2026 Cap Table Drama: Alternatives to Pulley and Carta

Editorial note

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Overview

Pulley just announced it is shutting down, and Carta is the one taking its customers. For founders staring down a forced migration, this comparison reviews the realistic alternatives to signing up for Carta by default, including Story.law's Aegis cap table, Cake Equity, and a straight look at what Carta itself now offers. We evaluate each provider on published pricing, migration workload, data-handling track record, and how much founder time the switch actually costs.

What Just Happened With Pulley and Carta?

Pulley, the Founders Fund and Stripe-backed startup that spent seven years trying to challenge Carta in cap-table management, is shutting down on December 8, 2026. In an unusual move, Carta has agreed to help migrate Pulley's customers and is offering them a year of matched pricing. Customers who move to Carta will be able to keep their current Pulley pricing for the first year, and Carta will credit any unused portion of their Pulley subscription. On paper, that sounds tidy. In practice, a migration means every historical grant, SAFE, note, and vesting schedule has to be reconciled inside a new system before founders can trust it as the record of truth, and the price match ends after twelve months. That combination, a compressed timeline plus a rate cliff, is why the default option is worth pressure-testing before signing.

Why the Default Path to Carta Deserves Scrutiny

Carta is the incumbent, and for many later-stage companies it remains the operational standard. It is also the same provider that manages the cap table for approximately 40,000 privately funded startups and that walked into a public trust crisis less than two years ago. In early January 2024, Karri Saarinen, the Finnish CEO of Linear (a project management software startup and Carta customer), posted publicly on LinkedIn that a Carta employee had contacted one of Linear's angel investors to offer to sell their shares through CartaX, Carta's private secondary trading platform. Linear had never consented to any secondary sales process. The investor contacted was a family member whose investment Saarinen says Linear never published anywhere.

Carta faced a significant credibility crisis in January 2024 when a prominent startup customer accused the company of misusing confidential information. This incident raised alarm among Carta's other customers and led to threats from founders to move their business elsewhere. The short of it is that one sales employee, according to Carta, used confidential data from one of the company's customers to craft a sales pitch for a secondary stock sale. The act was an obvious violation of Carta's ethics and customers' data privacy. The company initially paused secondary trading, and then last night said it would shut down that business altogether.

Carta closed the secondary business and Henry Ward publicly framed the decision as a trust reset. Carta co-founder and CEO Henry Ward posted on Medium tonight that: "Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we are not. So we have decided to prioritize trust, and exit the secondary trading business." That is the honest version, and it matters. It also does not erase the underlying data-custody question that any founder inherits when they hand over their shareholder records. Data custody risk. Every investor's contact information, share count, and cost basis sits in Carta's database. The January 2024 incident showed that internal controls can fail even at a company that publicly commits to data separation.

There is also a pure economics question. Carta's pricing is not fully public at the tiers most funded startups eventually land in. Pricing opacity. Carta's pricing is tiered and not publicly listed for mid-market or enterprise plans. Termination and downgrade terms are typically annual, which means a founder who signs a Carta contract as part of the Pulley wind-down and then wants to leave twelve months later, when the price-match year ends, is generally locked into whatever the renewal rate turns out to be.

What to Look for in a Cap Table Provider After a Forced Migration

When the switching event is not voluntary, the evaluation criteria shift. The questions that matter most:

• Published pricing. Can a founder see the full annual cost and renewal terms before signing, or does it require a sales call?
• Billing cadence. Monthly cancel-anytime pricing versus annual contracts with termination fees.
• Migration workload. How much founder time is required to reconcile historical documents into the new system?
• Document-first accuracy. Does the system build the cap table from signed legal documents, or does it rely on founder data entry that later has to be verified?
• Data-handling track record. Has the provider had public incidents of employee misuse of customer data?
• Optional legal supervision. Can a licensed attorney review the record without a separate engagement?
• Investor and law firm acceptance. Will the record hold up in a Series A diligence review?

Feature Comparison: Story.law vs. Pulley vs. Carta vs. Cake Equity

This table is a quick side-by-side. Details and citations are in the individual sections below.

The short version: Carta is the most institutionally recognized option and the default the Pulley wind-down pushes founders toward. Cake Equity is the strongest published-price mid-tier option. Story.law is the option that most directly reduces the founder time cost of migrating off Pulley, at pricing equal to or below Pulley's historical floor.

Story.law (Aegis) vs Pulley vs Carta vs Cake Equity

• Story.law (Aegis)

  story.law

  Story.law's Aegis is the option that most directly targets the friction of a forced Pulley migration. Instead of asking founders to re-enter historical equity data into a new system, Aegis reads the underlying signed documents and builds the cap table from them. Story.law is a licensed law firm, and the cap table product is offered as a standalone SaaS subscription with optional lawyer supervision.

