourself; we’re there if you want a second opinion.
- When it sells, there’s a 1% success fee if the asking price was over $20K and the buyer is one of our members. Under $20K, there’s nothing more to pay.
Your seller account shows each listing’s views and enquiries, and you can mark it sold or take it down yourself. There’s more on how we started FlipWP, and why, in why we started a marketplace for WordPress businesses, and answers to common questions in the FAQ.
Due diligence and the deal
Once a buyer is interested, expect this order of events:
- Calls and questions. The buyer will want to understand how customers find the product, what support looks like and why you’re selling.
- An NDA, before you share the code, the customer list or access to dashboards.
- An offer, then a letter of intent: a short, usually non-binding summary of the price, what’s included, how payment works and the transition period.
- Due diligence. The buyer checks your numbers against the source, reviews the code and looks for anything that could hurt the product (a security issue, a trademark problem, a wordpress.org guideline breach).
- An asset purchase agreement, which lists exactly what’s being sold, the price, any non-compete, and what you’ll do during the transition. For a larger deal, have a lawyer read it, and talk to an accountant about tax before you sign.
- Payment. For larger deals, an escrow service such as Escrow.com holds the money until the assets have changed hands. On smaller deals, buyer and seller often agree a split: part on signing, the rest once the transfer is done.
Most deals for a reasonably priced listing close within 60 to 90 days of it going live.
Handing over a WordPress plugin business
This is the part most guides skip, and where a sale can lose customers if it’s rushed. Make a checklist with the buyer and work through it together.
The wordpress.org plugin. For a plugin with under 10,000 active installs you can do it yourself: add the buyer’s wordpress.org account as a committer on the plugin’s Advanced tab, add them as a contributor in the readme, then use “Transfer your plugin” in the Danger Zone at the bottom of the same tab. Plugins over 10,000 users need an email to the plugins team from the current owner’s address. The steps are in WordPress.org’s guide to transferring your plugin to a new owner. Transferring doesn’t remove your commit access, so remove yourself once the buyer is set up.
Licences and subscriptions. Where they live decides how hard this is:
- Freemius: the product can be moved to the buyer’s store, and customers, licences and subscriptions go with it. See Freemius’s guide to moving a product to another store.
- Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce on your own site: the whole store goes to the buyer, usually with the domain and hosting. The payment account is the harder part (below).
Payments. Subscriptions are tied to the payment account they were set up in. Stripe can copy customers and their saved cards to the buyer’s Stripe account, but not the subscriptions themselves, so the buyer recreates those on their side. PayPal subscriptions can’t be moved between accounts, so those customers will need to subscribe again. Plan this with the buyer before the transfer, not after.
Everything else:
- Domain names and DNS
- The code repository, build tools and any deploy keys
- Hosting for the product site and any licensing or update server
- The support desk and its history, plus docs
- The email list and any automations
- Social accounts, affiliate programme and partner integrations
- Telling customers: a short email from you introducing the new owner keeps renewals going
Selling a WordPress agency or service business
Agencies and care plan businesses sell differently from products. Buyers value the recurring revenue from maintenance and hosting plans, and whether client contracts can be transferred to a new owner. One-off project work counts for much less, and so does any revenue that depends on your personal relationships with clients.
Most of what we list are plugins, themes and SaaS products, but we look at service businesses case by case. Some WordPress companies buy agencies and care plan books directly, so if yours is mostly recurring maintenance revenue, it’s worth approaching them too.
Ready to sell?
If you have a WordPress plugin, theme or SaaS business to sell, list it on FlipWP. Send us your numbers and we’ll help you set a price that sells.
Alex Denning
Updated October 5, 2026