SaaS due diligence checklist for AI businesses
A practical checklist for buying an AI SaaS, agent, app or micro SaaS. It covers the usual financial, legal and technical checks plus the items that decide value in AI products: inference cost, model provider dependency, prompt and data ownership, API terms and evaluation quality. Tick items as you go and track what is left.
How to use this SaaS due diligence checklist
Work through the groups in order. Financial checks confirm the business is what the listing says it is. AI-specific checks tell you whether the margin holds up and whether the product survives a change of model or provider. Legal and technical checks confirm you can own and run it. Customer checks show whether revenue will stay. Handover checks make sure nothing is left behind.
On Acquisitions, revenue, churn and traffic are already verified through read-only connections, so many financial items start with data you can trust. See Revenue verification for what is read and what is labelled as seller reported.
Acquirer and Fund plans include due diligence checklists attached to each deal, shared with the seller, with comments and a status for every item. Fund teams also see who checked what in the audit log.
Why AI businesses need extra checks
Two AI products with the same revenue can leave very different profit after inference costs. A product built on one model provider can lose quality, or its margin, when the provider changes prices or retires a model. Prompts, data and evaluation sets are often the real asset, and their ownership is not always clear. These items move the price more than anything else on the list. The SaaS valuation multiples estimator uses the same factors.
A checklist, not advice
This checklist is a practical starting point. It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and it does not replace advisers for larger or more complex deals. Acquisitions is a listing and deal-workflow platform, not a broker-dealer and not an investment adviser.
FAQ
Yes. You can tick items on this page without an account. Saving the checklist to a deal and sharing it with the seller are part of the Acquirer and Fund plans.
It depends on size, the quality of the records and how quickly the seller responds. Verified metrics and a shared checklist cut the time spent on exports and screenshots.
Inference cost share, gross margin after model and hosting costs, model provider dependency, API terms and ownership of prompts and data. They decide whether the margin and the product survive a change of owner.
Only when you share it on a deal. Then both sides see each item, its status and comments. Private notes stay private.
For larger or complex deals, yes. The checklist organises the work but is not legal, tax or investment advice.
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