We spent five weeks walking our community through the platforms they actually use. Here's what we found about what each one costs, who pays, and where each one falls short.
Platform pricing, listing counts, and terms change often. Current as of September 25, 2026.
Disclosure: Our members receive negotiated perks with several of the platforms below. SMBootcamp may enter into commercial arrangements with platforms mentioned here, and we'll update this disclosure if we do. One of our five sessions was presented by a member of our Deal Team who's also an investor in the platform presented.
Every platform below is here because our members use it. The sections that follow include a member whose deal nearly died and member experiences that contradict a company's own figures. We left those in.
There's no single platform you should source from.
That's the honest answer, and it isn't the one most people want. Over five weeks this summer we ran sessions on Axial, Rejigg, Dealonomy, Kumo, and Baton with our All Access community. Members demoed their own accounts, showed their search settings, and said out loud what was working and what wasn't. One member mentioned he checks around fifteen sites on a regular rotation.
That reframes the question. Not which platform should I pick, but how do I assemble coverage. These five cover different parts of the market, cost wildly different amounts, and fall short in different ways. Knowing which is which is most of the value.
The usual way to sort sourcing tools is broker-listed versus proprietary outreach. That line is dissolving.
Baton's off-market profiles let you flag an owner who isn't for sale and have Baton run the outreach. Dealonomy lets you refer a seller you turned up in your own search and collect a fee for it. Rejigg sources unlisted owners by phone, and also carries brokered listings at a reduced rate. All three are platform businesses working both sides of that line.
A more useful question is how many fee layers sit between you and the seller, and who pays them.
That frame explains almost everything that follows, like: why some platforms are free to browse and expensive to close on, why others are the reverse, and why every platform describes its economics from the perspective of whichever side it's recruiting.
| Axial | Baton | Dealonomy | Kumo | Rejigg | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Two-way matching marketplace of brokered listings | Tech-enabled brokerage with in-house M&A advisors | Closed platform that sources and brokers its own deals | Aggregator that scrapes public listings and broker sites | Sources off-market owners by outbound calling, plus brokered listings |
| Who pays | Both sides | Seller only | Buyer only | Nobody | Buyer only |
| Buyer cost | $0 access, Lehman formula on close | $0 | Free tier or ~$99/mo premium, plus a buyer fee at close | Free, $89/mo Pro, or $149/mo Ultimate | $150/mo, plus Lehman or half-Lehman on close |
| Volume | Low. Roughly 2 to 3 matches per week | ~150 active listings, 30,000+ registered buyers | ~58 to 70 listings nationally | Very high. One member saw ~103,000 results in a week | Modest. A complement, not a primary source |
| Quality | High | Reconciled financials, seller videos, data room | Clean, many with a sell-side QofE already done | Low signal, needs heavy filtering | Best-written listings of the five, per our members |
| Deal size | Majority $700K to $3M EBITDA | 70 to 80% in the $1M to $7M range | ~$500K SDE up to $4.9M EBITDA | Skews small | Varies |
| Exclusivity | Overlaps with other sites | Own listings, but cross-lists some | Fully proprietary | None by design | Off-market flow is proprietary |
| Standout | Fee exemption if you contacted the broker first | ~850 off-market owner profiles you can flag | 10-day premium-only window | One view of most of the public market | You speak to the owner with no broker between you |
| Keep in mind | The seller's broker must also accept you | Baton works for the seller | Can't upgrade to premium after your LOI is in | Weak geography data | You carry the relationship yourself |
| Platform | Buyer pays at close | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| Baton | $0 | 0% |
| Kumo | $0, subscription only | 0% |
| Rejigg, brokered deal | ~$75,000 plus ~$1,800 in year-one subscription | 1.5% |
| Axial | ~$150,000 | 3.0% |
| Rejigg, off-market deal | ~$150,000 plus ~$1,800 in year-one subscription | 3.0% |
| Dealonomy, premium tier | ~$280,000 | 5.6% |
| Dealonomy, free tier | ~$330,000 | 6.6% |
Now set that against the market. Broker success fees typically run 8 to 12% for businesses under $5M, and 3 to 6% in the $5M to $25M range.
