What is a software company's data worth?
In this article
Why buyers want a software or SaaS company's recordsWhich systems hold the valueWhat never leaves your buildingWhich buyers fitA worked exampleWhat to check firstRange is our estimate from the buyers' published figures, October 2026, sources on file. Not an offer.
Why buyers want a software or SaaS company's records
Software companies hit every buyer's wish list at once: code with its full history, the tickets that drove it, the chat where it was argued out, and the support queue that reported the bug.
What a buyer is paying for is the loop: a piece of work that starts, moves through people and systems, and ends with a visible result. In a software or SaaS company that looks like:
- A customer reports a bug in Intercom. An engineer opens a Jira ticket. The pull request that fixes it lands in GitHub. Support closes the loop. Buyers call that a linked work trail and pay for the whole chain, not the parts.
- A feature is scoped in Slack, broken into sprints, shipped, and then shows up in renewal conversations in the CRM.
- An outage: the alert, the incident channel, the post-mortem document, the code change.
Which of your systems hold the value
Value follows the systems that recorded the work. For a software or SaaS company, the usual ones are:
| System | What the buyer sees in it |
|---|---|
| GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket | every commit, pull request, review comment and issue, with the history intact |
| Jira or Linear | sprints, tickets, who picked up what, and how long it took |
| Slack | the engineering and support channels where decisions were made |
| Zendesk or Intercom | the customer report that started it, and the reply that closed it |
| HubSpot or Salesforce | pipeline stages, lost reasons and renewal notes |
More connected systems means a higher number. A ticket that links to an invoice that links to an email thread is worth more than any one of them alone. See every system, and how each one is exported.
What never leaves your building
The buyer scrubs before anything is used, and you approve the categories first. For a software or SaaS company that always means:
- Customer names, emails and account identifiers, replaced with tokens
- API keys, secrets and credentials in the repo (buyers scan and reject repos that contain them)
- Any customer data covered by a data processing agreement that forbids secondary use
- Employee HR matters that appear in private channels
How scrubbing works, and what every buyer commits to.
See what your company's records could get.
Ten questions, under five minutes, built from the buyers' own published ranges.
Get my estimate →Which buyers fit a software or SaaS company
- The enterprise buyers
- Lists code, tickets, Slack and CRM as its core categories; 30+ employees; Of the first 300 companies one buyer signed, 55% had Slack and 53% had GitHub; 40+ employees, recurring partnerships; 20+ full-time, 3+ years; 20+ US W-2 staff, 3+ years.
- The multi-lab licensing platform
- Full-company datasets, prefers 200+ people.
- The code buyers
- Repositories on their own, any company size.
- The shut-down and small-company specialists
- 1 to 200+ employees, operating or closed.
We check your company against every program and introduce you to the one that publishes the most for your size, with the fastest payment if you are in a hurry. Every buyer type side by side.
A worked example
A 60-person SaaS company, nine years old, with GitHub, Jira, Slack, Zendesk and HubSpot. Our model puts a scrubbed copy of its operating history at roughly $270,000 to $660,000 across the buyers that fit. One enterprise buyer publishes $100K+ for a qualified company and $500K+ for one with several teams. Final offers depend on the review.
What to check before the first call
Two things decide speed. Did every contractor who wrote code sign over the rights? And do your customer contracts say anything about secondary use of data? Both are yes-or-no answers you can get this week.
Other industries
In short
- Typical range for a 40-person software or SaaS company with 8 to 15 years of records: $180,000 to $440,000, from published buyer figures.
- 4 of the 6 buyer types fit this industry. Any size gets checked; different buyers look at different sizes.
- Customer, patient, borrower and employee identities never leave. Buyers want the process and the outcomes.
- Owners pay nothing. The buyer pays Briggs Analytics only when the company signs.
Questions owners ask.
Do we have to hand over our source code?
You license a scrubbed copy with secrets removed. You keep the code, the repo, and the right to keep selling your product. Most agreements are non-exclusive.
Our product is the data. Is that what they want?
No. Buyers want how your company works: the engineering and support history. Your customers' data inside the product is usually off limits and priced at zero.
We are 12 people. Too small?
No. The enterprise buyers start higher, but the code buyers and the shut-down specialists take companies of any size. A repo with real history has a price on its own. Everyone gets checked.
How fast?
Code-only deals quote in days. Full-company deals with the enterprise buyers run two to eight weeks after the review starts.
