Article

SaaS and subscription companies: get paid for your records

By TrustPast

Updated November 7, 2026

This page is for a software-as-a-service or subscription company with 30 or more people and a few years of renewals behind it. You know the recurring revenue has a value, and you know what an acquirer would pay for it. What is rarely counted is the operating record behind that revenue: how each customer was won, kept or lost, and how the team handled every outage along the way.

That record lives in the CRM, the ticket queue and the chat. The renewal note that says why a customer stayed. The churn reason that says why one left. The incident channel at two in the morning. A buyer pays to license records like these to train AI models, and what it wants is how the work was done, not your customers’ identities or the data they store with you. The general case, written for trade businesses and just as true of a subscription company, is on what data buyers actually want from a trade business.

Here is what a subscription business keeps, what micro1 says counts, what stays out, and what sets the price.

The records a SaaS and subscription company keeps

These are our examples, not a buyer’s list. They are what a subscription company writes down as it sells, supports and ships.

The CRM, from lead to renewal. Every lead, every demo note, every trial, every proposal and every discount approved. Then the renewals: the health score, the account review, the price rise, the save offer, the cancellation and its reason. Years of churn reasons are an honest account of where the product fell short. Our CRM records page shows which fields carry the most.

The sales playbook and its revisions. The discovery questions, the objection handling, the pricing page as it changed. Each revision follows a quarter that didn’t go to plan.

The support queue. Each ticket: the customer’s words, the first reply, the escalation, the workaround, the fix. The ticket that bounced between three teams before anyone found the cause is a record of diagnosis.

The knowledge base. Every article exists because a question kept coming. The edit history shows the answer changing as the product did.

The incident record. The alert, the incident channel, the status page updates, the timeline and the review afterwards with its action items. A company with six years of incident reviews has six years of how it learned to run a service.

The product record. The requirements documents, the roadmap and what moved off it, the design debates, the tracker, the release notes. The decision to drop a feature is usually in a thread, not a document.

The customer success notes. Onboarding plans, quarterly reviews, the escalation from an unhappy account and how it was settled.

The internal chat. Slack or Teams, channel by channel: sales, support, engineering, the incident channels and the one where the founders argued about pricing. The chat archives page covers which channels show the work and which are noise.

Then there are the records nobody budgets for. The shared inbox where invoices and refund requests land. The spreadsheet the finance lead kept of every discount over list price, with a column for who asked. The pricing experiments, with the before and after. The onboarding call notes that a success manager kept in a document instead of the CRM. The security questionnaires answered for enterprise deals, which say in detail how the company runs its service. None of these was bought as a system, so none shows up when an owner lists the tools the company pays for. Each is a record of a decision that the main systems only show as an outcome. Find them before you answer the estimate’s question about years.

Here is how one account might run, as an invented example. A mid-size customer signed in 2018 after a three-month trial; the CRM holds the demo notes and the discount approval. In 2020 a support ticket about slow exports escalated to engineering, and a chat thread argued about whether to fix it or rebuild the feature. They rebuilt it. The customer’s renewal note that year says the export fix saved the account. In 2023 the customer churned to a cheaper tool, and the churn reason says so. Four systems tell that story: the CRM, the ticket queue, the chat and the tracker. Read together, they show how a subscription company keeps customers and why it sometimes doesn’t.

See your estimate

What counts, in micro1’s own words

micro1 writes its eligibility on its data partnerships page: “We’re looking for established companies with 30+ full-time employees, mature business operations, and substantial historical operational data.” It goes on: “This can include internal communications, SOPs, project histories, CRM records, support tickets, and other business documentation.” CRM records, support tickets and internal communications are three of the records a subscription company keeps in the most detail.

micro1 lists industry examples under the heading “Operational data from every industry can contribute”. Three of them describe a subscription company’s main functions:

Sales and CRM: “CRM data, sales processes, playbooks, customer lifecycle documentation, and revenue operations”.
Customer support: “Support documentation, ticket workflows, QA processes, customer operations, and knowledge management”.
Software and engineering: “Source code documentation, engineering workflows, bug tracking, product planning, and technical knowledge bases”.

micro1 doesn’t name SaaS companies as a category. Its examples are functions, not industries, and a subscription company runs all three of these. As our own reading: “customer lifecycle documentation” is the renewal and churn trail. “Revenue operations” is the pipeline review and the forecast. “Ticket workflows” is the queue and its escalations. “Bug tracking” and “product planning” are the tracker and the roadmap.

On what makes data valuable, micro1 says: “We are looking for data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” And “The most valuable datasets capture real operational expertise, decision-making processes, and repeatable workflows”. The chat thread where the team decided to rebuild a feature is a decision-making process. The onboarding playbook is a repeatable workflow.

It adds: “Companies with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.” A subscription company with a CRM, a help desk, a tracker and a chat tool has four.

What is never included

Personal data stays out: customer contacts’ details, card numbers and billing data, staff files and payroll. Our page on what is never included shows where each sits in a company’s systems. A subscription company has two more lines, as our own advice.

Your customers’ content. The data your customers store in your product is theirs. Your terms of service and your data processing agreements say what you may do with it, and in nearly every case the answer is: run the service, nothing else. That data is not your operating record and doesn’t belong in an inventory. Neither do production database backups, logs that carry customer content, or support attachments a customer uploaded. Our page on client-owned work and NDAs goes through how to sort what is yours from what is theirs, and counsel has the final word.

