Where to Buy a Finished Mobile App in 2026: Marketplaces, Brokers and Direct Sales

There are four places to buy a finished mobile app, and they are not competing for the same buyer. Open marketplaces give you the widest selection and the widest range of quality. Curated marketplaces screen the listings and skew towards revenue. Brokers handle the large deals. And the studio that built the app will often sell it to you directly, which is usually the cheapest route for something finished but pre-revenue because nobody is taking a cut in the middle. Which one is right depends almost entirely on whether you are buying revenue or buying software.

TL;DR:

  • Buying revenue means a marketplace or a broker, escrow, and twelve months of verifiable figures. Buying software means going to whoever wrote it.
  • Marketplace fees are real and come out of your side of the table one way or another; direct sales have none.
  • Escrow solves the payment risk. It does not solve the "does this code build" risk, which is yours wherever you buy.
  • Template marketplaces are a different product, not a cheaper one — non-exclusive source means launching into a store full of your own clones.
  • The single question that sorts good listings from bad ones: is it sold once, and can the store listing transfer with it?

Table of Contents

The Four Routes, and Who Each One Suits

Open marketplaces

Flippa is the best-known. Anyone can list, which is both the attraction and the problem: the selection is enormous and spans abandoned side projects through to genuine businesses, and the quality bar is set by the buyer's diligence rather than the platform's. Listings carry revenue claims, traffic figures and sometimes verified analytics integrations. Expect to filter hard and to walk away from most of what you open.

Good for: breadth, price discovery, and buyers who enjoy diligence. Bad for: anyone who wants the platform to have done the filtering.

Curated marketplaces

Acquire.com screens listings before they go live and leans towards SaaS and startups with recurring revenue rather than pre-revenue mobile apps. The screening raises the average quality and narrows the selection, and the process is built around a real acquisition — letters of intent, diligence periods, asset purchase agreements.

Good for: buying a revenue-generating business with less noise. Bad for: picking up a finished app cheaply, which is not what it is for.

Brokers

Firms such as Empire Flippers vet the business, verify the financials, run the sale process and shepherd the migration, in exchange for a commission on the sale. At the sizes brokers work at, that commission buys real work — verified figures alone are worth it when six figures are moving.

Good for: larger acquisitions where verification matters more than fees. Bad for: anything in the hundreds or low thousands, where the commission has no room to exist.

Direct from the studio that built it

Development studios accumulate finished work: products built for clients who changed direction, internal projects that were completed and never marketed, apps published and maintained but never grown. Some of them sell it. You are buying from the people who wrote the code, which means the diligence answers come back in hours rather than days, and there is no intermediary taking a percentage.

Good for: finished, pre-revenue apps at the lowest price per unit of work. Bad for: buying revenue — a studio selling a published app is usually selling software and a listing, not a business.

A fifth thing that is not the same thing: template marketplaces

Code marketplaces sell app source for tens of euros, non-exclusively, to as many buyers as want it. This is a legitimate product and a terrible substitute for an exclusive sale. It belongs in the comparison only so you can tell the two apart when a listing is deliberately vague about which it is.

Pro Tip: If a listing does not use the word "exclusive" anywhere, assume it is not, and price accordingly.

The Comparison Table

Fees and terms change; treat the fee column as a shape rather than a quote and check the current terms before you commit.

Route Typical price band Fees Escrow Source quality Store transfer Exclusive Best for
Open marketplace €500 – €500k+ Listing fee plus success fee Built in or via a third party Unverified — varies wildly Seller-dependent Usually Breadth and price discovery
Curated marketplace €10k – €5m Buyer-side or closing fee Standard Screened, not audited Negotiated in the deal Yes Buying revenue with less noise
Broker €50k – €10m Commission, often 10–15% Managed by the broker Financially verified Managed migration Yes Large, verified acquisitions
Direct from the studio €500 – €10k None Not usually needed Known — ask the authors Often included Depends on the seller Finished pre-revenue apps
Template marketplace €20 – €300 Included in the price N/A Varies; usually documented No — never published No A starting point, not an asset

What a Listing Must Tell You Before It Is Worth Your Time

A listing that omits any of these is not necessarily hiding something, but you will spend the first three emails asking for them anyway:

  • What exactly is being sold — source only, source plus IP, or source plus IP plus the live store listing.
  • Whether it is exclusive, stated plainly.
  • The technology stack and its versions. "React Native" is not an answer; "Expo SDK 54" is.
  • Whether the app is currently live, and under whose account.
  • Revenue, if any, with the period it covers.
  • The running cost — every paid service the app needs to function.
  • What the handover includes — repository, documentation, design files, signing assets.

