The Pulley Migration Guide: All You Need to Know Including the Fine-Print

On September 15, 2026, Pulley customers opened their inboxes to news that ended a seven-year experiment: after raising more than $50 million from Founders Fund, Stripe, General Catalyst, and 8VC to build a real alternative to Carta, Pulley is shutting down. All operations stop December 8, 2026.

We’ve gone through Pulley’s official resources, its published FAQs, its live opt-in form, and how founders and industry watchers are reacting in public. Here’s what’s actually in the fine print - and, more importantly, what your options actually are.

Two rushed deadlines for transition

Most people who’ve heard about this assume there’s a single date to worry about: December 8, when Pulley shuts down. There’s actually an earlier, quieter one that matters more.

November 30: the opt-in cutoff

Per Pulley’s own FAQ: if you haven’t opted in to the Carta migration by November 30, 2026, everything changes. You can still sign with Carta after that date, but “you cannot take advantage of Carta’s collaborative migration process, and you will need to sign a new contract with Carta that has no guaranteed pricing or credits applied.” Pulley is explicit about what that means:

“Our team will not be available to assist your migration.”
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Two weeks to sign the contract

Stack that against the second deadline Pulley gives every customer once their contract arrives: two weeks to sign. Pulley’s FAQ doesn’t dress this up as a technical necessity - it frames it as a race:

“You have two weeks from when your agreement arrives to sign. Pulley recommends not waiting. The sooner you sign, the sooner your transition is scheduled, and the more time you have to get settled on Carta before Pulley fully winds down.”

Founders noticed. When Pulley posted its shutdown notice publicly, one founder posted on X, tagging Pulley with a single question: “why is this so rushed?”

You've a choice: Pulley's 'only path' isn't the only path

Pulley calls Carta its “exclusive transition partner,” and its FAQ repeats - almost word for word, twice - that Pulley “will not be available to assist a migration to a different provider in any capacity.”

What Pulley’s messaging actually means

It’s a statement about what Pulley will help with, not about what’s possible. Cap table and equity data isn’t proprietary to one platform - it can be exported and migrated to a provider of your choice. You are not required to sign with Carta to preserve your ownership records, and Pulley declining to help isn’t the same thing as having no path forward.

We’ve seen internal accounts from real companies on Pulley right now, told by its support team that there would be no help moving to any platform besides Carta - despite those companies having real reservations about Carta and actively considering other providers. That’s a pressure to be aware of. It’s not, however, a real barrier.

A free, fully managed “friendlier” alternative

You don’t need Pulley’s assistance to move your data elsewhere, and you don’t need to make a rushed, unsure decision just because the messaging implies there’s only one door. Qapita offers Pulley customers a fully managed, free migration – without any exclusivity clause, no dependency on Pulley’s cooperation. Our team handles the export, the data validation, and the upload directly into Qapita.

An opportunity for a cleaner cap table

There's an upside here too. Migrating is also a natural opportunity to clean up your cap table. As part of the process, we run a full health check on your equity data - catching inconsistencies, stale records, or gaps that tend to accumulate over years on any platform - before anything goes live on Qapita. You don’t just move; you move to something better organized than what you had.

The consent form: Is your data going to Carta?

Before any migration happens, Pulley asks a simple question: will you let us share your information with Carta?

You can say NO. Pulley is clear that opting in "is not a contractual agreement to migrate to Carta". It's closer to requesting a demo than signing anything binding. Saying yes just opens a conversation; it doesn't commit you to anything yet.

What your consent actually means

The consent itself is specific: you checking the box authorizes Pulley to share your organization's contact information and contract details with Carta. That's the first domino - a company that's faced real scrutiny in the past over how it's handled customer data gets a look at who you are and what you're paying, before you've decided anything. And once that domino falls, the decision isn't only yours anymore. Buried in the same FAQ:

“Your organization’s migration eligibility is subject to review and final approval by Carta.”

