53% of the SaaS tools that advertise a recurring price headline the annual rate, not the monthly one. We classified the published entry price of 302 SaaS and AI tools by what kind of figure it actually is. The number on most pricing pages is the discounted yearly rate divided by twelve, available only if you pay for a year up front.
The four numbers
- 123 of the 302 tools headline an annual rate shown as a monthly figure, against 111 that headline a genuine month-to-month price. Among the 234 tools advertising any recurring rate, 53% show the annual one.
- 27 tools, or 8.9%, publish no price at all. Counting those that publish only a free tier or a usage rate, 56 of 302 — about 19% — have no comparable recurring dollar figure.
- The median published entry price is $19.97 a month, and 82% of tools with a usable figure are under $50. The mean is $58, and the highest published entry price in the whole dataset is $2,500.
- Annual-rate tools show a lower number: a median headline of $18.75 against $23 for tools quoting true monthly rates. The cheaper-looking basis produces a cheaper-looking price, which is the point of it.
Why this is worth measuring
Nearly every pricing page in software now carries a monthly/annual toggle, and it usually defaults to annual. The figure you see first is therefore the discounted one. That is not deceptive on its own — the discount is real and the toggle is visible — but it has two consequences that are easy to miss.
The first is that the number is conditional. Paying month to month typically costs 15% to 25% more, so a buyer who intends to pay monthly is reading a price they cannot have. The second is that comparison breaks silently. When one vendor headlines its annual rate and the next headlines a true monthly one, the two numbers on screen are not the same kind of number, and nothing on either page says so.
That is why our dataset records an entry_basis field on every row. Without it a figure like $39 is unusable: it could be a monthly rate, a yearly rate shown monthly, a three-month introductory price or a per-seat charge.
How the 302 tools break down
| Basis | Tools | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
annual_equivalent | 121 | 40.1% | A monthly figure that is only available if you pay for a year up front. |
monthly_regular | 111 | 36.8% | A genuine month-to-month rate at the advertised price. |
quote_only | 27 | 8.9% | No price published at all; the pricing page routes to sales. |
usage_based | 10 | 3.3% | Priced per unit consumed, with no recurring floor. |
non_usd | 9 | 3.0% | Published in another currency, so not comparable in dollars. |
free_core | 7 | 2.3% | The software itself is free; revenue comes from elsewhere. |
free_tier_zero | 7 | 2.3% | Entry tier costs nothing; paid tiers are usage- or quote-based. |
promo | 3 | 1.0% | An introductory rate that expires. |
per_unit_monthly | 3 | 1.0% | A monthly rate per seat, employee or other unit. |
annual_total | 2 | 0.7% | A yearly total rather than a monthly figure. |
2 rows, Marketo Engage and Relay.app, are unclassified. Adobe’s Marketo pricing page returned no response at all when we checked on 12 October 2026, and relay.app/pricing returned a 404, so neither basis could be verified. We would rather carry two blanks than two assumptions.
The practice varies enormously by category
The 53% average hides a spread from 83% to zero. Categories selling creative or self-serve subscriptions lean hardest on the annual headline; categories selling to procurement departments barely use it.
| Category | Annual-rate headlines | Share of classified rows |
|---|---|---|
| AI Video, Audio & Image | 10 of 12 | 83% |
| Sales CRM | 7 of 9 | 78% |
| Website & No-Code Builders | 8 of 11 | 73% |
| Project Management | 7 of 10 | 70% |
| Scheduling & Booking | 6 of 9 | 67% |
| Productivity & Notetaking AI | 7 of 12 | 58% |
| SEO & Content Optimization | 5 of 9 | 56% |
| Forms & Surveys | 5 of 9 | 56% |
| AI Writing & Content | 5 of 9 | 56% |
| Customer Support AI | 5 of 10 | 50% |
| Data & Enrichment | 4 of 9 | 44% |
| Software (general) | 12 of 30 | 40% |
| Social Media Management | 3 of 9 | 33% |
| Automation & Workflows | 2 of 8 | 25% |
| AI Search & GEO Tools | 6 of 40 | 15% |
| Marketing Automation & CRM | 1 of 9 | 11% |
| Developer Platforms & Infrastructure | 1 of 9 | 11% |
| Accounting | 1 of 9 | 11% |
| AI Coding & Dev Tools | 1 of 9 | 11% |
| HR & Payroll | 0 of 9 | 0% |
| Analytics | 0 of 9 | 0% |
Categories with fewer than nine tracked tools are excluded. The AI search and GEO category is the largest group here at 40 classified tools and among the lowest at 15%, which fits a young category still competing on transparency rather than on discount optics.
What to do with this as a buyer
The practical version of this, step by step, is how to tell whether a pricing page is showing you the annual rate — seven checks and the eight traps we hit while verifying these figures.
- Find the billing toggle before you read any number. If it defaults to annual, the headline is the annual rate.
- Ask what the month-to-month price is, and treat the gap as the real cost of flexibility rather than a discount you are losing.
- When comparing two tools, put both on the same basis before you compare. More than half the time they will not start there.
