Updated October 2026
What a defunct company's data has sold for
The company is gone and you want to know whether its old email, Slack and code are worth the trouble. There is no price list, but there are a handful of reported deals, one shutdown service's typical range and one huge bankruptcy auction. Lined up from smallest to largest, they show where most closed companies land, and why a few land far higher.1,2
The ladder
Reported prices, from smallest to largest
First rung: a crypto startup that had operated for about two and a half years. MIT Technology Review reports it was paid about $25,000 for its code, and a separate sale of its Google, Notion, Figma and Slack data, worth about $15,000, was still pending.3,4,5
Second rung: SimpleClosure's 150+ data deals for wound-down startups, which it says typically run $10K-$100K each. This is the band most closing companies should plan around.1
Third rung: Cielo24, whose 13-year archive of Slack, Jira and email was reported to have sold for "hundreds of thousands of dollars". The exact figure was not published.6
Top rung: Spirit Airlines, in bankruptcy. Google won the auction for the airline's internal data at $10M, with Mercor as the backup bidder at $7.5M, and the court has not approved the sale yet.2,7,8
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| A closed crypto startup's data | About $25,000 for its code base, with about $15,000 for workspace data pending |
| Deals closed | 150+ data deals for wound-down startups, typically $10K-$100K each |
| Cielo24 archive sale | Cielo24 sold 13 years of Slack, Jira and email for "hundreds of thousands of dollars" |
| Spirit Airlines internal archive | $10M from Google, against a $7.5M Mercor bid |
Why the gap
What moves a company up the ladder
Size and years move you up. SimpleClosure says more employees and more years in business raise the value, along with quality and how rare the data is, and it puts typical company assets at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.9
Spirit's filings describe about 100M emails across 80,000 accounts, and a startup with a few dozen people holds a sliver of that. The crypto startup and Cielo24 sit two rungs apart, and the main difference between them is a decade of history.10,4,6
Your own number depends on your peak headcount, your years in business and which records survive. The quiz asks exactly that, then introduces you to the buyers we work with that take a closed company, such as Pewter, which counts staff at the peak, so you get a written offer instead of a guess from the ladder.11
Not comparable
Consumer-data sales are a different market
Ignore the big bankruptcy headlines about customer databases. 23andMe's assets went to TTAM Research Institute for $305M and Zulily's customer database went to Beyond for $4.5M, but those were customer records sold with a brand, not internal email or chat, and shutdown services such as SimpleClosure leave sensitive employee and health records out anyway.12,13,14
FAQ
Questions, answered with sources
Usually tens of thousands of dollars. SimpleClosure reports 150+ wind-down data deals, typically $10K-$100K each.1
About $25,000, paid for a crypto startup's code base according to MIT Technology Review; roughly $15,000 more for its workspace data was still pending.3
Its 13 years of Slack, Jira and email were reported to have sold for "hundreds of thousands of dollars".6
SimpleClosure says scale, quality, differentiation and scarcity set value, and more employees and more operating years raise it.9
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Questions to talk through with your buyer
Every business is different, so these are best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over them with you before anything is signed.
Questions for this kind of business
- How will you price our archive, and will you show us the comparable deals you relied on?
- Is the quoted price for an exclusive or a non-exclusive license, and does it change if you resell the data?
- What are the trustee's, assignee's, receiver's or board's duties, and who receives the proceeds?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?