Pulley is shutting down: what happens to your cap table, and what to do

Pulley is shutting down. After seven years and more than $50 million raised from Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Stripe and 8VC, the company has told customers the app goes dark on December 8, 2026, and has partnered with Carta to move its customers across.

If your cap table lives in Pulley, this is not a “deal with it in Q4” problem. The deadline that actually binds you is six weeks before the shutdown, and the most important thing you can do takes an afternoon and does not depend on which provider you end up choosing.

The three dates that matter

November 30, 2026 — the opt-in deadline. To be handed over to Carta, you have to opt in to sharing your contact and contract details. Miss it and you are not blocked from Carta, but you lose the assisted path.

December 8, 2026 — the app goes dark. Pulley’s words: “Pulley is shutting down on December 8th, 2026. At that time, the Pulley app experience will no longer be accessible.” Not read-only. Not degraded. Gone.

January 31, 2027 — the last of your data. After the shutdown, Pulley says data remains available in a limited format until the end of January. “Limited format” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is not a guarantee you will get back what you put in.

Do the export this week, whatever you decide

Every option below gets easier if you already hold your own data. Before you evaluate a single vendor, pull:

• The holder ledger — every stakeholder, share class, certificate number and issue date.
• Every grant, with its vesting schedule, cliff, strike price, exercise history and expiry — the schedules, not just the summary totals.
• 409A valuation reports, all of them, not only the current one.
• Board consents and resolutions authorising the pool and each issuance.
• SAFEs and convertibles, with their caps, discounts and conversion terms.
• 83(b) elections and exercise paperwork, which are the documents nobody can reconstruct later.

Our full export checklist walks through each of these and how to verify the files are actually complete. Export in whatever machine-readable format Pulley offers, then also save the PDFs. Keep the raw files somewhere you control. A cap table is a legal record with a multi-year audit trail; it is not something to hold on trust in someone else’s sunsetting product.

Your three options

Option 1 — Take the assisted path to Carta

It is the route Pulley built for, and the terms are better than a cold migration: cap table data, documents and transaction history transfer, the technical work takes “a few business days once your contract is signed,” your current Pulley pricing is honoured for your first full year on Carta, and prepaid balances come across as credits.

The catches are real but small. You sign a new Carta agreement, so read the term length and the renewal price — the price hold covers year one, not year two. Monthly plans have to convert to quarterly or annual billing.

Option 2 — Move to a different provider

Entirely doable, with one significant asterisk: Pulley says it is “unable to assist a migration to a different provider in any capacity.” No export help, no reconciliation support, no one to call when a vesting schedule lands wrong. That is not a reason to rule it out — it is a reason to run your export early, while the app is still up and someone still answers support.

If you are weighing this, we wrote a longer piece on where Pulley customers can actually move, a separate map of the Carta alternatives worth considering, and a note on what the shutdown does to the old Pulley vs Carta comparison.

Option 3 — Wait

The weakest option, and the most common one. Waiting compresses a migration, a vendor evaluation and a year-end close into the same three weeks of December.

Pulley alternatives at a glance

Where you are	Realistic first look	Why
US, want zero friction	Carta	The assisted path, price honoured for year one
Europe / multi-country	Ledgy	Built for European entities and reporting
APAC / Australia	Cake Equity	Regional coverage and pricing
Early and cost-sensitive	Eqvista, Fidelity Private Shares	Cheapest defensible options with 409A paths
Global teams, mid-market	Qapita	Multi-jurisdiction equity compliance

Every one of these is a real migration. Pick on where your entities and your stakeholders sit, not on a feature grid.

