Sell Code to AI
Who pays for private repositories, review threads and issue trackers, on their own published terms, each line dated the day we read it.
- read 2026-11-07micro1headline now $100K–$3M+ per company, 30-staff floor
- read 2026-11-07micro1referral fee up: $50K (deals ≤ $700K), $75K defunct
- read 2026-11-07Scale AI$10K–$1M+ "illustrative"; no repo access taken
- read 2026-11-07LabelboxPrism: code edit traces, ~$50K up, exclusive default
- read 2026-11-07SimpleClosureAssetHub: repos, tests, Slack, Drive; no prices
- 2026-10-13SimpleClosurereported: closed startup's code cleared ~$25,000
- 2026-06-16micro1company referral scheme launched
Lines come from buyers' own pages; "reported" ones come from the press, credited on the full changelog. Disclosure: several buyers in this log reward introductions, us included, once a deal is signed.
Two ways code gets sold
./pathsThe company is still running
You license copies of the history, not the product. What buyers chase is the residue of years of real work: commit messages that say why, pull requests where somebody pushed back, tickets that run from bug report to merged fix, and the tests holding it in place.
Programs aimed at live companies set a staff minimum: thirty full-timers at micro1, a preferred forty at Scale AI, at Nyne, twenty US W-2 employees and a three-year trading history. Prism sets none. Meanwhile you keep shipping, and the code stays yours.
The company has shut down
Now the code is something to realize on the way out, usually bundled with the Slack, Drive, Notion and Figma exports. That bundle is precisely what SimpleClosure's AssetHub takes during a wind-down. micro1 also keeps a track for defunct companies.
The opening question is authority, then price. A lender holding a lien, an investor veto or an ABC assignee may stand between the founders and the signature line. Public prices are thin: MIT Technology Review has one, about $25,000 for a closed crypto startup's code.
License or sale: which are you signing?
./terms| Question | License the history | Sell the IP |
|---|---|---|
| Owner afterward | You | The buyer |
| Keep using the code | Yes | Only with a license back |
| License to a second buyer | Yes, unless you granted exclusivity | No |
| Usual seller | Operating company | Wound-down company or its assignee |
| Who signs | The company | Whoever holds the IP now |
The detail, including exclusivity and field-of-use clauses, is in licensing your repo history vs selling the IP.
What buyers want from a repo, and what they strip
git diff --statValue lives in whatever could never be scraped. Your public packages are already downloadable. The private history, the arguments in review and the path from ticket to fix are not.
Exclusions line up just as neatly. Scale AI will not take credentials or repo access, nor the identity of any employee or customer. Each of the five buyers below promises to strip personal data, SimpleClosure on every dataset before licensing. Scrub it yourself first regardless.
On open source, one sentence: packages you depend on stay under their authors' licenses, so you have nothing to grant in them, and that includes snippets pasted into your own files. The longer version.
- Commit history with real messages
- Pull requests and review comments
- Issues, from report to fix
- Tests and the code they cover
- Design docs, ADRs, runbooks
- Secrets, keys and credentials
- Customer data in fixtures and logs
- Open-source and vendored code
- Code a client owns under an MSA
- Author emails and handles, unscrubbed
Who buys code, and on what published terms?
./buyersTerms re-read on 2026-11-07, straight from each buyer's site.
| Buyer | What its page lists | Published pay | Who qualifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| micro1 | Engineering workflows, bug tracking, source code documentation; also product planning and agent trajectories | Entry tier $100K–$500K; $500K–$3M when the dataset is large or spans teams; above $3M if truly unique | Needs 30+ people on full-time payroll and records mostly in English; US, UK and Canada favored |
| Labelbox Prism | Traces of code being generated and edited, plus reasoning and workflow sets | Roughly $50K at the small end, $1M+ for big enterprise deals; cash at signing, then a share of downstream revenue | No size or age threshold on the page |
| Scale AI | Jira and Confluence records, docs, chat; it will not take credentials or repo access | $10K–$1M+, which Scale calls illustrative value rather than a promised sum | Ideally 40 or more people, though smaller firms are judged individually |
| Nyne | Jira and Asana projects, tickets, CRM, and accounting kept in QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite | Usually $100K and up, scaled by how much data and what kind | Twenty or more US W-2 staff, plus a 3-year trading record |
| SimpleClosure AssetHub | Repos with their docs and tests, and the workspace around them: Slack, Drive, mail, Notion, Figma | Not published | Founders closing their company with SimpleClosure |
Disclosure: several of these companies run referral programs and could pay this site after a deal with a company we introduced. Rows are in no paid order, and fees do not shape the wording.
