Pulley vs Carta: the comparison is over

For most of the last five years, “Pulley vs Carta” was the default cap table comparison. Pulley was the challenger with cleaner pricing and a faster product; Carta was the incumbent with the network effect.

That comparison ended in September 2026. Pulley is shutting down on December 8, after seven years and more than $50 million raised, and Carta is handling the migrations. If you arrived here trying to choose between them, the choice has been made for you. What is left is a narrower and more urgent question: take the Carta offer, or go somewhere else under your own power?

What the offer actually contains

Pulley describes the migration to Carta as “a direct migration process that brings your entire cap table and history from Pulley to Carta with no lift required.” The commercial terms, as Pulley states them:

• Year-one pricing matches your current Pulley rate.
• Credits for any unused prepaid Pulley balance.
• A new Carta agreement, which you sign within two weeks of it arriving.
• Opt-in by November 30, 2026 — eight days before the shutdown itself.

That is a genuinely good deal for the first twelve months, and it is worth saying so plainly. Someone else does the migration, your rate does not move, and money you have already spent is not stranded.

The part the offer does not settle

Everything after month twelve.

A price match is a one-year instrument. What matters for your budget is the renewal, and the renewal is a normal commercial negotiation in which your leverage is lower than it is today — because by then you are already on the platform, your investors are already looking at it, and migrating again is a cost you will not want to pay twice.

So before signing, get five things in writing:

1. The year-two price, in numbers, not “standard rates apply.”
2. The contract term, and whether it auto-renews. A twelve-month term that renews annually is a different instrument from a three-year commitment signed in a hurry.
3. What happens at your next stakeholder band. Every provider in this category prices by stakeholder count. Ask what your price becomes at the next band, and where that band starts.
4. How many 409A valuations are included per year, and what an extra one costs.
5. What a complete self-service export contains — objects, format, and whether you can run it yourself. This is the question Pulley’s customers did not ask in 2021.

None of those is an unreasonable ask, and a vendor that will not answer them in writing has told you something useful.

How the two compared, for the record

Worth stating, because it explains why so many companies are on Pulley and why the migration feels like a loss rather than an upgrade.

Pulley competed on three things. Price transparency — published tiers against an incumbent that quotes. Modelling — scenario and waterfall tools that founders found easier to reason with, particularly around SAFEs and pool top-ups. Speed — a smaller surface that did fewer things and did them without a support ticket.

Carta competed on coverage and gravity. Bundled 409A valuations, fund administration on the investor side of the table, tender offers and secondaries, ASC 718 at audit scale, and the network effect of investors who already had accounts. For a company past Series B, the feature gap was real and it ran one way.

That was a genuine choice, and reasonable people made it differently. It is now a historical question.

What the shutdown says about buying software like this

Pulley raised more than $50 million from investors including Founders Fund and Stripe, ran for seven years, and still could not reach escape velocity against an incumbent with a network effect. That is not a product-quality verdict — it is a market-structure one, and it carries two lessons for anyone choosing a cap table platform next.

Funding is not durability. A well-funded challenger has to keep winning to keep existing. A profitable regional player or a bank subsidiary has a different obligation. Neither is automatically the better product; they are different risk profiles, and the risk shows up exactly when migrating is most inconvenient.

Portability is the only real hedge. You cannot diligence a vendor’s next five years. You can ask, before signing, exactly what a complete export contains and whether you can run it yourself. Companies that had taken an export in 2024 are having a much calmer autumn than companies discovering the question in November.

Questions to ask on the migration call

Whether you end up at Carta or elsewhere, these take ten minutes and are the highest- value ten minutes in the process:

• What exactly do you import — grants with full vesting schedules, or grant summaries?
• How do you handle non-standard vesting: waived cliffs, back-dated starts, milestone vesting?
• Do forfeited options return to my pool, and does that follow my plan document or your default?
• How are SAFEs represented, and do they appear in my fully diluted count?
• Who reconciles the import — you, or me? Do I get a reconciliation report I can show a board?
• What is my year-two price, and what is it at the next stakeholder band?
• How many 409As are included, and what does an extra one cost?
• Show me what a full self-service export produces. Today, on a demo account.

