We read the pricing page of every company in the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index on October 23, 2026, all 62 of them. Only 30 publish prices; 11 have a pricing page with no prices on it, only "contact sales"; and 21 have no pricing page at all. Of the 30 that publish, 13 charge per user, 3 per device or host, 8 by usage and 6 by flat plan tiers. 13 show a free plan. And 10 of the 62 now sell credits, usually for AI features, alongside or instead of seats.
This is the public-company end of the market, so read it as how large SaaS companies price, not as a template for a seed-stage startup. The same 62 companies are in our public SaaS benchmark and net dollar retention tracker, which lets us put pricing next to growth and retention below. For the choice of model itself, start with the SaaS pricing models guide.
Method
The sample is every constituent of the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index on October 22, 2026 that files quarterly with the SEC: 62 companies, picked by the index and not by us. For each one we loaded the pricing page in a headless browser and saved the text. Where the usual pricing URL did not exist, we checked the homepage navigation for any link to pricing, plans or "buy". We then classified each page by hand: whether it shows list prices, what the main unit of charge is, whether a $0 plan is shown, and whether credits are sold. The pages were read from a German IP address, so several showed euro prices; this changes the currency, not the structure, and we report no price levels for those companies.
Headline findings
| Finding | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Publish list prices | 30 of 62 | 48% |
| Pricing page with no prices (quote only) | 11 of 62 | 18% |
| No pricing page | 21 of 62 | 34% |
| Of those with prices: per user | 13 of 30 | 43% |
| Of those with prices: per device or host | 3 of 30 | 10% |
| Of those with prices: usage | 8 of 30 | 27% |
| Of those with prices: flat plan tiers | 6 of 30 | 20% |
| Of those with prices: $0 plan shown | 13 of 30 | 43% |
| Sell credits (all 62) | 10 of 62 | 16% |
Half of public SaaS does not publish a price
The companies that hide prices are mostly selling to large organizations: security platforms, banking software, HR and payroll suites, vertical systems for healthcare and life sciences. Their pages say things like "We'll provide a customized quote" (Paycom) or "Start here to get a custom quote" (Procore). The companies with public prices are larger and faster-growing in our data: median trailing revenue of $2.3 billion and median growth of 21%, against $1.2 billion and 16% for companies with no pricing page. That is a correlation, not a cause; many of the public-price companies run a self-serve product next to their enterprise sales team, which is why the price is on the page at all.
What they charge for
Per-user pricing is still the most common unit among companies that publish prices, but it rarely comes alone now. Eight of the 13 per-user companies also sell credits: Salesforce ("Flex Credits"), HubSpot ("HubSpot Credits"), Atlassian ("Rovo credits per user per month"), GitLab ("GitLab Credits"), Figma ("AI credits"), Asana, PagerDuty and Adobe, whose plans include credits "for creative AI". Snowflake prices in credits outright, and Braze describes "a flexible credit-based model" without listing prices. The pattern matches what we see in smaller companies: seats for access, credits for the AI work that costs the vendor money per use. Our per-seat to hybrid pricing guide covers the move, and the credit-based pricing guide covers what credits do to revenue recognition.
Usage pricing (compute hours, gigabytes, messages, contacts, rental units) is concentrated in infrastructure and data companies: DigitalOcean, Dynatrace, Fastly, MongoDB, Snowflake and Twilio, plus Klaviyo by contact count and AppFolio per rental unit. Three security companies price per device or endpoint (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne) or per host (Datadog). Flat plan tiers, sometimes with payment fees on top, are used by Cloudflare, Shopify, Toast, Weave, JFrog and UiPath.
Pricing unit and retention
Of the companies that both publish prices and report net retention, the six usage-priced ones have a median NRR of 116.6%, and the seven per-user ones 104%. The samples are small and the companies differ in many other ways, so this is a pointer, not a finding: usage pricing lets revenue grow when customers use more without a new contract, which is what NRR measures. Net retention is measured differently from company to company; see the tracker for each definition.