The honest conclusion isn't that these platforms save you money. The fee is roughly constant. What changes is who pays it, whether you can see it, and whether your lender will finance it.
Dealonomy's buyer fee is close to a normal broker fee that's been moved to the other side of the table and made visible. That's how it was presented to our community: transparency, not savings. Baton's 6% on the seller side sits below the norm for that deal size, which is their pitch to owners and tells you something about who lists there.
What it is. A two-way matching marketplace. You build a project describing what you want, brokers list deals, and the platform matches the two. The part most people miss is that the seller's advisor also has to accept the match. You can be filtered out on their side and never know it happened.
Economics. No access fee. A standard Lehman success fee on close: 5% of the first million, 4% of the second, 3% of the third, 2% of the fourth, and 1% above that.
The fee exemption nobody knows about. The fee triggers on first awareness of the opportunity through the platform. If you can document two-way communication with that seller's advisor before the deal reached you through Axial, you can request an exemption. There's a button for it.
That creates a legitimate long game, and members of our community have run it. Build a broad project, use it to meet brokers, then take those relationships offline. Deals start reaching you before they list, and the exemption applies.
Deal size. Axial's own data puts the majority of transactions in the $700K to $3M EBITDA range. Worth stating plainly, because the common assumption is that Axial is private equity chasing large deals, and that assumption keeps self-funded searchers off a platform built for them.
How to use it this week.
What to watch. The seller-side accept is invisible to you, so a quiet inbox may not mean your criteria are wrong. Confirm with your lender early whether they'll finance the fee. And closing on an Axial-sourced deal outside the platform carries penalties, so read the terms before you're anywhere near one.
Proof it works. Rob Belk's Axial acquisition is documented publicly on Acquiring Minds, and members of our community have closed through the platform in the past year.
What it is. A tech-enabled brokerage that looks like a marketplace. Baton employs its own M&A advisors, mostly out of investment banking, and represents the seller. Founded in 2021 in New York by Chat Joglekar and Dylan Gans, with roughly $12.8M raised.
Economics. Free to buyers, always. Sellers pay 6% on the first $5M and 2% above that, plus a $1,000 monthly retainer with a three-month minimum, non-refundable and not credited against the success fee.
That retainer is the most useful fact in this section. A seller writing a check every month has made a decision. It filters out the merely curious.
Inventory. Around 150 active listings against roughly 1,000 total profiles, which means about 850 are off-market owner profiles rather than businesses under contract. Over 30,000 registered buyers. Somewhere between 70 and 80% of listings fall in the $1M to $7M range, though they'll take anything from $300K to $50M.
The off-market feature. You can flag an owner who isn't for sale and Baton will run the outreach. This is the closest thing in the set to proprietary search with someone else making the calls.
Track record. Baton reports over 100 businesses sold in two years, roughly one a week and ramping, with a 4.3 rating on Trustpilot. Their published close rate of 68% and average time to close of 5.5 months are self-reported, and worth reading as such.
How to use it this week.
What to watch. Baton represents the seller. The advisor being helpful to you isn't working for you. And although listings are described as exclusive, Baton does cross-list some businesses to BizBuySell and Axial. That matters more than it sounds. A Baton business you discover through Axial could carry an Axial success fee on a deal that would've been free had you found it directly.
What it is. A closed platform. Dealonomy sources its own deals and brokers them, and outside brokers aren't invited to list. Nothing here shows up on Axial, and the inventory doesn't overlap with the aggregators.
Economics. The buyer pays, openly. On a $5M deal the fee runs about $330,000 on the free tier and about $280,000 with premium. Premium is roughly $99 a month and cancellable anytime.
The fee is SBA-financeable. Because Dealonomy is brokering the deal rather than aggregating listings, they invoice it, and it can be included in your down payment capital.
The 10-day window. Premium members see new listings for ten days before they go sitewide. Two recent deals went pending inside that window, which means free-tier users never even saw them as available. Combined with the fee discount, that's the entire premium argument.