That last one is the tell. A vendor confident about portability will show you; a vendor that is not will route you to support.

What actually transfers, and what does not

A migration moves records. It does not move history that was never recorded properly in the first place.

Things that transfer cleanly: issued shares, standard four-year option grants, investors, closed rounds, documents you uploaded.

Things that reliably need checking afterwards:

• Non-standard vesting. Advisor schedules, waived cliffs, back-dated start dates, milestone vesting. Anything that is not four-years-one-year-cliff deserves a manual look.
• Forfeited options. Whether they return to the pool depends on your plan document, and platforms make different default assumptions. This one moves your pool-remaining figure.
• SAFEs and notes. Pre-money versus post-money, caps, discounts and whether they appear in fully diluted at all. Different systems, different conventions.
• Terminated employees. Post-termination exercise windows, and whether the clock is running correctly for people who left recently.

Run the four control totals — shares outstanding, fully diluted, pool authorised, pool remaining — on both systems, and spot-check three grants by hand. Twenty minutes, whoever you migrate to, and it is the difference between “the import seemed fine” and knowing.

If you would rather not consolidate

There is a structural argument against taking the assisted path, and it is not about product quality. Pulley was the most direct US competitor Carta had. Its disappearance concentrates the market, and everyone who moves concentrates it a little further. Some founders will weigh that; most will reasonably decide their own migration deadline matters more than market structure.

If you do want to look elsewhere, the practical constraint is that Pulley is “unable to assist a migration to a different provider in any capacity.” You run the export, the import and the reconciliation. For a straightforward early-stage cap table that is a day or two of work.

The published alternatives, briefly — full detail in Pulley alternatives:

Provider	Published entry price	Notes
Cake Equity	$1,000/yr, +$1 per extra stakeholder	Team plan at $2,750 includes two 409As and free basic migration
Qapita	$1,600/yr to 40 stakeholders	Free under 25 stakeholders and $1M raised; 409A is a $1,500 add-on
Eqvista	$2 per stakeholder/month	409A-plus-cap-table bundles from $990/yr by stage
Fidelity Private Shares	Free to 25 stakeholders, under $1M raised	Paid tiers quoted; 409A from the Growth tier
Ledgy	Quote only	The usual answer for European entities

Geography narrows this faster than features do. European entities look at Ledgy; APAC and Australian companies at Cake Equity; cost-sensitive US companies at Eqvista or Fidelity Private Shares; globally distributed teams at Qapita.

The decision, compressed

Take the Carta offer if you are US-based, your investors are already there, you need a 409A in the next twelve months, and you would rather spend this quarter on your company than on a migration. Opt in before November 30 and negotiate the renewal now rather than next year.

Move elsewhere if your entities are outside the US, your costs at Carta were already the reason you were on Pulley, or you have wanted off this stack for a while. Export this week and migrate in October, before every other Pulley customer hits the same onboarding queues in late November.

Do not do nothing. That is the only genuinely bad option, and it is the most common one. The app is gone on December 8; the limited-format window closes January 31, 2027.

The lesson worth keeping

The useful takeaway from this shutdown is not which vendor won. It is that your cap table is a legal record you own, temporarily stored in somebody else’s software, and the vendor’s survival is not a variable you control.

Two habits follow. Export in the first week of a subscription, not the last. And keep the signed documents — board consents, grant letters, plan documents, SAFEs, 409A reports — somewhere that does not depend on any platform remaining in business. Those documents are the actual cap table. Everything else is a rendering of them.

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Where we fit, honestly: ESOP.fyi is an AI-native cap table, ESOP and liquidity platform opening its first cohort in Q4 2026 — after Pulley goes dark. We are not a migration option for this deadline and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Move where you need to before December 8, and join the waitlist if you want one email when we open.