14 SaaS Price Transparency Statistics (2026)

Ask a B2B SaaS company what its product costs and the most likely answer is a button that says “Contact Sales.”

Hidden pricing is the default in this market, and the published number is the minority case. Among the fast-growing SaaS unicorns OpenView tracked from 2016 to 2018, the trend ran toward more secrecy, not less.

Mystery Demo works behind that button: it books competitors’ sales demos as a credible buyer and comes back with the number that was never on the page, on one board beside the discount and the terms. The figures below come from public research, each re-checked against the source that first published it and footnoted to it; if you keep only a handful, keep these:

Most of the Market Won’t Show You a Price

For anyone benchmarking a competitor off its website, the headline question has a clear answer at the market level, and it is not flattering. Three datasets, each counting a different universe:

The three figures look inconsistent until you notice what each one counts. Vertice’s 57% counts vendors hiding pricing and G2’s 4% counts marketplace profiles that list one, which is not the same as a vendor’s own site; both include the enterprise-heavy vendors most likely to gate a price, while over half of ChartMogul’s 600 companies were below $10 million in ARR.³

The honest read is a rule rather than a single percentage: the larger a vendor’s typical deal, the less likely a price appears. A real published number is the minority behavior.

Transparency Depends on Who You Sell To

The aggregate hides a sharp pattern, and for a sales team it says which rivals will have a price on the page at all. Whether a company shows a price is mostly a function of the deal it sells, and Tremont and Growth Unhinged’s survey of 240 software companies in April 2025 measures it by average annual contract value (ACV):⁸

The share that publishes falls at every step, from 70% under $1,000 in ACV to 6% above $100,000, and from $25,000 up fewer than three in ten companies show a number.⁸

Older studies found the same split by company type:

Young self-serve SaaS and the biggest incumbents need opposite things from a pricing page. Startups publish a price to convert a buyer who will never take a call, and the biggest companies hide it because their deals are large, negotiated, and custom.

The most revealing cut is the middle: the $10 million to $100 million ARR band, the stage where companies start chasing enterprise, is where pricing pages tend to go dark. Across companies, transparency erodes with ambition, not with age: the up-market vendors are the ones without a price.

The Trend Went Backward, Not Forward

It would be reasonable to assume that, with buyers demanding it, the market has been drifting toward transparency. Between 2016 and 2018, the same firm tracking the same companies found the opposite:

The pricing page got rarer as the companies got bigger, which is the opposite of how confidence is supposed to work. The fastest-growing software firms looked at transparency and quietly walked the other way.

This is the finding that should unsettle anyone who treats “more transparency” as an inevitability. Between 2016 and 2018 the direction of travel was toward the sales call, not away from it; we found no later study that tracks the same companies, and Tremont’s 2025 data measures deal size, not change over time.

Margin is the likely explanation: a hidden price preserves room to negotiate, segment, and raise, and the companies leading the retreat were the youngest and fastest-growing.

Buyers Want the Number You’re Hiding

Buyers were not ambiguous about what they want fixed. When asked, pricing sits at the top of the list.

In TrustRadius’s 2025 research, transparent pricing was the number-one thing B2B technology buyers wanted from vendors, cited by 45% of buyers.⁶ A separate Forrester survey of more than 18,000 business buyers found nearly 90% had a purchase stall in 2023, and Forrester’s advice to providers was price transparency up front.⁷

The 45% figure is striking because of what it says about the gap: of everything buyers could ask vendors to fix, the most requested was the one most vendors refuse. Forrester does not say how many stalls came from pricing; its advice was transparency up front.

Showing the Price Changes Buyer Behavior

Vendors hide the price on the theory that a number scares buyers off; TrustRadius’s listing data measures the opposite effect directly. Listings that added pricing saw a 21% average increase in time on page, a 15x increase in page views, and a 3x increase in clicks on their calls to action.⁶ Buyers also go hunting for the missing number: on TrustRadius, queries for product pricing information rose 15% in a year, while traffic for generic top-of-funnel queries fell across the review-site industry.⁶

These are observed behaviors, not survey opinions, though they measure engagement on a review site rather than closed deals. Revealing a price tripled clicks on the listing’s calls to action, and the rising search for pricing data shows the demand does not disappear when the number does. Hide the price and the buyer goes to find it elsewhere: a review site, a community thread, or a competitor who did publish.