  Key Features

  • Aegis by Story.law now offers standalone cap table management at $99/month after a 7-day free trial. You upload your mess of legal documents, and the platform analyzes and organizes them to build your cap table. Teams can choose AI-only or lawyer-supervised workflows, with a one-time $499 onboarding fee for lawyer-supervised setup.
  • Cap table built from actual signed equity agreements rather than manual data entry
  • Optional lawyer-in-the-loop verification without a separate engagement letter
  • Monthly billing with no annual lock-in
  • Expandable into a broader legal operations platform (data room, governance tracker, contracts, e-signature) if and when needed

  Best For

  Pre-seed through Series A founders currently on Pulley who want to avoid a rushed Carta signup. Teams that want the cap table built from documents rather than reconstructed by hand. Founders who want optional attorney review without a separate legal engagement. Any team that prefers monthly, cancel-anytime billing to annual lock-in.

  Pricing

  7-day free trial. $99/month after. Cancel anytime. Lawyer-supervised onboarding is available for a one-time $499 fee. Broader Aegis packages that bundle cap table, data room, and legal operations start at $349/month. Monthly billing means no termination fee if the product is not the right fit.

  Differentiators Versus Carta and Pulley

  • Document-first accuracy. Upload your signed equity agreements. Story.law builds your cap table from actual legal documents, not manual data entry. Zero risk of founder error. This is the specific pain point of a Pulley-to-Carta migration: reconciling every historical grant.
  • Lawyer logic baked into the software. Even without the lawyer-supervised onboarding, the lawyer logic is built into the software, so there is no need to hire lawyers to help enter data properly as with other platforms; $99/month standalone pricing for the basic cap table beats competitor pricing; Story.law offers a 7-day free trial; lawyer supervision is available for less than the cost of one lawyer hour when you want legal verification.
  • Monthly cancel-anytime pricing. Story.law bills at $99/month with a 7-day free trial and no annual termination fees, versus Carta's tiered annual contracts and Pulley's former $1,200 per year floor.
  • No secondary trading business. Story.law is a law firm building software; it does not operate a secondary market and has no structural conflict of interest of the kind that produced the January 2024 Carta incident.

  Benefits of Using Story.law

  • Less founder time on migration, because the platform reads the source documents
  • Optional legal verification without a separate lawyer engagement
  • Monthly pricing that lets founders exit if the product does not fit
  • A single upgrade path from cap table to data room to broader legal ops

  How Real Teams Use Story.law

  • Post-Pulley migration. Uploading historical Pulley exports and signed equity documents to rebuild the cap table without hand-keying grants.
  • First priced round preparation. The earliest decisions around SAFEs, notes, and ESOPs compound over time, so founders benefit from structured tooling before their first priced round. Software gives you a single source of truth for ownership, vesting, pro formas, and investor updates.
  • Diligence readiness. Pairing the cap table with a data room and governance tracker so a lead investor's diligence request produces a clean export, not a scramble.

• Pulley

  pulley.com

  Pulley spent seven years as the credible independent challenger to Carta and built a real product with a real customer base. Pulley will cease all operations on December 8, 2026, the company told customers this week, ending a seven-year run that once looked like the strongest bet anyone had made against Carta's grip on startup equity software. Pulley had raised more than $50 million from Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Stripe, and 8VC, according to the company.

  Key Features

  • Cap table management with SAFE and convertible note modeling
  • 409A valuations with faster turnaround than the market default
  • Scenario modeling for priced rounds and option pool expansions
  • Flat annual pricing at published tiers
  • ESOP administration and stakeholder portals

  Best For

  Pre-seed and seed founders who wanted flat, published pricing. Teams running their first priced round with SAFE conversions. Founders who valued a faster 409A turnaround.

  Pricing

  Companies under 25 stakeholders that haven't raised $1M pay $0 on Carta Launch, cheaper than Pulley's $1,200/year floor. Pulley's Startup tier historically sat at $1,200 per year, with higher published tiers for growth-stage teams. Pulley's status as of this article: winding down. Any evaluation of Pulley now is really an evaluation of what comes next.

• Carta

  carta.com

  Carta remains the largest cap table provider by customer count and is the default option most law firms and later-stage investors recognize on sight. It is also the provider whose sales team the Pulley migration path funnels into.

  Key Features

  • Cap table management for pre-seed through late-stage private companies
  • 409A valuations
  • Fund administration for venture capital and private equity firms
  • Deep integration with law firms and auditors
  • Employee equity portals and tax reporting

  Best For

  Companies whose lead investor or law firm specifically expects Carta. Later-stage private companies with complex multi-class capital structures. Fund managers who want cap table and fund admin under one roof.