So the actual sequence is: you consent > your information moves > and then Carta decides whether they want you or not. Not the other way around. There’s also an eligibility factor. It's worth asking yourself, before checking that box, whether you're comfortable handing that decision to the company on the other side of it - especially when nothing requires you to.

What are the contract and cost implications

Pulley and Carta are both publicly clear that customers keep their current Pulley pricing for a full year, plus a credit for any unused prepaid balance. Fair, on its face.

What Carta's offer actually includes

Sign a new 12-month contract with Carta, and you get your Pulley rate carried over for Year 1, credit for whatever you'd already paid Pulley and hadn't used, and a migration Carta handles on the technical side. That's the pitch.
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Implications on cost: When "Year One" actually starts

The part that matters more than the headline number is timing.

“Your Carta agreement and Year 1 pricing take effect the day you sign, regardless of when your technical migration happens. Signing locks in your rate and contract term; your migration is scheduled separately.”

Your 12-month clock starts at signature, not at go-live. Pulley describes the technical migration itself as typically taking "a few business days" once your contract is signed (also depending on when your cohort is scheduled). More complex cap tables will take a bit longer. Given the two-week window Pulley gives you to sign, that gap between "contract starts" and "actually running on the new platform" can eat into the year you're supposedly getting for free.
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Implications on billing flexibility: What customers lose

If you're currently on Pulley's monthly plan, that option disappears entirely. Carta doesn’t offer monthly billing. Only annual, semi-annual or quarterly. Pulley's own FAQ confirms monthly customers "will start on one of those plans" instead, at the matched rate. Quarterly and semi-annual Pulley customers can stay on a similar cycle; monthly customers can't. If your business runs lean and monthly billing mattered to your cash flow, that flexibility is gone the moment you sign - permanently, not just for year one.

What happens after year one?

This is the part nobody's actually answering. The entire public conversation, official resources, messaging - stops at "your Year 1 pricing is matched." Nobody says what year two costs.
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• Is Carta's standard rate significantly higher than what you're paying now?  

• Does the 12-month contract renew automatically, or do you get a real chance to renegotiate - or leave?  

• If you don't know what the bill looks like in month 13, are you actually locking in a good deal, or just deferring the real cost of this migration by a year?  

• Does it mean you could start evaluating alternatives then?

These are the questions worth asking Carta directly before you sign, not after.

Why there’s some resistance about Carta

Separately from the mechanics of the transition, there’s a reason this particular handoff has generated more public reaction than a typical vendor shutdown would.

A customer base that grew by avoiding Carta

A meaningful share of Pulley’s customer base - which grew from roughly 2,200 companies in early 2023 to over 7,700 today - chose Pulley in part because they wanted an alternative to Carta. For founders who made that switch deliberately, being routed back to the exact company they moved away from reads differently than a neutral migration.

How the internet is reacting

Commentary online has reflected that tension - some pointing out that the move leaves Carta with “a totally uncontested hold on the market,” others calling it “the irony of the handoff.” As RuntimeWire’s coverage of the migration terms put it: “A shutdown is not just a product story when the data is a company’s ownership record.”

None of this requires assuming bad intent from anyone involved in this transition. It’s simply useful context for why “just sign with Carta” doesn’t feel like a neutral instruction to a lot of the people receiving it.

If you’re a Pulley customer weighing all this right now

A few questions worth asking before you sign anything:

• Does the two-week contract signing window match your actual migration complexity, or Pulley’s incentive to close quickly?

• If Carta doesn’t approve your migration (“subject to review and final approval”), what’s your fallback - and is there time left to use it?

• Have you actually looked at what a free, assisted migration to an alternative looks like - or are you defaulting to Carta because it’s the only option being offered to you?

You have more room to maneuver than you think. Qapita will migrate your cap table for free, handle the data work end-to-end, and use the move as a chance to clean things up - no rushed decision, no blind step required.  

Qapita’s own migration path matches your current Pulley pricing (or Qapita’s own rate, whichever is lower) with no exclusivity clause attached - and current customers who’ve made the move, including several coming directly off Carta, describe the difference in support as the actual reason they switched, not just the price.