Most founders pick a price by copying one competitor. This ledger tracks 181 verified price ladders and 4,599 individual price points across 14 software categories. The median entry price is $20/mo, 66% of products ship a free plan, and the median jump between tiers is roughly 2.3x. 31 products also have a full strategy teardown covering their anchor pattern and upgrade trigger. Verified August 2026.
Entry price is the cheapest paid tier. The jump column is the median multiple between adjacent tiers — the single number most founders get wrong.
| Category | Products | Median entry | Median top tier | Tier jump | Free plan | Charm pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Agents & Automation | 8 | $19.99 | $69 | 3.45x | 88% | 40% |
| AI Coding Tools | 8 | $20 | $40 | 2x | 100% | 12% |
| AI Image Generation | 8 | $11 | $25 | 2.5x | 75% | 25% |
| AI Productivity | 8 | $17 | $18 | 1.88x | 75% | 18% |
| AI Video | 8 | $15.50 | $62 | 2.71x | 100% | 33% |
| AI Writing | 8 | $26 | $44 | 1.84x | 62% | 53% |
| Cloud Hosting | 8 | $5 | $20 | 1.83x | 50% | 5% |
| CRM | 8 | $18 | $70 | 1.88x | 38% | 27% |
| Email Marketing | 8 | $15.50 | $69 | 2.72x | 75% | 53% |
| LLM Providers | 8 | $20 | $30 | 1.5x | 75% | 11% |
| Project Management | 8 | $9.50 | $18.50 | 1.74x | 100% | 22% |
| AI Assistants | 7 | $39 | $89 | 2.52x | 86% | 38% |
| AI Voice | 7 | $10 | $30 | 3.24x | 100% | 38% |
| Design Tools | 7 | $12 | $44 | 1.92x | 43% | 24% |
Products that ship a permanent free tier, with the real paid ladder they upgrade into.
Products with no free plan. Entry prices run higher because every signup has to be qualified by price.
Products that charge per unit consumed: credits, tokens, runs or actions instead of seats.
A free entry point with metered overage on top: the default for AI products in 2026.
Products whose top tier is a contact-sales quote instead of a published price.
31 products broken down: anchor pattern, upgrade trigger, what to copy and what to avoid.
Tally's pricing page is a single structural promise (free forever, unlimited forms, unlimited submissions) plus a paid tier that removes the Tally brand and unlocks logic. The free tier is not a trial; it IS the offer. The lesson for indie founders: when the incumbent monetizes per-submission, leading with unlimited becomes the entire pricing strategy.
Lemon Squeezy prices as a single percentage-plus-fixed-fee per transaction with Merchant of Record service included. There is no per-feature pricing page to compare against Stripe. The lesson: when you bundle multiple SaaS categories at one price, the buyer evaluates on outcome (compliance handled) rather than parts.
Notion's pricing structure is built around a personal-free tier that is good enough for indie use but creates friction at the team-collaboration boundary. The Team tier (~$10/seat/mo) is the trigger; Business and Enterprise climb from there. AI is priced as an add-on rather than a tier, which lets Notion add new revenue without disturbing the seat ladder. The lesson: personal-free can drive team-paid if the friction sits at the right boundary.
Linear's pricing is minimalist: Free, Basic, Business, plus a custom Enterprise. The page itself is shorter than most competitors' single-tier descriptions. The simplicity is a positioning move: Linear is for design-conscious teams that resent over-complicated tools, including over-complicated pricing pages. The lesson: pricing-page minimalism can BE the positioning.
Figma prices on a sharp split: viewers and commenters are free forever; editors pay per seat. This makes every design file shared with developers, PMs, and clients an acquisition asset, while keeping the revenue contained to actual designers. The lesson: when your product has high-multiplier viewers per editor, price the editor and free the viewer.
Vercel's pricing places Hobby as a fully-featured free tier for personal projects with strict commercial-use prohibition. Pro at approximately $20/user/mo unlocks commercial use and team features; Enterprise handles custom infrastructure. Usage overages are metered per resource, which makes the bill scale with success. The lesson: a free tier with crystal-clear commercial-use restriction converts solo developers into paid Pro accounts at exactly the moment the product earns revenue.
