Every vendor on earth describes its pricing as competitive. Almost none of them say competitive with what.
So here is the distribution they are all implicitly claiming to sit inside, built from 252 tools we price-check and keep under version control.
The median entry price for business software in 2026 is $19.99 a month.
That number is doing more work than it looks. It is the line most vendors are quietly pricing against — which is why so many plans cluster at $19, $20 and $24, and why the ones at $99 need a story.
The shape of it
Of 195 tools with a monthly plan whose price the vendor publishes itself:
- 98 start under $20 — exactly half
- 62 start between $20 and $49 (32%)
- 35 start at $50 or more (18%)
The mean is $46.14, well north of the median, and that gap tells you the shape better than either number alone: a dense pile-up under $20, then a thin tail stretching out to the right.
The part most pricing round-ups skip
We threw a lot of data away to get here, and how we threw it away matters more than the headline.
We excluded annual-billed enterprise figures. The eight largest numbers in our dataset — Decagon at $50,000 a year, Optimizely at $36,000, Braze at $30,000, Qualtrics at $30,000 — are all quote-only products whose prices come from third-party reports rather than the vendor. Leave them in and the mean jumps from $46 to $873.
That is not a benchmark. That is an artefact with a dollar sign in front of it, and it is roughly how most “average SaaS cost” articles get written.
We also excluded anything the vendor does not publish itself. If the only source for a price is somebody’s blog post, it is not verified, and averaging it in launders a guess into a statistic.
Where your category sits
| Category | Median entry | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| AI Search & GEO | $99.00 | 15% |
| SEO & Content Optimization | $49.00 | 22% |
| Customer Support AI | $29.00 | 44% |
| Forms & Surveys | $28.00 | 78% |
| Social Media Management | $22.09 | 44% |
| Website & No-Code Builders | $19.00 | 89% |
| Accounting | $19.00 | 56% |
| Email Marketing | $17.50 | 62% |
| AI Coding & Dev Tools | $17.00 | 78% |
| Sales CRM | $14.00 | 38% |
| Scheduling & Booking | $12.00 | 56% |
| AI Writing & Content | $10.00 | 55% |
| Project Management | $9.00 | 100% |
Eleven times, end to end. A project management tool and an AI search tool are both “a SaaS subscription” and they are not remotely the same purchase.
The ranking we refuse to publish
You will notice there is no “cheapest tools of 2026” list here. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining, because every site that publishes one is publishing something broken.
Gusto’s entry figure in our dataset is $6. Trello’s is $5. Ranked naively, Gusto looks like the cheaper product.
It is not. That $6 is per employee, and it sits on top of a $49 base. For a ten-person team Gusto is $109 a month. The ranking does not just shift — it inverts, on a variable that never appears in the comparison table.
65 of the tools we track charge per seat. Any list that sorts entry prices without separating those is measuring the wrong thing and presenting it confidently.
Updated as we re-verify. Every figure comes from the vendor’s own pricing page on a recorded date. Full dataset.
What 252 business tools actually charge to get started. DigiJaws, 2026. https://digijaws.com/reviews/software-entry-price-benchmark-2026/