The best alternative to Pulley and Carta

With the recent news that Pulley is shutting down, many founders are left scrambling for a reliable platform to manage their cap tables and company equity. While some are considering a transition to Carta, we believe Capbase provides a much stronger, founder-friendly alternative.

Carta is an equity management platform offering functionality related to valuation and compliance. While it has become a recognizable name, its model is built for later-stage, pre-IPO companies rather than agile, early-stage startups.

Opaque and Escalating Pricing

Outside of Carta's entry-level free tier (Launch plan), which is limited to 25 stakeholders and up to $1M raised, their pricing is opaque, highly variable, and strictly based on the number of shareholders. To get a price for a paid plan, you have to request a demo and negotiate with a sales representative. Real-world data shows that early-stage companies often pay between $3,000 and $8,000 annually, with median costs across all deals reaching nearly $15,400 per year. For early-stage companies, paying these escalating fees limits your resources.

Eliminating the "Shared Spreadsheet" Problem

For early-stage companies, there is limited functionality on Carta beyond a visual representation of your cap table. In reality, Carta is not far off from being a shared spreadsheet where you must manually enter data from equity contracts and investment agreements to generate a cap table. This process is cumbersome, manual, and highly error-prone.

Most of the startup founders we talked to before founding Capbase actually paid their lawyers to enter data into Carta for them—and they still made mistakes that could cost them a lot of money to fix. Capbase renders the old way of doing cap table management obsolete. We automatically update your document room and cap table in real-time as you issue shares, sign contracts, and raise money from investors, effectively eliminating the need for error-prone manual data entry.

If you were a Pulley user, you know that Pulley was strictly an equity management tool that helped shape a company's ownership structure and plan future investments. Much like Carta, Pulley didn't have the holistic functionality necessary to help you actually get your startup off the ground.

It didn't cover the incorporation process, employee onboarding, contract generation, or bank account setup. By contrast, Capbase is a comprehensive solution that covers cap table management functionality and all of the above essential operational tools.

On legacy platforms, there is limited functionality beyond visualizing your cap table. Capbase replaces manual data entry by automatically syncing your document room and cap table in real-time. When you issue shares, sign a contract, or raise capital, Capbase handles the background work instantly.

Capbase is intentionally designed for pre-seed and seed-stage companies. Our platform is the perfect fit for:

• Recently formed companies that have not yet been funded.
• Founders actively raising their very first external capital via incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and friends & family.

While Carta is optimized for later-stage companies dealing with complex GAAP/IFRS compliance and late-stage audits [cite: 1.1.2], Capbase focuses on giving early-stage founders the exact tools they need to launch, raise, and scale without the enterprise-level bloat.

Capbase is more than just an equity management platform—it’s the foundational first step in a complete founder journey. While Capbase secures your legal foundation through seamless incorporation and automated cap table management, it also connects you directly to the broader MainStreet family of products to support your startup at every stage of growth.

As your company's needs evolve beyond day one, Capbase serves as your gateway to a trusted ecosystem of operational tools:

• Operate: Keep your financials clean and investor-ready with professional bookkeeping and tax filing through Bench.
• Optimize: Extend your runway and preserve cash by claiming R&D tax credits and government incentives with MainStreet AI.
• Grow: Manage payroll, benefits, and HR compliance effortlessly as you build your team with Employer.com.
• Scale: Find and hire the top-tier talent necessary to take your business to the next level with Recruiter.com.

With Capbase, you aren't just getting a cap table; you're unlocking a fully integrated toolkit designed to help you start, operate, optimize, grow, and scale your business without skipping a beat.

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