Platform fees, not per-seat billing, are now the single most common SaaS pricing structure. According to Price Intelligently by SBI’s 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report, a survey of 321 SaaS operators and executives who own or influence pricing decisions, 34.0% of companies price with a platform fee, ahead of flat fee (23.4%) and pure usage-based pricing (21.2%). Pricing has become the lever every SaaS company is tuning at once, and the data below breaks down which models are winning, how many companies still charge by seat, and how much prices actually moved in 2025 and into 2026.
What is the most common SaaS pricing structure in 2026?
A platform fee, most often a base charge that bundles in some amount of usage, is now the leading structure at 34.0% of SaaS companies, according to Price Intelligently by SBI’s 2025 survey of 321 pricing leaders. Flat fee with no usage component follows at 23.4%, pure usage-based pricing at 21.2%, and a standalone base fee at 14.6%. Outcomes-based or performance pricing, despite years of hype, sits at just 0.6%.
Figure 1: How SaaS companies structure their primary pricing model. Source: Price Intelligently by SBI, 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report, n=321.
None of the six structures above dominates the market outright, which is itself the finding: SaaS pricing has fragmented into a genuine mix rather than converging on one default. Companies pricing on usage or platform fees do report stronger odds of beating growth targets than flat-fee or base-fee peers, per the same survey, which is part of why platform fees have pulled ahead.
Do most SaaS companies still charge per seat?
Seats have not gone away. More than 80% of SaaS companies still use some form of seat-based pricing metric, according to Price Intelligently by SBI’s 2025 survey, even as usage-based and hybrid models get more attention. But seats are rarely the whole story anymore: only 8% of companies rely on seats as their sole value metric, while 33% use seats as a primary metric augmented by others and 37% use seats as a secondary metric layered onto a different primary one. Another 19% do not use seats at all.
Per-seat pricing as a primary billing model has actually declined, from 64% of companies in 2024 to 57% in 2025, according to Monetizely’s 2025 SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study (n=103 companies’ public pricing pages, plus 47 pricing leaders surveyed). Companies are not abandoning seats, they are demoting them from the only value metric to one input among several.
Seats are declining as a standalone model but rising as a blended input, which is exactly the shift a terms and conditions generator needs to account for: a billing model change means the cancellation, refund, and fee-disclosure language in your terms needs updating at the same time, not months later.
Is usage-based or outcomes-based pricing catching on?
Usage-based pricing is growing, but how fast depends entirely on how you count it. Price Intelligently by SBI’s survey counts 21.2% of companies as pure usage-based, meaning usage is the sole structure. Monetizely’s separate 2025 benchmark, which counts any usage component inside a broader hybrid structure, puts usage-based elements at 43% of companies, up 8 percentage points from 2024. Both numbers are accurate; they are measuring different things, one isolates usage as the entire pricing model and the other counts usage wherever it appears.
Outcomes-based or performance pricing is a different story entirely: it remains close to theoretical. Only 2 of the 321 companies Price Intelligently by SBI surveyed, 0.6%, actually charge based on delivered customer outcomes.
Figure 2: Outcomes-based pricing is widely discussed but almost never implemented. Source: Price Intelligently by SBI, 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report, n=321.
Among companies with any usage component, enforcement is still manual for a meaningful share of the market: 23% direct customers to sales or customer success when they exceed a usage limit, and another 22% do not enforce usage limits in their plans at all, per the same survey.
Are SaaS pricing models shifting year over year?
Yes, and the direction is consistent across two independent 2025 surveys. Hybrid pricing, combining a subscription base with a usage or seat component, rose from 49% of companies in 2024 to 61% in 2025. Usage-based elements rose from roughly 35% to 43% over the same period. Per-user pricing as the primary model fell from 64% to 57%, and freemium offerings slipped from 41% to 38%, according to Monetizely’s 2025 SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study.
Figure 3: Year-over-year movement in SaaS pricing model adoption. Source: Monetizely, 2025 SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study, n=103 companies.
Every one of those four numbers moved in the same direction between 2024 and 2025: away from a single flat per-seat charge and toward some blend of usage, platform, and seat pricing.
Free trial or freemium: which do SaaS companies actually use?
A free trial, not freemium, is the primary acquisition motion for most SaaS companies. ChartMogul’s SaaS Conversion Report, published in January 2026 from a survey of 200 B2B software products, found 57% of companies lead with a free trial, 26% lead with freemium, and the remainder split across reverse trials (7%), interactive demos (7%), and paid trials (4%).
Figure 4: How SaaS companies structure their free acquisition motion. Source: ChartMogul SaaS Conversion Report, January 2026, n=200.
Conversion rates vary sharply by whether a trial requires a credit card up front. Free trials with no credit card requirement convert a median of 8% of signups to paid, with 4% to 6% considered good and 10% to 15% considered great, per ChartMogul. Trials that require a card up front convert far higher, 25% to 35% is good and 50% to 60% is great, because the signup pool is already pre-qualified. This same conversion-rate math is closely tied to what a company can afford to spend acquiring a trial signup in the first place; our SaaS churn benchmarks for 2026 cover what happens to those customers after they convert, where AI-native products in particular are struggling to hold onto revenue once the trial period ends. A deeper look at free-trial-to-paid conversion benchmarks specifically is a gap in our current coverage and not yet published on this site.
