A seller lists an app for a million dollars. That is interesting. It is not yet evidence that the app sold for a million dollars, or that your similar app could.
Asking prices are offers. Completed transaction prices are outcomes. Keeping those categories separate saves a remarkable amount of entrepreneurial daydreaming.
Start with the business being sold
Identify the assets included: code, domains, customer contracts, store listings, intellectual property, data rights, support obligations and any operational help. Two listings with identical annual revenue can contain very different businesses.
Then inspect earnings quality. Does revenue depend on one launch, one customer, one ad campaign or the founder’s audience? What work does the owner perform each week? A product described as automated may still have a person quietly resolving its exceptions every evening.
Reconstruct the cash
For serious diligence, use seller-authorized payment and expense records. Reconcile reported revenue with refunds, fees and actual receipts. Separate recurring subscriptions from one-off sales. Ask how customer retention and acquisition spending changed over time.
A valuation multiple is only as meaningful as the earnings figure beneath it. An advertised multiple based on a seller-adjusted number should retain that qualification in your notes.
Design for transferability now
If you hope to sell your own app later, document deployments, customer support, data licenses, incident handling and account ownership while the details are fresh. Keep business credentials separate from personal accounts. Make the weekly operating workload visible.
These practices do not guarantee an acquisition or a particular valuation. They make the business easier to understand and transfer, which is useful even if you keep it.
Read marketplace listings for clues about business models and buyer concerns. Use completed, comparable transactions when you can verify them. And let the million-dollar asking price remain what it is: the beginning of a negotiation, not the ending of your financial plan.