Free tool
Red-flag checker for business-for-sale listings
Paste a listing you are looking at. You get the payback in months, the asking multiple against comparable listings, and the top three red flags, each with a plain explanation and a question to send the seller.
Nothing you paste leaves your browser. The check runs on this page. The listing text is never sent to us or anyone else, and the page loads no third-party scripts.
Listing details
Next step
Get a full memo on this listing
The checker runs a handful of rules on what you paste. A full memo applies the complete rule set, compares every figure with the others on the page, ranks all the flags with their source, and gives you a ranked list of seller questions and the numbers that would change the call. Memos are free during the beta.
This form sends only your email and the two optional choices beside it. It does not send the listing text, and we do not store it. We will reply by email to arrange the memo.
How it works
Simple rules you can check
Payback and multiple
Payback is the asking price divided by monthly profit. If no profit is given, the checker uses annual profit divided by 12, then last month's profit, then MRR as an upper bound, and says which one it used. The multiple is the asking price divided by a year of that profit.
The benchmark is the middle half (25th to 75th percentile) of Empire Flippers asking multiples by category, from the Empire Flippers public Marketplace API on 6 October 2026: 173 listings for sale, all categories. These are asking prices, not sale prices. Categories with fewer than 8 listings, such as SaaS (6), are marked as a small sample.
The flags
About 30 rules taken from our memo pipeline, ranked high, medium or low. They cover missing profit figures, profit above revenue or margins over 90%, a weak last month or a stated decline, a short averaging window, ARR and MRR that disagree, churn above 5% a month, few customers or one large customer, organic search above 50% or one channel above 60% of traffic, Amazon, Google and other platform dependence, search-growth claims the traffic does not support, under 12 months of history, owner hours above 10 a week or not stated, "passive" claims next to staff, and figures with no connected data source.
The checker reads only what you give it. It cannot see the seller's accounts and does not verify anything. A listing with no flags here can still have serious problems.
Not advice
Informational screening only. The checker is an automated first-pass review of the text and numbers you enter. It is not investment, financial, legal, tax, accounting or valuation advice, and it is not an audit, verification or appraisal. Results depend on information published by the seller or marketplace, which has not been independently verified and may be incomplete, out of date or wrong. Flags are prompts for questions, not findings of wrongdoing, and the absence of a flag is not a sign that a business is sound. Do your own due diligence and talk to qualified advisers before you make any offer.
Read the buyer guides or see sample memos from public listings.