We Tracked SaaS Price Increases for 3 Years.
Here's What We Found.

The Timeline: A Three-Phase Wave

SaaS price increases didn't start with AI. They started with post-pandemic correction and free-tier pullbacks — then AI gave every vendor a new justification to accelerate.

The AI Tax: What the Data Actually Shows

We categorized the stated reason for each hike. The result was stark:

The phrase "AI [product] bundled into all plans" appears in Airtable's announcement, ClickUp's, Notion's, Asana's, Linear's, Monday.com's, Slack's, Grammarly's, Datadog's, and Dropbox's — often nearly verbatim. It is clearly a scripted justification, not a spontaneous one.

The critical nuance: in most cases, there is no way to opt out of the AI features and pay the old price. You pay for the AI tier whether you use it or not.

This is different from a traditional feature expansion. When Slack added video calling, you could ignore it. When Notion AI is "bundled," you pay +25% and there's no SKU without it.

Category Breakdown: Who Raised Prices the Most

Not all categories participated equally. Design tools and automation tools led the wave; infrastructure and finance tools trailed.

Design & Dev is skewed high by Canva's doubling and Figma's +67%. But even without outliers, the category averaged 30%+. The driver: these tools interact with AI generation most directly, making "AI bundling" most defensible to buyers.

Automation (Zapier, Retool) is next — both dramatically raised prices when adding AI workflow features to paid plans.

The 10 Biggest Individual Hikes

Who Didn't Raise Prices — and Why

This part of the dataset is underreported. Of the 70+ tools we track, roughly 15 have maintained stable pricing through 2024–2026. That's not nothing. Understanding why they held is as important as understanding why others raised.

• Jira ($7.75/seat) — Atlassian has kept Jira flat while competitors (Linear, ClickUp, Asana) raised. Why? Atlassian bundles Jira with Confluence and prefers enterprise contract-based revenue over per-seat list price increases.
• Basecamp ($99/mo flat) — DHH has publicly committed to flat pricing as a product philosophy. Their model is explicitly "one price, we don't grow via extraction." See: It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.
• Make/Integromat ($9/mo) — Competing directly with Zapier on price. If they raise, Zapier wins by default. Competitive pressure is the most reliable price anchor.
• Discord ($4.99/mo Nitro) — Consumer product with strong elasticity pressure. Even a modest increase would drive users to free alternatives.
• Paddle (5%+50¢) — Merchant-of-record model with percentage-based fees. Raising "price" would mean raising their take rate, which would be an obvious defection signal to customers.

The Compounding Effect on Team Budgets

Individual hike percentages look moderate on their own. The problem is that your SaaS stack is a portfolio, and these hikes compound.

Consider a 10-person product team with a typical 2022 stack:

• Figma ($12/seat × 10): $1,440/yr
• Notion ($8/seat × 10): $960/yr
• Linear ($8/seat × 10): $960/yr
• Slack ($7.25/seat × 10): $870/yr
• GitHub Copilot ($10 × 10): $1,200/yr
• Zapier (Starter): $600/yr

That stack cost $6,030/yr in 2022.

The same stack in 2026:

• Figma ($20/seat × 10): $2,400/yr (+$960)
• Notion ($10/seat × 10): $1,200/yr (+$240)
• Linear ($12.80/seat × 10): $1,536/yr (+$576)
• Slack ($8.75/seat × 10): $1,050/yr (+$180)
• GitHub Copilot ($19 × 10): $2,280/yr (+$1,080)
• Zapier (Starter): $840/yr (+$240)

Total 2026: $9,306/yr. An increase of $3,276/yr (+54%) for the exact same toolset, with no change in team size or usage patterns.

Multiply that across the full SaaS budget of a growing startup (typically 15–30 tools) and the real number is much larger than the press releases suggest.

What This Means Going Forward

Based on the patterns we've tracked, a few predictions:

1. The 2026 wave is not over. We're tracking 12 tools with scheduled pricing reviews in the next 6 months. At least 6 have signaled model changes in their latest investor materials.
2. The "AI bundling" justification has a ceiling. Once every tool has bundled AI, no single tool can justify a premium for it anymore. The next wave of hikes will need a different story — probably "enterprise features" or "compliance."
3. Enterprise contracts will insulate some buyers. Multi-year enterprise deals lock in pricing. SMBs on monthly or annual self-service plans will absorb the full increases.
4. Switching costs will rise, not fall. Every tool that raises prices also adds features that deepen lock-in. The short-term cost of switching keeps increasing even as the long-term cost of staying also increases.

Methodology

All data in this report is sourced from official vendor pricing pages, press releases, public announcements, and third-party verification (G2, Capterra, vendor blog posts). We track the entry-level paid tier unless otherwise noted. Dates reflect when new pricing became effective, not announced.

The full database — with 54 entries, filter by category, sortable by increase percentage — is available at the link below. It's free to use and cite with attribution.

Related: Category breakdown →  ·  Top 10 hikes ranked →  ·  Full database →