Rebuilt August 2026

    Pricing Ledger Methodology

    TL;DR • pricing data methodology • as of August 2026

    The ledger combines three layers: 181 manually verified pricing pages (4,599 individual price points), 31 editorial strategy teardowns, and a separate machine-mined layer covering 115 companies that keep their price list in public source code. Only the verified layers drive the benchmarks; the mined layer is shown separately and never blended into medians.

    Sources

    • ComparEdge pricing snapshots (CC BY 4.0) — verified vendor pricing pages with capture dates. Last verification pass: 2026-04-26.
    • unlocksaas.com indie SaaS teardowns (CC BY 4.0) — editorial strategy analysis of 31 pricing pages.
    • Public source repositories — price constants and plan configs diffed across commit history, producing 50 dated repricing events.
    • Industry benchmarks — Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index, OpenView, Metronome and Orb, used only for contrast on the price change page.

    Confidence tiers

    Every row carries a provenance. We separate them rather than averaging them:

    Tier What it is Used for
    Verified Read off the vendor pricing page on a recorded date All medians, category benchmarks, calculator
    Editorial Human teardown of a live pricing page Teardowns, pattern pages
    Mined Extracted from source code; only rows with a recognised billing interval and confidence ≥ 0.9 are surfaced Price change timeline only

    Normalisation rules

    • • All prices converted to USD monthly-equivalent. Annual totals divided by 12.
    • • Entry price means the cheapest paid tier. Free tiers are recorded separately so they never drag the median to zero.
    • • Quote-based tiers ("Contact us") are counted as tiers but excluded from price statistics.
    • • Tier jump is the median ratio between adjacent published tiers, not entry-to-top.
    • • Per-seat prices are taken at one seat; volume discounts are ignored.

    Known limitations

    • • Coverage skews to AI, developer and SMB software. It is not a proxy for enterprise software pricing.
    • • The repricing log is a lower bound: companies that keep prices in a CMS leave no commit trail.
    • • Published list price is not realised ARPU. Discounts, annual commitments and overage are invisible here.
    • • Prices move. Every product page carries its verification date — confirm before quoting a number in a deck.

    Licence and attribution

    Upstream sources are CC BY 4.0 and attributed on every page that uses them. Our derived benchmarks are free to cite with a link to ideaproof.io/saas-pricing. Corrections are welcome via the contact form.