Beehiiv's pricing scales by subscriber count, with the higher tiers unlocking the ad network, paid subscriptions, referral mechanics, and the Boost monetization network. The ladder maps to creator maturity: as the newsletter grows, the operator climbs the tier ladder by need rather than by upsell pressure. The lesson: when your product can stack monetization features, the value ladder lives inside the product, not the page.
Cal.com runs a tri-track pricing model: generous free hosted tier for individuals, per-seat paid tiers for teams, and a free self-host option under AGPL for principled buyers. Each track captures a different buyer type without forcing a choice at first contact. The lesson: when your buyer types diverge sharply, multi-track pricing serves more buyers than a single tier ladder.
Resend's pricing scales by emails sent per month, with a generous free tier (3,000/mo) that covers most indie SaaS in production. Paid tiers scale linearly from there. Pricing is in round numbers (3K, 50K, 100K, etc.) that match how developers reason about send volume. The lesson: when your buyer is technical, price in their mental units, not yours.
Stripe's headline pricing is 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge, with no setup fees, monthly fees, or refunds-on-refunds. The published price is the price for almost every customer below enterprise scale. The lesson: when your buyer is comparing multiple complex pricing pages, the simplest legible price wins by default.
Plausible prices on pageviews with a sliding scale, plus a self-hosted free option under their license. The public revenue dashboard turns the pricing model into proof — buyers see real customers paying real money before they decide. The lesson for indie founders: when transparency is the brand, the pricing page should let buyers see what they're buying into, not just what they're paying.
Mintlify's pricing is per-editor with a free tier for open-source projects and graduated paid tiers for teams. The most valuable forward-looking feature (AI-powered search and Q&A) is reserved for higher tiers, creating an upgrade trigger as customer expectations evolve. The lesson for indie founders: gate the future-state feature, not the table-stakes one — buyers upgrade for capability they do not yet have, not for what they take for granted.
181 of 181 products
Start from the observed median in your category, not from your costs. Across 181 tracked products the median entry price is $20/mo, but the spread by category is enormous: project management sits near $9.50 while AI assistants sit near $39. Pick the category median as your entry tier, then ship a second tier at roughly 2.3x and a third at 3-4x your entry price.
66% of the products in this dataset have one, but the rate varies from 100% in AI coding, AI video and project management down to 38% in CRM. A free plan is table stakes when buyers self-serve and your marginal cost per free user is near zero. It is a liability when every user costs you inference or storage money.
Three is the modal answer across every category in the dataset, and the median tier count never drops below 2.5. Two tiers under-segments and leaves money with your heaviest users; four or more increases decision friction without measurably raising ARPU at seed stage.
The median jump between adjacent tiers is 1.8x to 3.5x depending on category, clustering around 2.3x overall. A jump under 1.5x makes the higher tier look like a rounding error; over 4x and buyers stall at the bottom tier rather than climbing.
It is category-dependent. Roughly half of AI writing and email marketing products end their prices in 9, versus 5% in cloud hosting. Charm pricing signals consumer positioning; round numbers signal enterprise. Match the convention of the buyers you want, not the one that tests marginally better.
The industry benchmark is a review roughly every 18 months, with a median increase near 7.8% per year according to the Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index. In the 50 price changes measured directly from public repositories in this dataset, the median measured increase is smaller — around 3% — because published list prices lag internal repricing.
Only if your buyer expects a procurement cycle. Quote-based top tiers work when contracts are negotiated anyway; on a self-serve funnel a price reads as 'expensive and slow' and buyers leave the page. Publish a number for every tier a founder can buy with a credit card.
Between 16.7% (two months free) and 20% (roughly two and a half months). Anything above 25% signals a cash-flow problem to sophisticated buyers and permanently anchors your monthly price lower.
Two verified public sources under CC BY 4.0 — ComparEdge pricing snapshots and the unlocksaas.com indie SaaS teardowns — plus a third, clearly separated layer of prices mined from public source repositories. Only high-confidence rows are shown by default. Full methodology at /saas-pricing/methodology.
Pricing pages were verified as of 2026-04-26 and the ledger was last rebuilt August 2026. Prices move: always confirm on the vendor page before quoting a number in a fundraising deck.
Test your price against the real distribution in your category.
Dated repricing events measured from public repositories.
Check whether a free version of your product already exists.
What actually kills companies — including monetisation failure.
Where to submit once the pricing page is live.