Rudy Bekker vs Flippa.

Flippa is the biggest name in buying and selling online businesses by volume. For starter sites, aged domains, and $5K flips, their marketplace works well — it's genuinely the default.

For a real business doing $50K+ net monthly, the math stops making sense. A 10% success fee on a $2M sale is $200,000 — roughly two years of an operator's salary, handed to a platform that primarily ran ads against your listing.

Then there's the auction mechanic itself. Your listing goes public. Anyone with an account can request your metrics, sign an NDA (that most won't honor anyway), and pepper you with due-diligence questions while having no actual capital. A non-trivial share of Flippa listings — especially higher-ticket ones — never close. They simply time out.

I'm not a marketplace. I'm a single principal with capital already reserved for acquisitions. If your numbers are real, I send a written offer in 24 hours and can wire funds within 48 of a signed agreement. You keep 100% of the price we agree on — no success fee on the back end.

To be fair: Flippa is a good fit for small flips — think $5K – $40K Shopify stores, starter content sites, domain names, and app prototypes. The marketplace is built for that volume and velocity.

It can also work for sellers who have the time and patience to run their own sales process: screening a high volume of buyers, answering the same due-diligence questions fifteen times, and waiting out a 30–60 day close. If you value running your own auction to maximize price discovery, and your business is squarely under $500K in total value, Flippa is a legitimate channel.

If the business is more material — meaningful monthly profit, real tech stack, real users — the auction model tends to cost more in time and fees than it returns in price lift.