How much are you actually selling?

A SAFE feels free because no money leaves your hands and no number is locked until the next round. It is not free. The day you sign a post-money SAFE, you have sold a fixed slice of your company at a fixed price. The only question is whether you know the slice. Most founders do not, because the cap is a big number and the raise is a small one, and the brain reads that as "barely any dilution." Enter both below and see the real figure. If you are raising without a network, knowing this number cold is part of how you hold your own in the room.

On a post-money SAFE, the investor's ownership is fixed the moment you sign: their money divided by the post-money valuation cap. A 500,000 dollar SAFE on a 10 million dollar post-money cap buys 5 percent of the company, full stop, assuming it converts at the cap. The word "post-money" is the whole point. The cap already includes this SAFE and every other SAFE in the round, so the percentages are locked and they simply add up. That is cleaner than the old pre-money SAFE, where each new SAFE quietly diluted the earlier ones and nobody could tell you their real ownership until the priced round closed.

This is why the cap is the most important number you will negotiate at this stage, and why it should not come from a rule of thumb. Set your cap off comparable recent rounds in your sector and your geography, companies at your stage, with your kind of traction, that raised in the last twelve months. Price and judgment come from comparable evidence, not from a number a founder down the hall happened to mention. A cap that is twice the going rate for your stage does not make your company worth more. It makes the round harder to close and sets a bar your next round has to clear or you take a down round.

There is no correct cap. There is a defensible one. The ranges below are illustrative starting points for US pre-seed and seed rounds, the kind of post-money caps you would expect to see by stage. Treat them as orientation, not a target. They move with the market, and they vary enormously by sector and geography.

Now the honest part. These numbers are US-centric and they are wide on purpose. Rounds in Europe and Poland typically run lower at the same stage, sometimes meaningfully, because the comparable rounds around you are smaller. A hot sector like AI infrastructure runs higher. A crowded or capital-intensive one runs lower. A hardware company and a SaaS company at identical revenue do not carry the same cap. So do not lift a number off this table and put it in your SAFE. Find five recent rounds that genuinely look like yours, in your sector and your region, raised in the last year, and let those set the cap. That is the only method that survives contact with an investor who knows the market. The same comparable-evidence discipline is in the pricing checklist.

One more thing the single-round math hides. Founders rarely sign one SAFE. They sign a few over a year, each one a few percent, and the slices add up faster than it feels. Then the priced round adds a fresh chunk of new money, and the lawyers add an option pool that usually comes out of the founders' share, not the investors'. The calculator above shows you the SAFE layer cleanly. The two effects it does not show, priced-round dilution and the option pool top-up, are real and they are why the cap table at Series A often surprises the people who built the company. Plan the whole path, not one round.

Educational estimate only, not legal or financial advice and not an offer of any security. SAFE terms, caps, and conversion mechanics vary by document and by jurisdiction. Numbers are illustrative and move with sector, stage, and geography. Have a qualified startup lawyer review your actual SAFE before you sign anything.