Carta Pricing in May 2026

Carta's standard pricing follows tiered structure: Launch (free for up to 25 stakeholders), Build at $3,500/year, Grow at $7,000/year, Enterprise custom-quote starting around $20K/year. Add-ons (409A valuations at $3K-7K each, ASC 718 at $2K/year, secondary services) push total annual Carta costs to $10K-50K/year for most venture-backed startups. The pricing tier escalates meaningfully with shareholder count and round complexity.

The $1,000 off first year discount effectively covers 14-30% of typical first-year Carta commitments. Eligibility focuses on early-stage venture-backed startups planning institutional fundraising. The discount applies to standard Carta tiers. The strategic decision: Carta's value is genuinely the network effects on the investor side — most institutional VCs read cap tables from Carta, run secondary processes through Carta, and expect 409A valuations from Carta-certified appraisers. For startups planning institutional capital within 12 months, Carta's ubiquity reduces friction in ways that are hard to quantify until you hit them mid-deal-cycle. For bootstrapped or angel-funded startups not raising institutional capital, Pulley is dramatically cheaper (typically 40-60% less than Carta at equivalent scale) with sufficient feature parity for the cap table + 409A workflows. The discount window is the right time to evaluate whether your fundraising timeline justifies Carta's premium — for pre-priced-round teams with only SAFE notes, the cost-benefit math typically favors Pulley until a priced round is imminent.