SaaS prices have increased 12% on average in the past year

End users are not the only ones feeling the pinch when it comes to soaring prices. SaaS vendors themselves are also looking for ways to maximize their own profit margins, driving many to up the price of their plans.

In the past year alone, SaaS prices have increased by an average of 12% — and much higher in many cases. Looking at a handful of select vendors, HubSpot was in line with the 12% average increase, Microsoft’s costs went up by 15%, and web development platform, Webflow, raised its prices by 23%.

According to Vertice data, 73% of vendors have increased their prices this year to date. Considering that the average organization now uses as many as 130 tools, it’s difficult to ignore the impact this will continue to have on your SaaS spend.

These standard price hikes are not the only concern finance leaders need to be aware of. We’ve seen that certain vendors are driving up their costs in more subtle ways, using tactics like bundling or unbundling features and shifting from drawdown pricing models towards monthly usage models. We’ve covered each pricing tactic in more detail here.

Finance, sales and productivity tool vendors are the most likely to hike their prices

SaaS price increases are occurring across the industry, and there is a pattern emerging where annual price increases are more likely within certain sectors.

Our data indicates that vendors with opaque, variable and/or complicated pricing structures are the most likely to implement year-over-year price hikes.

Vertice has rated the pricing practices of multiple software providers across three key factors – pricing simplicity, transparency and parity – which formulate our Pricing Clarity Score. Finance, sales and productivity are the vendor categories with the lowest average Pricing Clarity scores, indicating that vendors in these groups are more likely to up their costs on an annual basis.

Ultimately, the more transparent a SaaS company is in its pricing, the harder it is for them to make sporadic changes to their costs. The same applies to those with straightforward pricing models. When companies hide behind complicated pricing models and opaque pricing, it’s easier to make these changes.

And the data backs this up — an increase in Pricing Clarity by one standard deviation leads to lower average price increases by 2.7%

Trending SaaS vendors

Looking at the total contract value (TCV) of new transactions across our user base — including both new purchases and renewals — we’ve ranked the 10 most popular SaaS vendors and examined their ups and downs over the last three months.

Auth0, Snowflake, Slack, HubSpot and Highspot have dropped off the leaderboard this month, with vendors like NetSuite (5th) and LinkedIn (2nd) climbing up the ranks, with the latter indicating a major surge in popularity for the professional social networking platform.

Also soaring into our top 10 for the first time are search-powered solutions provider, Elastic, up from position 16, and business intelligence platform, Looker, up from position 45.

Rising SaaS vendors

In addition to looking at the top 10 SaaS vendors by their total contract value (TCV), we’ve also looked at those that have seen the largest month-on-month TCV increases.

Climbing the ranks this month are product analytics platform, Amplitude, business intelligence tool, Sisense, and project management provider, Asana.

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Falling SaaS vendors

What goes up must come down. Not that that’s true of Salesforce.

Unfortunately, the total contract value of transactions for analytics automation software Alteryx, API platform Postman, and project collaboration tool Smartsheet have decreased the most significantly since July.

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Vendor of the month: Amplitude

With the highest increase in total contract value across our user base, this month’s vendor spotlight is on product analytics platform, Amplitude.

With more than 2,000 customers worldwide and an almost 5-star rating on G2 based on just as many reviews, it’s no surprise that the company has risen in popularity among our customer base.

Not yet using Amplitude?

Find out much you can expect to pay for a subscription and more importantly, how you can obtain a discount in our recent article on Amplitude pricing.

Alternatively, access exclusive pricing intel for Amplitude here.

SaaS category of the month: Product Analytics

Despite already being worth close to $11 billion, the increased use of modern technologies such as big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence is set to increase the value of the global product analytics market almost fivefold, estimated to reach $49.31 billion by 2030.

Judging by our data, tools in this market are already becoming staples within the average organization’s SaaS stack, now accounting for 4.3% of total software spend.

Amplitude isn’t the only noteworthy platform in this category — Mixpanel, Pendo, Heap and Smartlook are also gaining popularity across our user base.