- For a quote-only vendor, do not accept a third-party estimate as a budget. 8.9% of this market publishes nothing, and the reported ranges we found for those vendors were wide enough to be useless — one spanned $3,000 to $130,000 a year.
- Check the renewal terms on an annual plan. The discount is granted for a year; the renewal is not necessarily at the same rate.
Method
The dataset is the 302 SaaS and AI tools DigiJaws tracks. For each one we record the cheapest paid entry price published on the vendor’s own pricing page, the date we checked it, and an entry_basis label for what kind of figure it is. The 10 labels are the ones in the table above.
Three rules do most of the classification work. A figure is annual_equivalent when the vendor shows a monthly number that requires annual payment, which is usually stated in a qualifier beside the price. A parenthetical only qualifies a figure when it carries no money figure of its own, so Starter $16/mo (billed annually) is an annual rate while Starter $16/mo (or $192/yr) is a monthly one. And a price is attributed to a tool by structure — the row it sits in, the column header above it, or the review page it appears on — never by matching the number itself.
Where a vendor publishes nothing, entry_usd is null. We do not substitute an estimate.
A warning for anyone computing the same statistics
Preparing this study we found 14 rows in our own dataset carrying third-party reported figures in the machine-readable entry_usd field — vendors like Braze, ZoomInfo, Optimizely and Qualtrics, who publish no pricing, where a reported range had been recorded as though it were a price. The row text said so honestly; the numeric field did not.
Removing them moved this study’s own aggregate figures a long way: the mean entry price fell from $771 to $58 and the maximum from $50,000 to $2,500, because the estimates were the extreme values. The median barely moved, from $20 to $19.97.
The lesson generalises. If you aggregate SaaS pricing from a dataset that mixes published prices with reported ones, your averages are mostly describing the estimates. Keep the two in separate fields and compute on the published ones. Our companion piece, what business tools actually charge to get started, makes the same point from the other direction.
Limitations
- This is a convenience sample, not a probability sample. These are the tools our readers ask about, which skews toward marketing, AI and productivity software sold self-serve. The figures describe this set of 302 tools; they do not estimate the whole SaaS market.
- Pricing pages change constantly. Every row carries its own verification date, and the dataset is more current for some categories than others.
- Several vendors A/B test their pricing pages or vary them by region, so a figure we recorded may not be the figure you see.
- 2 rows are unclassified, named above.
- The free-tier field in the dataset is free text across roughly 180 distinct values, so no free-tier statistic is published on this page. Normalising it means imposing a classification after the fact, which should be declared rather than buried — so the figures and the rule live together on our free-tier analysis instead.
The dataset
The full dataset is published as JSON at digijaws.com/pricing-data.json under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Every row carries entry_paid, entry_usd, entry_basis, billing, per_seat, free_tier, the verification date and the vendor pricing URL. If you cite a figure from it, please link this page so readers can see the method.
Frequently asked questions
What share of SaaS tools show an annual rate instead of a monthly one?
In this study of 302 tools, 123 headline an annual rate and 111 headline a true month-to-month rate. Among the 234 tools that advertise any recurring price, that is 53% showing the annual rate as the headline figure. Across all 302 tools, including those with no published price, it is 41%.
Why does it matter whether a pricing page shows the annual rate?
Because the number you compare is not the number you can pay. If you want to be billed monthly, the real cost is typically 15% to 25% higher than the figure on the page, and it is often only visible after you switch a toggle. Comparing two tools where one headlines annual and the other headlines monthly means comparing two different things.
Which software categories do this most?
AI Video, Audio & Image led at 83% of classified rows, followed by Sales CRM at 78% and Website & No-Code Builders at 73%. At the other end, HR & Payroll and Analytics sat at 0%, and AI search and GEO tools at 15%. The spread across categories is far wider than the overall average suggests.
What is the median entry price for the SaaS tools in this dataset?
The median published entry price is $19.97 a month, and 82% of the tools with a usable figure are under $50. The mean is $58. For this kind of distribution the median is the figure worth quoting.
How many SaaS vendors publish no pricing at all?
27 of the 302 tools, or 8.9%, publish no pricing figure and route buyers to sales instead. A further group publish only a free tier or a usage rate, so 56 of 302 tools, about 19%, have no comparable recurring dollar figure of any kind.
Do the tools that headline annual rates actually look cheaper?
Yes, measurably. The median headline figure among annual-rate tools is $18.75, against $23 among tools quoting a true monthly rate. The tools using the lower-looking basis also show a lower number, which is the entire point of the practice.
Can I download the underlying dataset?
Yes. The full dataset is published as JSON at digijaws.com/pricing-data.json under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Every row carries the date it was verified, the vendor pricing page it came from, and an entry_basis field recording which kind of figure the price is.
Is this a random sample of the SaaS market?
No, and that matters. These are the 302 tools DigiJaws tracks, chosen because readers ask about them, which skews toward marketing, AI and productivity software that sells self-serve. It is a convenience sample, not a probability sample, so the figures describe this set of tools rather than estimating the whole market.
Dataset of 302 tools, verified through 12 October 2026. Figures describe DigiJaws’ tracked set, not the SaaS market as a whole. Compiled from vendors’ own published pricing pages.