The Software Pricing Index

Key findings

1. Median entry price across the 1,934 priced software products is $25/month, with a quarter of listings priced at $10 or less and a quarter above $61.
2. 37.1% of tracked software products (1,249 of 3,371) offer a free tier.
3. Among 576 tracked plans that advertise an annual-billing discount, the median advertised discount is 20%, while 45 explicitly offer none.
4. Between 2026-02-05 and 2026-07-19, 103 pricing changes were recorded across 55 of 200 trackable records — 55 increases and 48 decreases — leaving 145 records flat.
5. Of the entities with tracked movement, 25 saw a price increase and 24 saw a price decrease over the same window, with 6 registering both.

The state of software pricing

The most and least expensive categories

Median entry price by category, among categories with at least 10 priced products. Billing, sales, and inventory software command the highest floors; infrastructure, VPNs, and scheduling tools sit at the bottom.

Where free tiers live — and don't

The 37.1% headline hides an enormous spread. Free plans are a table-stakes acquisition tool in developer-facing categories and almost absent where switching costs are high.

What changed in recorded list prices (February 5 – July 19, 2026)

Recorded list prices were mostly stable. Of 200 products with a cleanly comparable same-named plan at both ends of the window, 72% showed no list-price change above 1% on any matched plan. Where matched plans did move, movement was roughly balanced — 55 recorded increases vs 48 decreases at the plan level (25 products recorded only increases, 24 only decreases, 6 both) — with a typical hike of about +20% and a typical cut of about -20%.

How this sample is built: of 3,371 records in the corpus, 503 had a dated pricing-page snapshot at both ends of the window (February 5 – July 19, 2026). From those we exclude records with no same-named positive-priced plan at both ends (81), records where either endpoint snapshot has extraction confidence below 0.8 (199), lineups restructured mid-window (16 — a surviving plan name may mean something different), and whole-lineup shifts matching the signature of a billing-term or currency normalization (7). That leaves 200 cleanly comparable records — this movement sample, not the full corpus. Named examples are additionally hand-verified against the vendor's live pricing page or public change coverage before publication; promotional rates and plan relabels don't count as price changes. Follow any product link to the sourced pricing record.

Median entry price by category

Every category with at least eight priced products, sorted by number tracked.

Frequently asked