A practical sequence

1. This week: run the full export, verify it opens, store it where you control it.
2. By late October: check what you are actually paying and when your Pulley term renews. That number decides whether the Carta price hold is worth much to you.
3. By November 30: opt in if Carta is your answer — the assisted path costs nothing to keep open while you decide.
4. Before December 8: reconcile the new system against your export. Total shares outstanding, fully diluted count, pool size and remaining pool, and a spot check of three or four grants against their original letters. Migrations fail quietly in vesting schedules and unallocated pool, not in headline numbers.
5. Before January 31: confirm your documents are archived. After that, the limited window closes.

What to check after any migration

Migrations rarely fail loudly. The four things that go wrong quietly:

• Unallocated pool. Reserved-but-ungranted options frequently arrive as zero or as granted. Check pool size and remaining pool separately.
• Cliffs and start dates. A grant whose vesting commencement date shifts by a month changes the number an employee sees, and eventually the number they exercise.
• Exercised and cancelled options. Historic exercises sometimes import as outstanding, inflating your fully diluted count.
• SAFE conversion terms. Caps and discounts are the fields most often dropped in a transfer, and you will not notice until you model a priced round.

Reconcile against your own export, not against the previous system’s summary screen.

What happens to your 409A valuations

A completed 409A is a report, not a feature of the platform — but a report you only have if you downloaded it. Pull every one, not just the current one. Auditors ask for the history at your first audit, acquirers ask in diligence, and the safe-harbour argument for your option strike prices rests on the documentation, not on a screen in a vendor’s app.

Your next valuation is a separate question. Some platforms bundle it, some resell it, some leave you to a standalone firm at typical fees of $2,500–$5,000. If your current 409A is approaching twelve months old or you have a financing event coming, price that into whichever move you make — it is usually a bigger number than the subscription.

What to ask Carta before you sign

The assisted path involves a new agreement, and the price hold covers your first full year. Five things worth pinning down in writing:

1. Term length and year-two price. The hold expires; the contract may not.
2. What counts as a stakeholder for tier purposes, including ex-employees with outstanding options.
3. Whether a 409A is included in your tier, and how many per year.
4. What the migration transfers — confirm vesting schedules, exercise history and documents explicitly, not just “cap table data.”
5. What export looks like if you leave later. Ask now, while you have leverage and a live example of why it matters.

If you miss the November 30 opt-in

You are not locked out of Carta — you are locked out of the assisted version, which is the part that moves your data for you. In that case: export immediately, sign up with whoever you choose as an ordinary new customer, and import manually. It is more work on a shorter clock, which is the whole reason the date is worth a calendar reminder today.

Your record-keeping obligations do not pause

A vendor shutting down changes nothing about what your company is required to keep. Depending on where you are incorporated, that typically includes a current stock ledger, the board approvals behind every issuance, and the documentation supporting your option strike prices. Employees and former employees also keep statutory rights to certain information about their holdings, and “our platform shut down” is not an answer to those requests.

Practically: the archive you pull this month is not a nice-to-have backup, it is the evidence that your ledger is what you say it is. Store it where your counsel and your accountants can reach it. (This is general information, not legal advice — check the specifics with your counsel for your jurisdiction.)

Why this keeps happening

Pulley did not fail because cap table software is a bad business. It failed because the category is a system of record with one obvious incumbent, and a system of record is nearly impossible to displace on price and interface alone. Switching costs protect the leader, and every challenger has to be enough better to justify a migration that carries legal risk.

The lesson for founders is not “pick the biggest vendor.” It is that your equity data outlives whatever product is holding it. Own your exports, insist on formats you can read without the vendor, and treat portability as a feature you evaluate before you sign — not the thing you discover during a shutdown notice.

That is a large part of why we are building ESOP.fyi the way we are: a cap table you can read, reconcile and take with you, with an AI that ingests whatever your last provider handed you rather than demanding a migration project.

---

A straight note on timing: ESOP.fyi opens its first cohort in Q4 2026. If you are migrating off Pulley before December 8, we are not the answer today — export your data and take the assisted path. If your renewal lands after that, or you would rather not sign another multi-year contract right now, join the waitlist and we will email you once, when doors open.