About
About FirstPass Memo
FirstPass Memo is a free red-flag checker for people buying a small online business: SaaS, content sites, ecommerce, apps. Paste the listing text and it shows payback in months, the asking multiple against a range of comparable listings, and the top three red flags, each with a question to send the seller. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing you paste is sent.
Facts
| Name | FirstPass Memo |
|---|---|
| What it is | A free red-flag checker, five free buyer calculators and buyer-side first-pass memos on online-business listings priced $10k to $150k |
| Who it is for | People buying a small online business: SaaS, content sites, ecommerce, apps, newsletters and similar |
| Website | firstpassmemo.com |
| Contact | hello@firstpassmemo.com |
| Stage | Beta, launched October 2026. Beta memos are free. Paid memos are planned at $99 (Standard) and $149 (Plus), with the first memo at $79 for waitlist members. |
| Who pays | Buyers only. No referral fees or other payments from marketplaces, brokers or sellers. |
| Affiliation | Independent. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or paid by any marketplace, broker or seller. |
| How the checker works | 33 plain rules, summarised on the checker page, explained one by one under red flags explained and published as rules.json. It is not an AI model, and it runs in your browser: nothing you paste is sent. |
| Data we publish | Dated aggregates of public listing data from the WebsitesForSaleOnline public API (Empire Flippers listings excluded), with a CSV and the method, on the benchmarks page. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. |
| Advice | None. Everything here is informational screening, not investment, legal, tax, accounting or valuation advice, and not an audit or verification. |
What we do
- Read the numbers a listing already shows and work out payback in months and the annual multiple.
- Point out red flags in those numbers, each tied to the figure that triggered it, with a question to send the seller.
- Publish the rules, the arithmetic and the data behind them, so you can check our work.
- Write first-pass memos on live listings for buyers in the free beta.
What we do not do
- We do not verify seller figures, inspect accounts or replace due diligence by you and your advisers.
- We do not take money from marketplaces, brokers or sellers, and we do not earn referral fees on any sale.
- We do not tell you to buy, sell or bid. ADVANCE, WATCH and PASS labels in memos compare a listing with criteria shown in the memo.
- We do not republish marketplace listings. Composite examples on this site are invented and labelled as such.
- We do not set cookies or use trackers, ads or third-party analytics. We count visits from known search and AI crawlers, and from a short list of search and AI sites, as daily totals only: no IP addresses, cookies or full referring addresses.
Corrections
If a figure or fact on this site is wrong or out of date, email hello@firstpassmemo.com. Pages show the date they were last updated, facts from other sites carry the date we read them, and changes to the benchmark data are logged on the benchmarks page.
Marketplace names and trademarks belong to their owners and are used only to identify where a listing appeared.