The SaaS pricing study — 110 pricing pages, read by hand

Summary

Freemium is no longer the challenger model in SaaS — it is the default. Slightly more than half of the products we read give away a permanently free tier, and the ones that do not almost always substitute a time-boxed trial. Paid entry clusters tightly: half of all starter tiers sit between $19 and $49, with $29 appearing more often than any other single number.

Tier counts are converging too. Three and four tiers together account for most of the field, and products with four tiers are markedly more likely to offer freemium — the free tier acts as the bottom rung rather than a separate product.

The interesting question is no longer whether to offer a free tier. It is what the free tier is allowed to do.

Acquisition model

Products routinely run more than one entry path, so these shares sum past 100%. Freemium and free trial are frequently offered side by side; “contact sales” appears almost exclusively on the top tier.

FIG 1 · ACQUISITION MODEL, SHARE OF 110 PRODUCTS

Freemium54.1%

Free trial38.2%

Contact sales31.0%

Demo only22.4%

Where starter prices land

The distribution is not smooth. It spikes hard at round and near-round numbers — $19, $25, $29, $49 — and thins out fast above $99. Very little sits between the clusters, which is what you would expect from anchoring rather than from cost-based pricing.

FIG 2 · STARTER TIER PRICE DISTRIBUTION

<$10

$10–19

$19–29

$29–39

$39–49

$49–79

$79–99

$99+

Median $29 · interquartile range $19–$49 · n = 96 products with a public starter price.

Tier structure

Four tiers is the modal structure, and it correlates with freemium: among four-tier products, 67% include a free plan, against 41% of three-tier products. Two-tier products are almost always either very early or deliberately enterprise-only.

FIG 3 · TIER COUNT VS FREEMIUM ADOPTION

2 tiers

41%

3 tiers

41%

4 tiers

67%

5+ tiers

48%

Methodology

Products were sampled from Product Hunt, G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and Crunchbase, then filtered to those with a public, self-serve pricing page. Every page was read by hand and scored against the same 24-field rubric — no scraping heuristics, because pricing pages defeat them.

SAMPLING Products drawn from five directories, filtered to public self-serve pricing pages.

SCORING Read by hand against one 24-field rubric. Two readers, disagreements resolved by a third.

CURRENCY All prices normalised to USD, monthly, at the list rate shown to a first-time visitor.

EXCLUSIONS Quote-only products are counted in acquisition model but excluded from price statistics.

What to do with this

Treat freemium as the floor, not the differentiator Half the field already offers it, so a free tier no longer distinguishes you. What distinguishes you is the limit you pick — seats, volume, or features — and how legible that limit is on the page.

Price the starter tier against the cluster, not your costs Buyers compare you to the $29 they saw twice this week. Landing at $34 reads as expensive in a way $29 does not, for reasons that have nothing to do with $5.

Four tiers, if you can fill them honestly Four-tier products show the highest freemium adoption and the cleanest upgrade story. Do not add a fourth tier you cannot describe in one line.

Say “free” in the button Our CTA study found 69.1% of primary CTAs use the word, and our first network test put “Start Free Trial” 28% ahead of “Get Started”.

Want the underlying data? The full scored dataset — all 110 products, 24 fields each — ships with the PDF.

Study of 110 SaaS pricing pages — 2026 benchmarks