What your tech stack tells a buyer (and how we detect it)
We fingerprint the frameworks, hosting, analytics and payment tools behind every listed startup. Here is what each signal means to an acquirer, and how to check your own site in five seconds.
Every ExitFounder profile has a Technology block. It is not decoration: for a buyer of a small internet business, the stack is the first diligence signal, because it predicts how hard the transfer will be and what the running costs are.
How the detection works
We do not ask founders and we do not run a browser extension. When we crawl the official site we look at:
- script and stylesheet URLs (
/_next/static/,plausible.io/js/script.js,js.stripe.com/v3) - meta tags (
generator: Astro v4.16.19,og:*) - HTTP response headers (
x-vercel-id,server: cloudflare,x-powered-by) - cookie names (
laravel_session,csrftoken) - the JS/CSS bundles themselves for client-rendered apps, where React Router, Radix, shadcn/ui or a Supabase URL only appear inside the code
About 120 signatures with versions where the site exposes them, and an "implies" layer (Next.js ⇒ React, shadcn ⇒ Tailwind + Radix). Path markers only count on the site's own origin, so a directory page embedding someone else's WordPress images is not "WordPress". You can run the same detector on any URL with the free tech stack checker.
What buyers read into it
Frameworks. Next.js / Nuxt / SvelteKit / Astro on a modern host means the buyer can redeploy in an afternoon. A custom PHP app on a VPS means "budget a migration". Neither is bad; the second is a discount.
Hosting. Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare and Fly are transferable with a team invite. Bare AWS with hand-built infra needs documentation before anyone pays for it.
Payments. Stripe is the default and the easiest to transfer (account transfer or a new account plus customer migration). Lemon Squeezy, Paddle and Polar are merchants of record — simpler tax, but the buyer inherits their fees. RevenueCat means a mobile app and App Store transfer.
Analytics. Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, PostHog, Umami: the presence of any of them is good news because it means real traffic history exists to verify. No analytics at all is a yellow flag.
Support and marketing. Crisp, Intercom, Loops, ConvertKit, Beehiiv tell the buyer there is an audience and a support load. Intercom at $100+/month on a $2K MRR product is a margin question.
Auth and backend. Supabase, Firebase and Clerk are transferable projects; each has a documented ownership transfer. A home-grown auth layer is fine but will be read line by line.
Fix the cheap things before you list
- Make the stack boring and documented: a README that says how to deploy, where secrets live, which services bill monthly.
- Move the domain to a registrar account you can hand over (not your personal Google account).
- Replace any tool billed to your personal card with one on the company's card.
- Remove dead scripts (an old Hotjar or Facebook Pixel you forgot) — they show up in the fingerprint and prompt questions.
Verified vs detected
Detected technologies are labeled as such on the profile; when the founder claims the profile they can correct them, and those corrections show as Reported. Mentions of technologies in marketing copy ("built on OpenAI") are stored separately at lower confidence — saying you use something is not the same as our crawler seeing it.