Missing: Mercor. It has a company data program, yet we could not load its pages on 2026-11-07, and we print nothing secondhand. The full comparison adds personal data handling and payment timing.
Sources and read dates (5)
- micro1.ai/data, as of 2026-11-07
- prism.labelbox.com, as of 2026-11-07
- scale.com/data-partnership, as of 2026-11-07
- nyne.ai/sell-company-data, as of 2026-11-07
- simpleclosure.com/product/assethub, as of 2026-11-07
What is a codebase worth?
Usually less than the headlines. Those numbers describe whole-company partnerships with staff minimums. micro1's bottom tier begins at $100K; Nyne quotes $100K and up as typical; Prism opens near $50K for a narrow dataset; Scale's $10K–$1M+ comes with the word "illustrative" attached.
A repo on its own, from a small team that has stopped trading, lands well under that. One crypto founder cleared about $25,000 for the code of his closed startup, with SimpleClosure arranging the sale (MIT Technology Review, 13 Oct 2026).
The code value tool filters those published figures by team size, history and what your repos contain. What comes out is the buyers' own numbers, never an offer, and real license fees often come in far lower.
How a code deal runs
./dealInventory
Repos, years, committers, and the signed agreement behind every contractor. Tag anything third-party or client-owned.
Clean up
Rotate and purge secrets, pull customer records out of fixtures, drop vendored packages. All before a single file leaves the building.
Scoping with a buyer
You learn what they want and how they strip identities. Scale, for instance, works on your side and asks you to approve every package before release.
Agreement
License or assignment, scope, field of use, exclusivity, term. Counsel marks it up; only then does a signature go on it.
Delivery and payment
Data moves on the agreed terms. micro1 settles in full within a month of acceptance; by Prism's own account, call to wire runs under three weeks.
The rules that decide whether you can sign
- Title first. You can only license code the company owns or has the right to license. Staff work under an invention assignment normally counts; contractor work counts only where the contract assigns it.
- Dependencies stay under their own licenses and so fall outside anything you grant.
- Client code and customer personal data stay out, except where both your contract and the applicable law permit them.
- Investors, lenders and acquirers may hold rights, most often after a wind-down. Read the financing papers and any asset purchase agreement.
- Strip personal details yourself. Buyers de-identify too, but only your pass happens before anything leaves.
- Estimates are not offers. And every agreement goes to your own counsel before signature.
Short answers
Can I sell my startup's code to an AI company?
Yes, provided the company holds title to it. A live company tends to license history and engineering records (micro1 and Labelbox Prism both list that kind of material). A closed one can go through SimpleClosure AssetHub, which handles code and workspace exports in a wind-down. Your open-source packages and anything a client owns never form part of the deal.
How much is a codebase worth to an AI lab?
On the buyers' own pages, entry points sit near $50K at Labelbox Prism and $100K at micro1, both aimed at companies above a staff minimum. Press coverage gives one closed-startup price: about $25,000 (MIT Technology Review, 2026-10-13). Treat every figure as a ceiling to test, never an offer; real license fees often come in far lower. The code value tool lines them up for your case.
Do I give up ownership of the code?
Not if you license. micro1 states plainly that the seller keeps ownership of the underlying data. The clause to watch is exclusivity, which Prism makes its starting position.
Does a buyer need access to our GitHub org?
Not necessarily. Scale AI does its anonymizing on your infrastructure, and repo access and credentials are on its refusal list. Other buyers work from exports you deliver. Get the method in writing before you add anyone to the org.
What about the names and emails in our commit history?
Those are personal data. All five buyers in the table promise de-identification, yet the first pass should be yours: committer emails, reviewer handles, customer names quoted in tickets, real records hiding in fixtures.
Who can sign after the company shuts down?
The holder of the IP, which is not always the founders. It could be the company, a secured lender, an ABC assignee or whoever bought part of the business. The wind-down page walks through each.
Get a quote
ZIP, contact, then eight multiple-choice questions about the repos. Your answers get held up against every buyer's published rules, and the matches come back to you by email, by name.
No code, repo URLs, exports or samples here, please. Answers only; we do not want your data.
We run an introduction service, and a buyer you end up signing with may pay us for the introduction. You are not charged.
Answers in. The next moves:
- Each answer is compared with the published conditions of every buyer on this site.
- You get a short email: the fitting buyers by name, each with its reason, or a plain "no match today".
- A buyer only learns of you after you approve it, by name, in a reply. Your address is used for this request and then left alone.