SaaS Pricing Research: 1,000 companies

Pricing page should reflect unique solutions that both SaaS product and service provide. For many SaaS companies, pricing is the most overlooked way to drive growth. Pricing page rises above all other pages on SaaS website in importance. That's why we, AcademyOcean team, prepared new research that is dedicated to SaaS pricing pages. We analyzed them to see the trends, standards, and innovations in one of the essential parts of any SaaS website.

Did you know that only 60,4% of these companies have a pricing page? 79% of companies with pricing pages list prices and 21% don't list.

Out of 1,000 companies, 11.9% only have the option to request a quote. This might be a part of their pricing strategy.

Plans

The amount of money that people are willing to spend varies a lot from one client to another. You can get more customers and therefore more revenue if you offer different plans, with a different set of features for different target audiences.

On the contrary, too many options can also be counter-productive. When you have too many plans with different features, it can complicate the overall checkout process, which can make potential customers feel overwhelmed.

Below is a graph that shows how many companies have the following number of plans:

It is a good idea to have around three or four different plans, which is the status quo for most SaaS companies that charge for their services as we see it on the graph.

Pricing structure

People put numbers in their minds on a special number line: from left to right — from the smallest to the largest. It was supposed to be a result of a habit developed in reading and writing both for letters and numbers.

Let’s take a look at how companies use this habit in their price formation.

11% of the companies that list prices have a calculator or slider for computing prices. It remains a great way to make the pricing page engaging (users interact and play with it) and the cost transparent to visitors.

Discounts

When it comes to SaaS pricing, discounts are both awful and awesome. — Lincoln Murphy.

Some companies use discounts as their pricing strategy. SaaS discounting is the practice of offering a lower price or rate on a particular plan.

The benefits of SaaS discounting are clear: up your win rate, shorten sales cycles, keep a customer happy, etc. But the downsides can begin to outweigh the benefits if the practice is left unchecked: in some cases, buyers' perception of the value of the product degrades.

Let's look at how many companies use discounting. 4 out of 10 companies provide a discount on plan pricing. Here are the discount percentages that companies give:

Trial Periods

There isn't a best SaaS Free Trial length that works for every SaaS company, in every niche, for every market. Every free trial is designed for the same outcome: for a user to have an 'aha' moment, where they realize they can't live without your product. Not every free trial will end with a conversion to paying customer, but if the user has this 'aha' moment — when it all clicks — then they are still hooked and a sale could come down the line.

So let us present the graph that shows how many companies give trial periods and how long they are:

1 out of 4 companies doesn't indicate trial length.

Free trials are typically structured in one of two ways:

• Limited time
• Limited capability

Enterprise option

During our research, we noticed that some companies take enterprise option out of the pricing page. In such cases, Enterprise option is a separate page on the website. Let's look over the figures:

Pricing sections

Some companies break out their pricing by product, with each product having its own pricing. In these cases, each product has a different pricing section.

62% of companies that list prices have 1 general pricing section. Below is a graph that shows how companies divide their pricing into pricing sections (sometimes called a plan):

Interesting facts

Among all the companies that were included in our study, we found a few unusual things that we remember. Take a look:

• Some companies disguise their pricing by a “Buy” button.
• Some companies have a chatbot that can help customers clarify the price.
• The most popular trial length is 14 days (49,4% of the companies) and the 30-day trial is the second most suggested.
• 4,6% of the companies that have pricing have only an annual payment.
• Some companies have a paid trial.
• 37,2% of companies have 3 plans.
• Most companies offer customers a substantial discount on plan prices if they make an annual purchase. But some companies have more unconventional discounts, offering two or three months of service for free instead of a price reduction.

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