The vocabulary of SaaS pricing, defined honestly — with the number of tools in our 498-dossier corpus that carry each pattern, and a documented example from the wild.
The sticker price is the advertised headline price of a software plan. It is the number vendors market — but in our researched corpus, only about one in three tools has a sticker price that is also the whole story: meters, seats and add-ons move the real bill.
Usage-based or metered pricing charges on top of (or instead of) a flat subscription: credits, message or minute counts, overage fees or percentage cuts. Done openly it is fair; done quietly it makes the advertised plan price meaningless once you have real volume.
Seen in 253 of 498 researched tools.
Per-seat pricing scales the bill with every user, member or agent you add. Predictable at small size, but it quietly taxes growth: doubling your team doubles the software bill even when usage barely changes. Flat-fee alternatives exist in most categories.
Seen in 125 of 498 researched tools.
Quote-only or hidden pricing means the vendor publishes no usable price list — you must book a sales call to learn what it costs. It enables per-customer price discrimination and makes comparison shopping impossible before you invest time in a demo.
Seen in 33 of 498 researched tools.
A renewal jump is the gap between the introductory price you sign at and the higher rate your subscription renews at — standing practice in hosting and security software. The honest question is never the intro price but the year-two price.
Seen in 7 of 498 researched tools.
Paid add-ons are features sold separately on top of a plan — payroll on top of bookkeeping, verification on top of email. The pattern turns one advertised price into a stack of line items; price the bundle you actually need, not the base plan.
Seen in 139 of 498 researched tools.
An annual lock-in means the advertised price only exists with a yearly (or longer) commitment; monthly billing costs meaningfully more or is unavailable. It shifts risk to the buyer: you pay for a year before you know whether the tool sticks.
Seen in 114 of 498 researched tools.
A genuinely free tier is a plan you can run on indefinitely at zero cost — not a fourteen-day trial in a costume. The honest test: can a real, small use case live on it forever? In our corpus, about four in ten tools pass.
Seen in 160 of 498 researched tools.
A free trial ends; a free plan does not. Vendors often market trials as 'free' — the honest distinction is whether the tool remains usable at zero cost after the clock runs out, or whether every path leads to a paywall within weeks.
A price-hike registry documents SaaS price increases, free-tier cuts and plan retirements with evidence — because vendors quietly delete old pricing pages. AIBM's registry snapshots every monitored pricing page monthly and archives independent receipts at the Wayback Machine.
Pay-to-play awards are industry prizes that require entry fees, sponsorships or paid licensing of winner badges — the economics reward payment, not merit. The honest alternative: awards drawn from published research, where vendors cannot apply and evidence is shown per winner.
An evidence-based software review ties every claim to a verifiable source: documented prices, quoted terms, archived pages. The practical test is whether the reviewer publishes the evidence next to the verdict — and says 'skip it' when that is the honest answer.
Definitions are editorial; corpus numbers are computed from hand-researched dossiers (open data). Some links are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; it never changes a definition.