The B2B SaaS Sticker Shock Index

Every category below starts somewhere different. Some SaaS categories let you in for the price of a coffee; others assume you already have a budget line item. We pulled the cheapest publicly listed entry-level price from each of our comparisons across 18 categories (excluding tools that only quote custom pricing or charge a percentage fee) and ranked them low to high. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive category here is nearly 50x.

Cloud storage is the cheapest entry point in the index at $1.99/mo (Google Drive), and it isn’t close: the next category up, video conferencing, still starts under $5/user. The steepest jump in the whole ranking sits at the very top: Sales Intelligence & B2B Data tops out around $49/user/mo before CRM & Agency Software platforms like GoHighLevel ask for a flat $97/mo just to get started, a 2x jump with no smaller-tier option in between. In general, anything built for outbound sales or agency-scale operations (data enrichment, agency CRMs) starts 20–50x higher than horizontal productivity tools (storage, chat, docs). The market prices “sales infrastructure” as a fundamentally different tier of spend than “team productivity.”

“Free trial” means three very different things depending on the tool. We checked what each tool in our comparisons actually offers before you pay:

Prices are the lowest self-serve monthly (or per-seat/per-mo) rate publicly listed on each tool’s pricing page at the time each underlying comparison was last updated, converted to USD where needed. We excluded two categories from the main chart: Outreach vs Salesloft (both quote-only, no published self-serve price) and Stripe vs PayPal (fees are percentage-of-transaction, not a flat subscription, so they aren’t comparable on a $/mo axis). Enterprise tiers and usage-based add-ons are not reflected, and where a vendor headlines an annual-billing rate, that is the rate shown. This index is about the price of getting in the door, not total cost of ownership. For full feature-by-feature breakdowns, see the individual comparison linked for each category below.