Red Flags

  • Revenue screenshots with no way to verify them. Ask for read access to the store dashboard or analytics, on a call, live.
  • A seller who will not confirm exclusivity in writing. There is exactly one reason to hesitate on that question.
  • No answer to "does it build from a clean checkout". This is a five-minute test for the seller and a week of your life if the answer turns out to be no.
  • Pressure to complete outside the platform after you found the listing on one.
  • An app that has not shipped an update in two years. Not fatal, but assume an upgrade sprint before you can ship anything.
  • Vagueness about who wrote the code. Contractors without an IP assignment are the most common way a clean-looking sale turns out not to be one.

Pro Tip: Ask every seller the same question — "has this code been sold or licensed to anyone else?" — and keep the answer in writing. It costs you nothing and it is the single most useful sentence in the transcript if something goes wrong later.

How Exclusivity Changes the Maths

Two apps, identical code, identical quality. One was sold to you alone. The other was sold to four hundred people, of whom perhaps sixty published it.

In the first case, whatever ranking you earn for your keywords is yours to keep and to build on. In the second, you are one of sixty near-identical apps with near-identical screenshots competing for the same search terms, and the store's own duplicate-content and spam guidelines become a live risk rather than a theoretical one. Apple rejects apps that are substantially similar to others already on the store, and a template that sixty people published is precisely that pattern.

This is why a €1,500 exclusive app and a €49 template are not the same purchase at different prices. The €49 buys you working code. The €1,500 buys you working code and the absence of competitors running the identical product.

How to Pay Safely

For private deals of any size, use escrow — Escrow.com is the usual choice. Funds are held until the agreed transfer has actually happened, which protects both sides: you are not paying for a promise, and the seller is not handing over source to someone who may not pay.

Define the release condition precisely before you fund it. "Source delivered" is weaker than "source delivered and the App Store transfer accepted", and the transfer is the part that takes days rather than minutes.

For small purchases from a studio selling its own finished work, escrow is usually overkill — a card payment against an immediate download does the same job, because there is no gap between paying and receiving for anything to go wrong in.

How Kellosolutions Compares

We are the fourth row of the table, and only the fourth row. We are an engineer-led studio that builds mobile apps and SaaS products, and we sell finished ones from a catalogue of twenty-one projects priced between €750 and €4,500.

What that means concretely: every project is sold once, to one owner, and leaves the catalogue when payment clears. A sale includes the complete source and documentation, and where the listing names a published app, the App Store listing is transferred rather than resubmitted — reviews, ratings and ranking history come with it. Payment is a single Stripe card transaction in euros, and the source archive downloads immediately rather than arriving after a handover call. Offers below asking can be made on any listing, and an accepted offer reserves the project for 72 hours. Confirming a newsletter subscription gets you a single-use code worth 10% off any Mobile Apps listing, valid for 30 days.

What it does not mean: we are not selling businesses. These are finished, published apps sold as software and a store listing, not as revenue with a P&L attached. If you want to buy revenue, a broker or a curated marketplace is the right room to be in, and we would tell you so.

Browse the Catalogue

Twenty-one finished projects, each sold once, with full source and App Store handover. See what is for sale.

Sources

FAQ

Where can I buy a finished mobile app?

There are four routes. Open marketplaces such as Flippa list everything from side projects to established businesses and give you the widest selection at the widest range of quality. Curated marketplaces such as Acquire.com screen listings and skew towards SaaS and revenue-generating startups. Brokers handle larger deals end to end for a commission. And you can buy directly from the studio that built the app, which is usually the cheapest route for finished but pre-revenue apps because there is no intermediary taking a cut.

Is it safe to buy an app from a marketplace?

It is safe if you use escrow and do real diligence, and risky if you do neither. The specific dangers are a seller who does not own the code they are selling, a listing whose revenue figures cannot be verified, and source that has already been sold to other buyers. Marketplaces reduce the payment risk by holding funds until transfer completes; they do not verify that the code builds or that the intellectual property is clean. That part stays your job wherever you buy.

How much does it cost to buy an app?

Finished but pre-revenue mobile apps sold directly by their developers generally run from a few hundred to a few thousand euros. Apps with modest recurring revenue trade on a multiple of monthly profit and typically start in the low five figures. Established app businesses with meaningful revenue run from six figures upwards and are usually handled by brokers. Template and code marketplaces sell non-exclusive source for tens of euros, which is a different product rather than a cheaper version of the same one.

What is the difference between buying an app and buying a template?

Exclusivity, and it changes everything. A template is licensed to everyone who pays, so the app you launch competes in the store with every other copy of itself, often under similar names and targeting identical keywords. An exclusive sale transfers the code to one buyer and removes it from sale. The code can be equally good in both cases — what differs is whether the position you build with it is yours alone.

Should I use escrow when buying an app?

Yes for any private deal, and for any marketplace purchase where the platform does not already hold the funds. Escrow protects both sides: your money is held until the source and the store listing have actually transferred, and the seller knows the money exists before handing over the asset. For small purchases from a studio selling its own work, a card payment against an immediate download achieves the same thing more simply, because there is nothing to wait for.