Chief Mystery Officer

Mystery Demo

A “contact us” button is a research problem for the buyer and a tell for us. When a competitor hides every number behind a form, it usually means the price moves, by segment, by quarter, by how badly they want the logo. We book the same product twice with two different use cases and get quoted two different starting points, which is exactly what the hidden page is protecting. The vendors who post a real number are making a bet on volume. The ones who hide it are keeping room to read the buyer first, and that room is what we measure.

What none of this tells you is what your specific competitors put behind their own “contact us” wall, or how that number changes depending on who is asking. That only exists on a real call. Below is one page from our example board, where the company and every competitor on it are invented.

Mystery Demo takes that call as a real buyer and brings back the starting price, the segmentation, and the discount they reveal only once someone is in the room.

For the structured version, our SaaS competitor pricing research turns each hidden page into a real number you can plan against. If a rival’s pricing page ends in a form, the price still exists; it just gets said out loud instead of published. We’ll go through the form as a real buyer and bring the number back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What share of SaaS companies hide their pricing?

57% of SaaS vendors hid their pricing from public view in Vertice’s 2023 index of 16,000 vendors.¹

How many SaaS products publish an actual price?

4% of product profiles on G2’s marketplace list an explicit price, still over 9,300 profiles as of March 2025.²

Does transparency depend on deal size?

70% publish a price under $1,000 in average ACV, falling to 6% above $100,000, in Tremont and Growth Unhinged’s April 2025 survey.⁸

Do the biggest SaaS companies show pricing?

80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies had no pricing page at all in a 2016 study, against 39% of trending startups that published pricing.⁴

Even when SaaS shows pricing, is the top tier public?

59% of the trending startups in that 2016 study listed their enterprise package’s price as “Contact us.”⁴

Which SaaS companies are most likely to hide pricing?

Nearly half of HR software companies did not list pricing in ChartMogul’s 2020 data, and companies at $10 million to $100 million in ARR were the most likely to keep it private.³

Did SaaS pricing get more transparent over time?

55% to 47% was the fall in SaaS unicorns publishing pricing between 2016 and 2018, and no company that had hidden pricing moved toward transparency in that period.⁵

Were newer SaaS companies more or less transparent?

21% of the newest unicorns published pricing in OpenView’s 2018 study, against 33% across all 66 studied.⁵

What do B2B tech buyers want most from vendors?

45% of buyers named transparent pricing, the number-one thing they wanted from vendors, in TrustRadius’s 2025 research.⁶

Do stalled deals connect to pricing?

Nearly 90% of more than 18,000 business buyers had a purchase stall in 2023; Forrester does not attribute the stalls to pricing, but its advice to providers was price transparency up front.⁷

What happens to engagement when a vendor shows pricing?

15x more page views and 3x more clicks on calls to action, plus 21% more time on page, for TrustRadius listings that added pricing.⁶

References

1. Vertice: 2023 SaaS Inflation Index (2023)
2. G2: Is B2B Software Pricing Transparency Broken? (2025)
3. ChartMogul: The B2B SaaS Pricing Masterclass: Lessons From 600-Plus SaaS Companies (2020)
4. OnStartups: Insightful Study of 386 SaaS Startup Pricing Pages (2016)
5. OpenView: Why SaaS Companies Are Moving Away From Pricing Transparency (2018)
6. TrustRadius: Who Says Nice Guys Finish Last? TrustRadius B2B Peer Reviews Grow Authority in the AI Search Era (2025)
7. Forrester: Forrester's 2023 Global B2B Buyers' Journey Survey (2023)
8. Tremont and Growth Unhinged: 2025 State of B2B Monetization (2025)