How do SaaS leaders actually decide on a price?
Most SMB pricing decisions are still made by gut feel rather than data. 59% of SaaS companies with revenue under $250 million in annual recurring revenue rely heavily on “leadership intuition” to set prices, according to Price Intelligently by SBI’s 2025 survey. That matters because the minority of SMBs using objective, data-driven approaches were roughly 10 times more likely to exceed their 2025 growth targets than intuition-led peers in the same survey.
Figure 5: The cross-functional sequence Price Intelligently by SBI recommends for pricing decisions. Source: Price Intelligently by SBI, 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report.
When SaaS leaders were asked what actually informs their pricing strategy, customer value ranked highest at 33%, followed by cost (23%), competition (22%), and company strategy (21%), a near-even four-way split that helps explain why 73% of SaaS companies spread pricing authority across a group or committee rather than one person. Price point itself, not pricing structure, ranks as the single hardest part of SaaS pricing to get right, ahead of packaging and bundling, per the same 321-company survey.
If your company changes its pricing model, a T&C Generator that keeps your cancellation, refund, and billing-change clauses current is one of the cheaper fixes to make before a new price point goes live, not after a customer disputes a charge.
How do the major SaaS pricing surveys compare?
Two of the sources behind this article measure pricing differently, and neither is wrong, they answer different questions. The table below lines up the figures side by side so the difference in definition is explicit rather than buried in a footnote.
| Metric | Price Intelligently by SBI (2025, n=321) | Monetizely (2025, n=103) |
|---|---|---|
| Usage-based pricing | 21.2% (pure usage-based structure only) | 43% (any usage component present) |
| Per-seat / per-user pricing | 80%+ use seats in some form; 8% seats-only | 57% use per-user as primary model |
| Freemium | Not measured in this survey wave | 38% of companies offer it |
| Platform / hybrid pricing | 34.0% platform fee (single largest structure) | 61% use some form of hybrid pricing |
Source: Price Intelligently by SBI, 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report; Monetizely, 2025 SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study.
Neither survey is large by academic standards, 321 and 103 companies respectively, so treat both as directional benchmarks rather than a census of the entire SaaS market. What they agree on matters most: seats are being demoted from the whole pricing model to one input among several, and usage-based elements, however counted, are gaining share every year they have been tracked.
The Bottom Line
SaaS pricing in 2026 is not converging on one winning model. Platform fees lead at 34.0%, but flat fee, usage-based, and base-fee structures each still hold a real share of the market, and seats remain present in over 80% of companies even as they get demoted to a secondary metric. The clearest trend across every source cited here is a move toward hybrid structures that blend a base charge with some usage or seat component, up from 49% of companies in 2024 to 61% in 2025. Outcomes-based pricing remains almost entirely theoretical at 0.6% adoption despite years of conference-stage attention. For a SaaS company setting or revisiting its own pricing in 2026, the practical takeaway is not which single model to copy, it is that pricing decisions made on leadership intuition alone are measurably worse than data-informed ones, and that a pricing model change is not complete until the terms customers agreed to are updated to match it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most common SaaS pricing structure in 2026? A platform fee, used by 34.0% of SaaS companies, ahead of flat fee (23.4%), usage-based (21.2%), and base fee (14.6%), according to Price Intelligently by SBI’s 2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report (n=321 pricing leaders).
Do most SaaS companies still charge per seat? Yes. More than 80% of SaaS companies use some form of seat-based pricing metric, though only 8% rely on seats as their sole value metric; 33% use seats as a primary metric alongside others and 37% use seats as a secondary metric (Price Intelligently by SBI, 2025, n=321).
Is usage-based pricing replacing per-seat SaaS pricing? It is growing but has not overtaken seats. Price Intelligently by SBI counts 21.2% of companies as pure usage-based (2025, n=321), while Monetizely’s separate 2025 benchmark study, which counts any usage component within a broader pricing structure, puts usage-based elements at 43% of companies (n=103 companies analyzed, 47 pricing leaders surveyed), up 8 percentage points from 2024.
How much are SaaS companies raising prices in 2026? SaaS companies raised list prices by a median of 8% to 12% year over year as of late 2025, and the median entry-level plan reached $29 per user per month, up 11% from the prior year, according to Monetizely’s 2025 SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study of 103 companies.
Sources and References
- Price Intelligently by SBI. (2025). “2025 State of SaaS Pricing Report, Part 1: 10 Insights for Building Market-Leading Pricing.” Survey of 321 SaaS operators and executives.
- ChartMogul. (2026). “SaaS Conversion Report.” Published January 2026, survey of 200 B2B software products.
- Monetizely. (2025). “SaaS Pricing Benchmark Study 2025.” Published December 22, 2025, analysis of 103 companies’ pricing pages plus a survey of 47 pricing leaders.
Note: All figures verified as of September 2026. Pricing model adoption shifts at least annually as new benchmark reports publish, so headline figures here are scheduled for a refresh in the first half of 2027.
