How to Find Abandoned SaaS for Sale (Before They Hit Marketplaces)

GitHub has 6.7 billion events indexed. Millions of repos with paying users, working payment integrations, and real recurring revenue — maintained by founders who moved on, burned out, or simply ran out of time. Most of these never appear on any marketplace. They just sit there, dormant, waiting.

ReviveHQ's AI scans this entire event stream daily. But if you want to understand the methodology — either to validate how it works or to run your own searches — this is the complete playbook.

Why GitHub First

Acquisition marketplaces have a selection bias problem. The deals that appear on Acquire.com, Microns.io, or MicroAcquire are the ones someone thought were worth listing. That means:

• The founder already knows the asset has value
• A broker has usually already applied a multiple
• The deal has been shopped — you're probably not the first buyer
• The asking price is anchored to public comps, not the floor

GitHub is the opposite. Founders who stopped committing in 2022 aren't thinking about their repo as an asset. They're not monitoring inbound interest. They're often reachable via email in the README and genuinely surprised someone wants to buy their old project.

The Four-Step Filter

Step 1: Dormancy — The 12-Month Rule

Not every inactive repo is an opportunity. The signal you're looking for is intentional abandonment — a project that had real users, working infrastructure, and paying customers, followed by a hard stop in maintenance.

The meaningful dormancy threshold is 12+ months without a commit. Shorter than that and the founder might just be busy. Longer signals they've moved on structurally. The GitHub search operator:

This returns repos with 100+ stars that haven't had a push since the start of 2025. Adjust the language and star threshold for your target niche. Node.js, Python, and Ruby repos tend to have the most monetized SaaS-style products. Stars over 100 filter out hobby projects without users.

Important: stars are a proxy for community, not revenue. A 500-star repo might make $0. A 90-star repo might have $3K MRR from a narrow professional audience. Stars tell you someone cared — they don't tell you someone paid. You need the next filter for that.

Step 2: Monetization Signals — What Actually Matters

This is where most self-sourcing buyers stop: they find dormant repos but can't tell which ones have revenue. Here's what to look for in the repo itself:

Gumroad links in the README. Gumroad is the canonical indie-hacker monetization layer. If the README has a Gumroad link, there's a real checkout flow, which means real transactions. Check the Gumroad product page — often still active, sometimes showing purchase count in the social proof section.

GitHub Sponsors active. If the founder has a Sponsors button and it's been active for 12+ months, some fraction of their user base is paying. This is a floor signal — Sponsors revenue rarely exceeds $500/mo, but it proves a paying audience exists.

Stripe integration in the codebase. Search the repo for stripe or STRIPE_SECRET_KEY in the codebase. A working Stripe integration means the product was designed to collect payment. Combined with dormancy, this is the strongest signal.

Reference to MRR or pricing in the README or Issues. Some founders are explicit: "This tool charges $X/month for the hosted version." Issues section often has feature requests referencing paid tiers. The history is all there.

Step 3: Fork-to-Star Ratio — Separating Organic from Trend

A repo can accumulate stars from a single Hacker News post. Forks are harder to fake — they represent someone caring enough to take the code and run with it. The fork-to-star ratio tells you whether interest is organic and sustained or a single viral moment.

The signal range:

• 0.10–0.20 fork/star ratio: Healthy organic growth. People are actively building on this.
• Below 0.05: Stars likely came from a viral moment. Community isn't engaged enough to actually use it.
• Above 0.30: Either very niche/technical (good) or the repo was used as a template (bad). Dig into what the forks are doing.

GitHub's API makes this trivial: GET /repos/{owner}/{repo} returns stargazers_count and forks_count. Run the division. A 200-star, 30-fork repo (0.15 ratio) is a better signal than a 1000-star, 20-fork repo (0.02 ratio).

Step 4: Founder Reachability — The Last Filter

This sounds obvious but most buyers skip it: confirm the founder is reachable before you spend time on analysis.

Check the README for contact info. Check the commit email (git log shows it). Check the GitHub profile for a website or Twitter. Check the Gumroad product page for a support email. Most founders who abandoned a project are reachable within 48 hours if you message them directly.

The message that works: don't open with an offer price. Open with acknowledgment — "I've been using [product] and noticed development slowed down. I'm interested in potentially acquiring it to continue the development. Would you be open to a conversation?" This frames you as a steward, not a liquidator.

Why ReviveHQ Does This At Scale

The manual version of this process — running GitHub searches, checking Gumroad links, calculating fork ratios, validating Stripe integrations — takes 4–6 hours per week if you're thorough. And that's before you've analyzed a single deal in depth.

ReviveHQ's AI runs this continuously across GitHub's full event stream, plus ProductHunt trending/declining products, Gumroad marketplace data, and verified acquisition listings. Each opportunity gets scored 0–100 based on dormancy depth, monetization signal strength, community health, and estimated revival effort. You get 10–15 pre-filtered, pre-scored deals per week.

The free email digest gets you the top 3 deals. The Pro tier at $29/month gets the full weekly list plus revival analysis (tech stack assessment, estimated rebuild time, revenue potential, reason for abandonment).

What Makes a Deal Worth Pursuing

Once you've identified a candidate using the above filters, the decision framework is straightforward:

Confirming MRR: Ask the founder directly. Most will share Stripe dashboard screenshots or Gumroad sales history if they're serious about selling. No verifiable revenue = no acquisition. A founder who can't or won't show payment history is a red flag regardless of how promising the repo looks.

Revenue quality: Recurring revenue (subscriptions) is worth more than one-time sales. A tool with 20 paying subscribers at $15/month ($300 MRR) is better than a tool that sold 500 licenses once. Subscriptions mean the revenue transfers — you inherit the subscriber base, not just the code.

Infrastructure debt: Read the codebase. How hard is the handoff? A well-documented Express app with a single Postgres database is a 2-week rebuild. A custom deployment that requires the founder's personal server credentials is a 3-month migration. Estimate this before you price the deal.

Pricing anchor: The market rate for small SaaS acquisitions is 2–4x annual revenue. A $2,400/year ($200/month) product should sell for $4,800–$9,600. Most founders with abandoned projects don't know this — they're either asking too much based on sentimental value or too little because they're just happy to get anything. Arrive anchored to the multiple, not to an arbitrary number.

The Window Is Closing

The supply of genuinely undervalued abandoned SaaS is not infinite. As more buyers run this methodology, prices will compress toward market comps. The deals that exist today — projects abandoned in 2022 and 2023 that haven't appeared on any marketplace — won't be around in 2027 the way they are now.

The window is real. The methodology works. The question is whether you're running it manually four hours a week or letting a tool do it for you.