What 500 SaaS Pricing Pages Actually Did in Q1 2026
We expected to find a story about SaaS inflation. The data told a different one.
We’ve been crawling 500 SaaS pricing pages every week and pulling historical snapshots out of the Wayback Machine going back to 2018. The thesis going in: prices march up, free tiers die out, plan menus get longer. After running the numbers on Q1 2026, only the third one held up.
How the data was collected
500 SaaS companies, weighted toward the most-trafficked pricing pages. Live snapshots run weekly, historical data backfills from the Internet Archive. Pricing extracts via an LLM scored on four signals. Anything under 0.5 confidence is dropped, anything between 0.5 and 0.7 is flagged for human review. The corpus right now sits at 6,439 distinct pricing snapshots across the 500 companies, going back as far as 2018 for some of them.
For the Q1 comparison below, we limited the dataset to companies with a clean starter-tier price extracted in both early January and mid-April 2026. That intersection is 55 companies. Small sample, but enough to see directional movement.
Most pricing did not move
Among those 55 companies, only 5 raised their starter price. 9 lowered it. The other 41 held flat.
The five that raised: Cloudinary, Kissmetrics, WP Engine, Spotify for Artists, and Datadog. The median raise was 20%. The mean was 157%, which tells you the distribution is broken: two companies completely repriced.
The two outliers were not “raises,” they were repricings
| Company | Was | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudinary | $99 | $549 | +454% |
| Kissmetrics | $25.99 | $99 | +281% |
| WP Engine | $25 | $30 | +20% |
| Spotify for Artists | $5.99 | $6.99 | +17% |
| Datadog | $27 | $31 | +15% |
Cloudinary’s “starter” plan moved from a $99 entry point to a $549 floor. That isn’t an inflation story. It’s a deliberate move upmarket. The long tail of small developers on the old plan got left behind. Kissmetrics did the same shape of move. The remaining three are normal annual price tweaks.
If you are tracking SaaS pricing for budgeting, the 80th-percentile takeaway is: most of your tools did not raise prices this quarter. The few that did, hit hard.
Free tiers are getting more common, not less
This one was the bigger surprise. Going in, we assumed the freemium era was ending. The data shows the opposite.
In Q1 2026, 9 companies killed their free tier: Clio, Databricks, Datadog, Formstack, Hugging Face, Instantly, Klipfolio, n8n, and Tidio. Several of those are AI infrastructure plays (Databricks, Hugging Face) where the unit economics of “free” got rough fast.
But 18 companies added a free tier in the same period. Net plus nine.
Our read: free tiers are now competitive table stakes in dev tools and productivity. Companies that were skeptical five years ago are quietly capitulating, while a smaller cohort of infra companies are walking away from free as their compute costs caught up.
Plan menus are not getting longer in the middle, but the long tail is exploding
The median pricing page in our corpus has 3 plans. It also had 3 plans in 2021 and in 2025. That part of the story is stable.
What changed is the upper end. The single page with the most plans in 2021 had 10. In 2026, it has 15.
The current leaders by plan count on a single pricing page:
- JetBrains: 15
- DigitalOcean: 12
- Ahrefs: 10
- Pilot: 9
- Twilio: 8
These are companies with genuinely complex products. JetBrains sells one IDE per language plus the All Products Pack. DigitalOcean has six compute tiers and three database tiers. Twilio prices messaging, voice, and email separately. The complexity is honest. It is also impossible to compare across companies.
Where the money is, by category
Median starter-tier price by category for the most recent snapshot of each company:
| Category | Companies | Median starter |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics | 13 | $40 |
| Sales | 11 | $35 |
| Marketing | 24 | $31 |
| Data & Infrastructure | 26 | $30 |
| E-commerce | 10 | $29 |
| HR & Recruiting | 7 | $29 |
| Customer Support | 9 | $25 |
| Media | 6 | $24 |
| Finance | 12 | $24 |
| Developer Tools | 45 | $20 |
| CRM | 7 | $19 |
| Communication | 15 | $17 |
| Design | 8 | $11 |
| Productivity | 30 | $11 |
| Project Management | 12 | $11 |
Analytics tools sit at the top because that buyer is rarely the end user. It’s a marketing or product team with budget. Productivity, project management, and design sit at the bottom because the buyer is often the individual contributor paying out of pocket or on a small team budget.
The companies that change pricing the most
Counting distinct pricing pages we have captured in the last 12 months, the companies churning their pricing fastest are the ones developers love:
- Linear: 10 distinct pricing pages in 12 months
- Stripe: 9
- Supabase: 8
- Notion: 8
- Figma: 7
- Datadog: 7
- Ahrefs: 7
Linear changed its pricing roughly every five weeks. None of those changes were dramatic on their own. In aggregate, a Linear customer who signed up in May 2025 is on materially different terms than someone who signed up last week. That kind of incremental drift is invisible to anyone who is not watching for it, which is most people.
Reproducing this analysis
Every number above came from queries against the public API.
# After signing up, you'll get an API key emailed to you:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer spa_yourkey" \
https://saaspricingarchive.com/v1/companies/notion/pricing
The free tier covers the top 100 companies and is enough to reproduce most of the numbers above. Paid tiers include the full 500-company corpus and the historical snapshots back to 2018.