Every company in the study
| Company | Pricing page | Main unit of charge | $0 plan shown | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe | public prices | per user, plus generative AI credits | No | Yes |
| AppFolio | public prices | per rental unit a month | No | |
| Asana | public prices | per user, plus AI credits | Yes | Yes |
| Atlassian | public prices | per user, plus Rovo AI credits | Yes | Yes |
| Bill.com | public prices | per user a month, plus per-payment fees | No | |
| Cloudflare | public prices | per domain plan | Yes | |
| Crowdstrike | public prices | per device a year | No | |
| Datadog | public prices | per host a month, plus usage | Yes | |
| DigitalOcean | public prices | per hour / GB | Yes | |
| DocuSign | public prices | per user | No | |
| Dynatrace | public prices | per hour / GiB of usage | No | |
| Fastly | public prices | per GB / request | No | |
| Figma | public prices | per editor seat, plus AI credits | No | Yes |
| Freshworks | public prices | per agent | No | |
| Gitlab | public prices | per user, AI via GitLab Credits | Yes | Yes |
| HubSpot | public prices | per seat, plus HubSpot Credits | Yes | Yes |
| JFrog | public prices | platform tiers plus usage | No | |
| Klaviyo | public prices | by contact count | Yes | |
| MongoDB | public prices | per hour of cluster | Yes | |
| Okta | public prices | per user | No | |
| PagerDuty | public prices | per user, plus credit packs | Yes | Yes |
| Ringcentral | public prices | per user | No | |
| Salesforce | public prices | per user, plus Agentforce Flex Credits | Yes | Yes |
| SentinelOne | public prices | per endpoint a year | No | |
| Shopify | public prices | per store plan, plus payment fees | No | |
| Snowflake | public prices | per credit | No | Yes |
| Toast | public prices | per location plan, plus per-employee add-ons | Yes | |
| Twilio | public prices | per message / minute | No | |
| UiPath | public prices | platform tiers, from $25 a month | Yes | |
| Weave | public prices | per practice plan, from $199 a month | No | |
| AvePoint | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Braze | pricing page, no prices | Yes | ||
| Elastic | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Paycom | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Paylocity | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Procore | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Samsara | pricing page, no prices | |||
| ServiceTitan | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Tenable | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Workiva | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Zscaler | pricing page, no prices | |||
| Agilysys | no pricing page | |||
| Alkami | no pricing page | |||
| BlackLine | no pricing page | |||
| Five9 | no pricing page | |||
| Intapp | no pricing page | |||
| nCino | no pricing page | |||
| Netskope | no pricing page | |||
| Nutanix | no pricing page | |||
| Palantir | no pricing page | |||
| Palo Alto Networks | no pricing page | |||
| Q2 | no pricing page | |||
| Qualys | no pricing page | |||
| Rubrik | no pricing page | |||
| SailPoint | no pricing page | |||
| ServiceNow | no pricing page | |||
| Sprinklr | no pricing page | |||
| SPS Commerce | no pricing page | |||
| Veeva Systems | no pricing page | |||
| Waystar | no pricing page | |||
| Workday | no pricing page | |||
| Zeta | no pricing page |
Read October 23, 2026. Company names link to the page we read. Classification is ours, from the page text; a company may offer other products priced differently.
What a SaaS startup can take from this
- Publish a price if anyone buys without talking to you. The public companies with self-serve products all show a number. A "contact us" wall only makes sense when every deal is a sales conversation.
- Charge for the thing that costs you money. Where serving a customer costs more as they use more (AI inference, compute, messages), the large companies have moved that part to credits or usage, even when access is per seat. The AI COGS guide shows the margin math.
- A free plan is common, not universal. 13 of the 30 companies with public prices show a $0 plan, mostly developer and collaboration tools where usage spreads inside a company.
- Model the change before you make it. A switch from seats to usage changes when revenue arrives and how NRR behaves. Our price increase calculator runs the effect of a price change on revenue and churn.
Frequently asked questions
What share of SaaS companies publish their prices?
Among the 62 public companies in the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, 30 (48%) publish list prices on their website. 11 have a pricing page without prices and 21 have none.
What is the most common SaaS pricing model in 2026?
Among public SaaS companies that publish prices, per-user pricing is still the most common unit (13 of 30), followed by usage (8), flat tiers (6) and per device or host (3). Many per-user companies now add credits for AI features.
How many SaaS companies use credits?
10 of the 62 companies sell credits, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Atlassian, GitLab, Figma, Adobe, Asana, PagerDuty, Snowflake and Braze. Most use them for AI or other usage-heavy features alongside seats.
Do public SaaS companies offer free plans?
13 of the 30 that publish prices show a $0 plan, among them Atlassian, Asana, HubSpot, GitLab, Datadog, MongoDB, Cloudflare and Salesforce.
Price your plan in your forecast
Pricing decisions show up in the model as ARPA, expansion and churn. Adlega builds a driver-based 36-month SaaS model where you can change price and packaging assumptions and see revenue, burn and runway move, and its AI CFO explains every number.