Contracts with confidentiality terms. Enterprise customers often negotiate confidentiality clauses that cover the relationship itself: the pricing, the security review, the account notes. Read the big contracts before listing the CRM records for those accounts.

Then the ordinary ones. Security keys, credentials and secrets that sit in old chat messages stay out; that is a reason to raise chat exports on the call rather than to delete anything.

How de-identification works

micro1 says the company doesn’t need to do the scrubbing. Asked whether a company must anonymize its data before transferring it, its page says: “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.”

micro1’s confirmations before any participation include “De-identified before sharing”, explained as “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties”, and “Data segregation”, explained as “Your data is kept separate from other companies’ data, with access restricted to authorized personnel”.

Its process answer says: “Depending on the nature of the data, personally identifiable information may be removed and certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.” It says “companies are given the opportunity to review representative samples before prepared data is used”, and “Upon request or at the end of an engagement, data is deleted according to the agreed retention and deletion terms.”

For a CRM record, as our own illustration: the contact’s name, email, phone number and the account name are the identifying parts. The stage history, the notes on the objection, the discount and why it was approved, the renewal outcome and the churn reason are the work. For a support ticket, the customer’s words keep their substance and lose their signature. For a chat thread, the argument stays and the names become roles. More on each step is on how de-identification works.

What decides the price

micro1 publishes three tiers on its data partnerships page. $100K-500K for “Qualified Enterprise Data Partnerships” (indicative, not an offer). $500K-3M for “Large-scale operational datasets or ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions” (indicative, not an offer). $3M+ for “Highly unique, proprietary operational data” (indicative, not an offer). Above them it says “Compensation is based on the quality, uniqueness, and value of the data provided”.

The factors are named in its questions: “dataset size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise represented, and the uniqueness of the operational knowledge contained within the dataset.” On minimums: “There’s no fixed minimum number of files, documents, or terabytes.” Its estimate page says the final payout “is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.”

As our own reading, for a subscription company:

Several functions. Sales, support, success and engineering are four teams with four records. The middle tier names “multiple teams and business functions”.
Notes, not just fields. A CRM with a stage and an amount is thin. A CRM with call notes, loss reasons and renewal reviews is a record of judgment.
The full ticket. Tickets with the thread, the internal notes and the escalation are worth more than tickets exported as a subject and a status.
Years. A company that has run for eight years has been through pricing changes, outages and a few rebuilds. micro1’s estimate asks how many years of data you have.

What lowers it: chat history lost to a free plan’s limit, a help desk migration that kept only open tickets, a CRM switch that left the old notes behind. Our page on whether old systems count shows how to keep them before access ends.

On payment, micro1 says that once the company transfers its data, “micro1 has 30 days to review and approve it”, and that payment follows “within 30 days of invoicing.” On 9 October 2026 it announced a commitment to spend $1 billion over 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data. The factors are explained on what decides the price of your records.

Which programme fits

This page is about micro1’s programme. Its line is 30 or more people, now or at peak, or a company of any size outside the US. micro1’s referral page lists the requirements for its enterprise partnership as “30+ employees”, “US and Western markets”, “English” and “All industries”. A company that grew to 70 and cut back to 25 kept the records of 70. The estimate asks your headcount and names the programme that fits it.

If the company has shut down, the CRM export and the chat archive still exist, if someone kept them. micro1’s referral page lists a Defunct Company Data Partnership: “We are acquiring data from companies that are no longer operating.” Its listed requirements are “30+ employees”, “10+ Countries”, “English” and “All industries”, with company compensation of $100K-$3M+ (indicative, not an offer) “for approved data packages”. For a closed software company, the urgent part is keeping the exports before the subscriptions lapse. That and who can sign are on the page for closed companies.

A consulting or advisory firm keeps a CRM of proposals and renewals much like a subscription pipeline, with engagements in place of accounts. A manufacturing or industrial company runs its own incident reviews, under the name of corrective actions, with a part on the bench instead of a service down. And a publisher or education company maintains a knowledge base and release notes of its own: the style sheet and the errata log.

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Questions and answers

Does micro1 want our product data, the data our customers store with us?

No such claim is on micro1’s pages, and that data is usually your customers’ under your terms of service. micro1 asks for data that “reflects how work is actually performed within an organization”: your CRM, tickets, playbooks and internal threads, not your tenants’ content.

Which of our records fit micro1’s published examples?

micro1 lists sales and CRM (“CRM data, sales processes, playbooks, customer lifecycle documentation, and revenue operations”), customer support and software and engineering among its industry examples. A subscription business keeps all three.

Do customer names in the CRM go to micro1’s buyers?

micro1 says personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before the data is shared with third parties. It also says the company does not need to anonymize its data before transferring it.

Our Slack has seven years of history. Is all of it useful?

Not all of it. The threads where a decision was argued and made carry the most; micro1 says the most valuable datasets capture “decision-making processes”. Keep the history as it is and let micro1 judge scope after review.

How much does micro1 pay a software company?

micro1 publishes tiers of $100K-500K, $500K-3M and $3M+ (indicative, not an offer). It evaluates each partnership individually.

Can we keep using our CRM and Slack?

Yes. micro1 says “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.” The licence doesn’t move your systems anywhere.