Carta is the Gold Standard for startups to keep their CAP Table, but at a price.
One of my companies hasn’t really raised any money, but we have a 50+ stakeholders do to a merger and employee options. We execute maybe 2-3 documents per year related to capital. So the $8,400 annual price of Carta cost us about $4,000 per transaction that we did. Obviously, that is absurd.
We ended up downloading all of the reports and PDFs of all existing options. And added some instructions for what we need to do when new options are granted, exercised, etc. We save the CAP table and related documents in a Google Drive (that we already pay for), and ended up saving $8,400+ per year!
I understand that there are a few other things, such as 409A valuations and peace of mind that come with having a professional software like Carta manage your CAP table, but the savings, for us, are an easy trade-off.