  Pricing

  Carta offers a free Launch tier for the smallest companies, then tiered annual plans that scale with stakeholder count and features. Pricing opacity. Carta's pricing is tiered and not publicly listed for mid-market or enterprise plans. The Pulley migration promotion includes a year of matched pricing, after which standard Carta rates apply. Termination generally follows an annual contract cycle.

  The Trust and Ethics Overhang

  • Any objective Carta review in 2026 has to acknowledge the January 2024 incident and its aftermath. Carta, a fintech startup that rode its message of democratizing startup ownership to a $7.4 billion valuation, is facing mounting blowback after a client accused one of the company's sales employees of trying to use confidential customer information to broker trades.
  • The secondary business was small in revenue terms. That secondary transaction business has remained small, only bringing in about $3 million in annual revenue, per Ward. Compared that to the $250 million it gets from cap table management, and $100 million from fund administration. The reputational cost was larger.
  • Customer satisfaction data also lags the market share. Competitors' narrower focus may produce higher quality products, pulling customers away from Carta. Despite its dominance in the equity management market, Carta has only the seventeenth highest satisfaction score on G2 as of January 2025.
  • Carta is a serious product with real institutional acceptance. It is not, based on the public record, the only reasonable option for a founder being pushed off Pulley.

• Cake Equity

  Cake Equity is a US and Australia-linked equity management platform that has grown into a credible mid-market option, particularly for founders who value published pricing and free migration.

  Key Features

  • Cap table management with SAFE, convertible note, and priced-round support
  • Identify how much each shareholder will be diluted by if you progress a round of investment. Simulate conversion of your SAFE or Convertible Notes and changes in your cap table instantly. Top up your option pool and review changes to your holdings. Model future scenarios and see how new investment rounds will impact ownership.
  • 409A valuations bundled into higher tiers
  • QSBS eligibility tracking, Rule 701 disclosures, and ASC 718 reporting
  • Free migration handled by Cake's team

  Best For

  US pre-seed and seed startups that want a free-to-start cap table with room to grow. Founders who want a 409A bundled into their cap table subscription instead of paying a separate vendor. Teams that value G2's top implementation and support ratings in the category over brand name recognition. Budget-conscious founders who still need audit-ready compliance ahead of a priced round.

  Pricing

  Free: up to 5 stakeholders, genuinely free, not a trial. Build: $1,000/year for up to 25 stakeholders. Team: $2,750/year for up to 40 stakeholders, with a 409A valuation included. Cake's honest limitation: The trade-off is brand recognition: Carta and Pulley are more familiar names to US institutional investors and law firms, so it's worth a quick check with your lead before you commit if you're heading into a priced round. For founders whose investors are flexible on tooling, Cake is a strong published-price alternative to Carta at the seed and Series A ranges.

How to Choose

The Pulley wind-down creates a specific decision window. Founders can accept the Carta migration path, which comes with a one-year price match and then reverts to standard Carta pricing on an annual contract, at a provider whose data-handling controls publicly failed in January 2024. Or they can evaluate independent alternatives on the criteria that actually matter in a forced switch: published pricing, billing flexibility, migration workload, and data custody track record. On published pricing, Story.law's $99/month standalone plan is below Pulley's historical $1,200 per year floor and below Cake's Build plan. On migration workload, Story.law's document-first approach is the only option in this comparison that builds the cap table from signed legal documents rather than requiring founders to re-enter historical grants. On billing flexibility, monthly cancel-anytime pricing removes the renewal-cliff risk that comes with any annual contract, including Carta's post-promotional year. On data custody, Story.law is a law firm building software and does not operate an adjacent secondary trading business. Carta is the correct choice for some companies, particularly later-stage teams whose lead investor or law firm explicitly expects it. For most pre-seed through Series A founders being pushed off Pulley, the default is worth questioning before signing.

• Choose Story.law (Aegis) if you want the cap table built from signed documents rather than reconstructed by hand, prefer monthly cancel-anytime billing over annual lock-in, and want optional attorney review without a separate legal engagement. Story.law most directly reduces the founder time cost of migrating off Pulley at pricing equal to or below Pulley's historical floor.
• Choose Cake Equity if you want published annual pricing, a free tier for very small cap tables, and Cake's team to handle migration. Cake is the strongest published-price mid-tier option for budget-conscious US seed founders whose investors are flexible on tooling.
• Choose Carta if your lead investor or law firm specifically expects Carta, you need fund administration alongside cap table, or you operate at a later stage with complex multi-class capital structures where institutional acceptance matters most.
• Choose Pulley if you are still on Pulley only until December 8, 2026 — after that, evaluate Story.law, Cake Equity, or Carta using the criteria above rather than defaulting to the migration path without a comparison.