SaaS Pricing Benchmarks 2026: What Software Charges, Across 294 Tools We Price

Short answer: across the 294 tools we price ourselves, the median lowest recurring price is $24 per month. But the median hides the thing that matters. SEO tools run a median of $59 across 6 priced tools, while Project Management runs $8.13 across 8, a 7.3x gap between categories buying broadly similar amounts of software. Both are small samples, so the sturdier figure is the one in the table with the largest count: Marketing, 53 tools, median $29.

Every vendor publishes its own price. Almost nobody publishes what that price means next to comparable tools, which is the question a buyer actually has. This page is that comparison, rebuilt from our own review corpus whenever the corpus moves.

The numbers

Read the quartiles rather than the median alone. A category where the 25th and 75th percentiles sit close together is one where vendors have converged on a price and the decision is about fit. A category where they sit far apart is one where the label covers products doing genuinely different jobs, and a cheap tool is not a cheaper version of an expensive one.

Where the extremes sit

The gap inside a single category is routinely larger than the gap between categories. That is the practical warning in this dataset: "Marketing tool" as a shopping category spans $2.50 to $500 per month, and the difference is rarely 200 times more value.

How these figures are produced

Every figure here comes from our own reviews, not from vendor marketing pages or aggregated survey data.

• Source. The lowest recurring monthly price quoted in the Dupple review of each tool. 294 of 429 tools in our catalogue carry one.
• What this is not. It is not always the price of the entry plan. Where a vendor charges a platform fee plus a per-seat rate, the per-seat rate is the lower figure and is what gets recorded, so a tool listed at $1 may bill $19 plus $1 per user. Roughly one tool in six with multiple quoted prices is affected. Read these as the floor of what a vendor charges recurrently, not as an invoice.
• What counts. Recurring monthly pricing, including per-seat pricing at one seat. Annual-only contracts, one-off fees and quote-on-request enterprise tiers are excluded, because they are not comparable to a monthly entry price.
• What is dropped. Figures above $2,000 per month, which in practice are annual contracts quoted in passing rather than entry prices, and any category with fewer than five priced tools, where a median would be noise.
• Free tiers. A tool with a free plan is recorded at its lowest paid price. A benchmark of entry prices that counts free tiers as $0 mostly measures how many vendors offer a free tier.
• Read on. 2026-08-19. Prices change; this page is regenerated from the corpus rather than edited by hand, so the figures and the date always move together.

The distribution is not symmetrical, and averages mislead here

The mean entry price across the same 294 tools is $58.69, against a median of $24. That gap, 2.4x, is the whole reason to distrust any "average SaaS price" figure quoted without a median next to it. A handful of tools priced in the hundreds pull the mean far above what a typical buyer pays.

The shape underneath: 169 of 294 tools (57%) start at $25 per month or less, while 28 (10%) start above $100. Software pricing is not a bell curve with an expensive tail; it is a dense cluster of cheap tools and a thin scatter of expensive ones, and the two groups rarely compete for the same buyer.

The practical consequence is that "we are mid-market priced" means almost nothing as a claim. Mid-market against the mean is roughly $58.69; against the median it is $24, and the second is the number a buyer's own stack will look like.

Free tiers are common, and they are not the same as being cheap

140 of the 429 tools in our catalogue advertise a free plan or free tier, which is 33% of the catalogue. Free trials are excluded from that count, since a trial is a sales motion rather than a price.

None of those free tiers are counted in the medians above. A benchmark that records a tool with a free plan at $0 stops measuring what software costs and starts measuring how many vendors have adopted a freemium funnel. Every tool here is recorded at its lowest paid price, including tools whose free tier is genuinely usable.

Worth knowing when reading a free tier: the usual constraint is seats or records rather than features, which means the free plan works until the moment the tool becomes load-bearing for a team. That is by design, and it is why a free tier should be read as a deferred entry price rather than an absent one.

Using this as a buyer

Three things this dataset is good for, and one it is not.

Sanity-checking a quote. If a vendor is asking three times the category median, that is not automatically wrong, but it is a question worth putting to them. The 75th percentile column gives you the number to quote back.

Budgeting a stack. Multiply the medians for the categories you need rather than the tools you have heard of. Tools you have heard of skew expensive, because marketing budget and price tend to move together.

Spotting a category in flux. A wide gap between the 25th and 75th percentile usually means the category has not settled, and waiting a quarter costs less than picking wrong.

What it is not good for is predicting your price. Seat counts, annual commitments and negotiated discounts move real invoices far more than list pricing does. This is a map of the list, and list prices are where negotiations start, not where they end.

Related reading

• Every tool review we publish sits behind these numbers, one price at a time.
• Tool comparisons put two products side by side with the same category median attached.