Inventory. Around 58 to 70 companies nationally, targeting roughly one new listing a week. Thin, and worth saying so. The range runs from about $500K SDE up to a $4.9M EBITDA business. Many arrive with a sell-side quality of earnings already done, which is unusual at this deal size.
Competition is visible, which is the useful part. One listing drew 703 views, 16 watchers, and 35 NDAs, and went pending in about 21 days in the middle of summer. Another drew 31 LOIs. On that one the seller didn't take the highest price. They took the best person. That's worth more than any amount of advice about writing a stronger LOI.
How to use it this week.
What to watch. You can't upgrade to premium once your LOI is submitted, so that decision has to be made early. Inventory is thin enough that this can't be your only source. And the figures here come from a single live demo presented by someone with a financial interest in the platform, so weight them accordingly.
What it is. A pure aggregator. Kumo scrapes publicly available listings from BizBuySell, Murphy, Transworld, and a long tail of individual broker websites, then puts them in one searchable place. It brokers nothing and takes no success fee, ever.
Economics. Subscription only. Basic is free but shows deals only after 30 days on the market, which means you're looking at what nobody else wanted. Pro is $89 a month and Ultimate is $149.
The volume problem is the whole story. One member set up a search and started receiving roughly 103,000 opportunities in a week. That's not deal flow, that's noise. The skill with Kumo is subtraction, not addition. Better to get 100 leads a week you actually read than 10,000 you delete.
How to use it this week.
What to watch. Kumo can only find brokers who post somewhere public, and plenty don't. There are brokers who've operated for years without a single listing a scraper could reach, and no aggregator will ever surface them. That's the argument for keeping direct broker relationships alive alongside the tool.
What it is. Rejigg employs outbound callers who contact business owners who aren't for sale. When an owner shows interest, they go on the platform and you talk to them directly. It also carries brokered listings, priced differently, which is worth knowing before you assume everything here is off-market.
Economics. Full Access is $150 a month, billed monthly, cancel anytime.
On top of that, buyers pay a success fee at close. On an off-market deal it's the standard Lehman formula. Effective January 1, 2026, if the business is already being brokered when you initiate contact, the fee drops to half Lehman. Your status is displayed and agreed before you start the conversation, and it locks at that moment. There's also a $500 late fee and 1.5% monthly interest on unpaid success fees.
The practical takeaway is to check the brokered status before you click into a conversation. On a $5M deal that's the difference between roughly $150,000 and roughly $75,000.
Volume. Our members consistently found the flow modest relative to the aggregators, and the consensus in our session was that Rejigg works as a complement rather than a primary source. Expect a trickle of well-qualified opportunities rather than a stream of anything. Rejigg's inventory has been growing quickly, so this may look different in six months.
Seller intent tags. Owners are tagged serious, considering, exploring, or curious. To be tagged serious, an owner must meet two of three criteria, which is: a realistic asking price, a fully populated data room, or a prior LOI received or countered. Rejigg describes the process as imperfect but directionally accurate, meant for triage.
Read those criteria carefully, because they explain a complaint we heard. A seller can qualify as serious on the data room and LOI history alone while still being priced far outside the market. The tag is a starting point, not a verdict. Price-check every listing yourself.
What sellers get. More support than you might expect, and less than a sell-side broker. Complimentary valuation reports, SBA pre-approval, help preparing materials, referrals to M&A attorneys, and education on the diligence process and market deal terms.
Response data. Rejigg told us that roughly 75% of conversation requests are accepted, with a median time to acceptance of one day and a middle 50% falling between one hour and four days. The rest are declined for fit, a seller going under LOI, or cold feet. Unresponsive owners are delisted, and anything under an exclusive LOI comes down.
Set against that, several of our members described messaging owners and hearing nothing back. Both things can be true. Getting the first conversation on Rejigg is fast and likely. Keeping momentum after it, with no broker managing the process, is the hard part.
How to use it this week.
What to watch, and this is the important one. With no intermediary, the relationship with the seller is the whole machine. Three members of our community have closed through Rejigg, and their experiences make the point from both directions.
