SaaS Pricing Benchmarks: The $25 Median and Your Category

Ask ten founders what a new product should charge at the door and you get ten confident answers and zero data. Here is the data. Of the products in our directory whose pricing pages disclose a starting monthly price, 651 as of our August fetch, the median SaaS pricing entry point is $25 a month. Half of every disclosed entry price in B2B software costs less than a decent lunch.

That number is useful. What is more useful is how wrong it becomes the moment you slice it by category.

What 651 entry prices say about SaaS pricing

The full spread, from our directory’s latest fetch: disclosed starting prices run from under a dollar a month at the bottom to $7,188 a month at the top, with the median at $25. The distribution is heavily bottom-weighted. Most SaaS products open with a number designed to be approved without a meeting.

Just as telling is who is missing. Our tracker parses tier structures for 1,000 products, but only 651 of them publish a starting monthly price. The other 349 either gate everything behind a demo or publish tiers with no numbers attached. If you have ever wondered whether hiding pricing is normal, it is: roughly a third of parsed pricing pages disclose no entry price at all. The habit clusters by category too. In HR, 14 of the 45 products with a parseable model run fully custom pricing, the highest custom share of any category in the table below, which fits a market where deals are sized to headcount and compliance scope rather than to a tier. We wrote about what sits behind those walls in the Crayon pricing teardown, and the pattern generalizes well beyond competitive intelligence tools.

So the honest benchmark question is not “what does SaaS cost”. It is “what does my category charge, and what motion does that price serve”.

Category is destiny

Here are six categories from our directory with enough disclosed prices to be worth quoting, as of the August fetch:

Category	Median entry price	Free plan share	Free trial share
Security	$8/mo	46%	71%
Email Marketing	$15/mo	48%	52%
HR	$15/mo	22%	40%
AI	$20/mo	63%	34%
Developer Tools	$25/mo	71%	49%
CRM	$29/mo	24%	80%

Sample sizes vary (41 disclosed prices in Developer Tools, 19 in Security), so treat the small categories as directional. The pattern across them is not.

The spread from $8 to $29 is not noise, and it is not about how much value each category delivers. It tracks the acquisition motion. Developer Tools and AI are free-plan-led: 71% and 63% of those products respectively offer a free tier, so the paid entry price is an upgrade nudge for someone already using the product. The entry tier does not need to sell anything. It needs to not scare a developer who has already integrated the thing.

CRM is the opposite motion. Only 24% of CRM products in our directory offer a free plan, 80% run a free trial, and 19 of the 24 parsed CRM products price per seat. The $29 median entry price is not the product’s price; it is the first rung of a seat-expansion ladder. We covered why that model persists in Seat-Based Pricing Isn’t Dead. It Just Lost Default Status, and CRM is the clearest example of where it still is the default.

Email Marketing keeps a low sticker for a third reason: the value metric does the work. Of the 22 parsed products in that category, 21 use hybrid or usage-based models. Your $15 entry price grows with your list whether you upgrade or not. The model distribution across the whole directory is its own story, which we broke down in SaaS Pricing Models: What Hundreds of Live Pricing Pages Actually Use.

Two pricing pages that show the bands in action

Help Scout sits exactly on the global median: Standard costs $25 per user per month on annual billing, beneath a free plan capped at 5 users, 1 inbox, and 1 docs site. That is the textbook self-serve wedge: free plan to get in the building, median-priced entry tier to convert, higher tiers ($45 Plus, $75 Pro) to expand. Nothing about it asks for a conversation with sales.

Agorapulse opens at $99 per user per month ($79 on annual billing), roughly four times the global median, with no free plan and a 30-day trial that requires no credit card. That price only works because the entry tier is not competing with $0 anywhere in the buyer’s head; it is competing with the hours a social media manager spends every week. Above-median entry prices need that kind of anchor. If you charge 4x your category median, your pricing page has to name the alternative cost you replace.

How to set your entry price against the benchmark

The median is not a target. It is a positioning line, and you choose which side of it you stand on.

Price below your category median and you are making a volume claim: self-serve, low friction, no sales call, and enough top-of-funnel to survive small contract values. That only works if your acquisition cost behaves, which is a strategy question before it is a pricing question. We walked through how to pick the model itself in SaaS Pricing Strategy: How Early-Stage Teams Should Actually Choose a Model.

Price on the median and you inherit the category default. That is a fine choice early: it removes price as a variable and lets the product argue on its own merits. Help Scout’s $25 is exactly this.

Price above the median and you owe the page an explanation. An outcome, a replaced cost, a team workflow. Agorapulse’s $99 works because the page sells a job, not a login.

And before you pick any of the three, check your category’s free plan share. If 71% of your competitors offer a free tier, as in Developer Tools, your entry price is not competing against their entry prices. It is competing against zero, and the real question becomes what you gate. If free plans are rare in your category, as in CRM and HR, a free tier can be a wedge instead of a tax, which is exactly the move a category outsider can make against incumbents priced for expansion.

The one move worth making this week

Take the five products you most often lose deals to and pull four numbers from each pricing page: entry price, free plan yes or no, trial yes or no, and pricing model. Thirty minutes of work. Then place your own entry price on the band deliberately: below the median as a volume play, on it as the default, above it with a named anchor. If you cannot articulate which of the three you chose and why, that is the gap. You can run the comparison manually, or point our SaaS pricing page analyzer at the pages and let it do the parsing.

Outmano is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that tracks competitor pricing pages continuously, so benchmarks like these stay current instead of decaying in a spreadsheet. The numbers in this post come straight from our directory’s live fetches.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a typical entry price in SaaS pricing?

Across the 651 products in our directory that disclose a starting monthly price, the median entry price is $25 a month as of the August 2026 fetch. Category medians vary widely around it, from $8 in Security to $29 in CRM, so benchmark against your own category rather than SaaS as a whole.

Why do so many SaaS companies hide their pricing?

Of the 1,000 products whose tiers our tracker parses, 349 publish no starting price at all. Undisclosed pricing usually signals a sales-assisted motion: the vendor wants to qualify the buyer, size the deal to the account, and preserve room for negotiation. It trades self-serve volume for larger, slower contracts.

Should my product have a free plan or a free trial?

Look at your category’s norms first. In our directory, 71% of Developer Tools products offer a free plan while only 24% of CRM products do; CRM leans on trials instead, at 80%. Matching the category default is the safe play, and deliberately breaking it, like offering a free plan where none exist, is a positioning move that needs to be funded and gated with care.

Is a $25 per month entry price too cheap for B2B?

Not by itself, because the entry price rarely describes the contract value. A $25 per-seat product across a 20-person team is $500 a month, and usage-based products grow with consumption regardless of the sticker. Judge the expansion path, not the door price.

How often should I re-check competitor entry prices?

Quarterly at minimum, because entry tiers move more often than most teams assume: our tracker regularly records tier renames, repackaged features, and new free plans within a single month. Continuous monitoring beats calendar reviews, since the point is catching the change before your next pricing conversation, not after.