Anica John closed on DiggyPOD, a print-on-demand business for self-published authors in Tecumseh, Michigan, that she found on Rejigg. Roughly $5M in revenue at about 35% EBITDA margins, financed with a maxed $5M SBA loan plus $2.6M of pari passu debt, for a total project cost around $10M. Her quality of earnings came back showing decline, she pushed to restructure the deal, and the seller walked. Her account is that the deal was resurrected by her SBA loan officer at Northwest Bank, and that this is the risk with off-market deals: sometimes you need a third party to carry a hard message, and there isn't one. She credits Rejigg with trying to fill that role.
Vince and Kalyn Saulsberry-Fong closed Audience Synergy through Rejigg in 75 days from LOI to close, with an SBA loan, during a government shutdown. Rejigg wrote up their story in full.
Patrick McGonagle, from our 19th cohort in February 2026, closed on Blue Spruce Landscape in Campbell, California, a landscape construction and maintenance business founded in 1977. Seven months from our LIVE Bootcamp to close. $5M purchase price, $5.2M all in after inventory and the tax gross-up, structured as a stock sale with an F reorg. Fully seller financed, no SBA loan, no investors.
Asked what made buying off-market different, his answer was about the relationship rather than the search. Building rapport with the owner mattered enormously to getting the deal done, and because that trust was already there, the post-LOI closing process was fairly straightforward. In his words, the relationship with the seller was front and center.
The lesson. Removing the broker doesn't just remove a fee. It moves the entire burden of the relationship onto you. Anica needed an intermediary at the worst possible moment and didn't have one. Patrick built the relationship early enough that he never needed one. Which of those you get depends on work you do before you need it, which means the rapport is the job, not a nicety alongside it.
Every one of the five sessions ran into the same objection, so it deserves its own answer.
The reflex is to treat a buyer-side fee as disqualifying. Here's the reframe that landed hardest with our community. If the seller came back late in the process and asked for another $150,000 on a $3.5M deal, most buyers would find a way to say yes. The platform fee is the same money going to a different pocket, and it bought you a deal you wouldn't otherwise have seen.
One of our members gets laughed at in his market for paying to use a platform. He's come to treat that as an advantage, because the people mocking him are self-selecting out of the highest-quality flow he sees.
The number that makes it concrete: across these five, on the same $5M deal, the spread runs from $0 to roughly $330,000. That's worth understanding precisely rather than reacting to.
This is the hardest thing in this article to find anywhere else, and it's the question that catches people late.
Whether a buyer-side platform fee can be financed depends on the lender, not the platform. Some treat it as a finder's fee that has to be covered dollar for dollar with equity. Others will include it. Live Oak and Byline will. Others in the SBA space won't, and you won't find that policy published anywhere.
Where the platform is brokering the deal rather than aggregating listings, the fee is generally invoiceable and can go into your financing. Dealonomy's works this way. Axial's doesn't, because Axial is an aggregator and isn't brokering.
Two things make the difference between this working and not working, whichever platform you're on.
One wrinkle worth naming. Patrick's Blue Spruce deal was fully seller financed with no bank involved, so the question never came up for him. Seller financing doesn't remove the platform fee, but it does remove the lender's opinion about it.
Deal flow is seasonal. A meaningful block of new listings arrives in September, some more in October, and very little through November and December. If you're reading this in the fall, the inventory you're looking at is about to change.
If you take one thing from five weeks of these sessions, make it this: the platform isn't the strategy.
Pick two that cover different parts of the market. An aggregator for breadth and something proprietary for depth is a reasonable starting pair. Set them up properly, which mostly means excluding more than you include. Then give it ninety days before you judge whether it's working, because a quiet month is normal and a quiet quarter is information.
And before you engage seriously on any platform that charges a buyer-side fee, call your loan broker or lender. That one conversation will save you more trouble than any amount of time spent choosing between these five.
Our All Access members get perks with several of the platforms above, along with weekly sessions like the ones this article came from. If that's useful to you, come find us.
Matt Beckham is Head ofGrowth at SMBootcamp, where he runs the programs, webinars, and community that have trained 400+ searchers toward 80+ acquisitions.
