There is no market rate for a thing that did not exist last month. Here is what to anchor to instead, and where real products actually landed.
Price against the cost of the problem, not the cost of the product: work out what the customer already spends on it each month in time, tools or outsourced help, and charge a visible fraction of that. Then sanity-check the number against what comparable products actually charge, which across 3,696 tracked startups is a median of $13.40 per user per month. Commit to the price for 90 days before you judge it, because a price tested for two weeks tells you nothing.
Competitor pricing is a crutch, and when you are genuinely first there is nothing to lean on. But your customer is not comparing you to nothing. They are comparing you to what they do today, which is always one of four things: a spreadsheet, a person, a tool they misuse for the purpose, or living with the problem.
That workaround has a price, and it is the only benchmark in the room. So the sequence is:
The trap in this method is a customer with a real problem and no money. Pain is necessary but not sufficient, and it is the mistake that quietly kills otherwise sensible products:
The product was genuinely good. Could not get a single person to pay for it. Why? His entire audience was unemployed. They had massive pain sure but zero purchasing power.
via r/SaaS
Once you have a number from the problem, check it against reality. This is the part most pricing advice cannot give you, because it requires actually measuring products rather than reasoning about them.
The category you are in moves this a lot, and it moves it in a direction worth understanding before you copy a price you saw somewhere:
| Category | Products | Median ARPU | Median MRR | Median subscribers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | 213 | $30.94 | $276 | 7 |
| E-commerce | 55 | $26.00 | $143 | 6 |
| SaaS (horizontal) | 352 | $21.05 | $155 | 6 |
| Artificial Intelligence | 931 | $18.59 | $207 | 9 |
| Analytics | 87 | $18.00 | $77 | 4 |
| Content Creation | 168 | $15.83 | $117 | 6 |
| Developer Tools | 164 | $12.25 | $69 | 5 |
| Social Media | 77 | $11.99 | $110 | 7 |
| Fintech | 96 | $10.50 | $83 | 5 |
| Design Tools | 77 | $10.48 | $124 | 8 |
| Education | 170 | $8.72 | $185 | 22 |
| Productivity | 214 | $7.00 | $50 | 5 |
| Mobile Apps | 282 | $5.88 | $144 | 23 |
| Utilities | 62 | $5.52 | $61 | 6 |
| Health & Fitness | 169 | $5.00 | $121 | 16 |
The pattern is the useful part. Marketing sits at $30.94 and Health & Fitness at $5.00, a sixfold spread, and it is not because marketing software is six times better. It is because marketing software is bought by a business against a revenue line, and fitness apps are bought by a person against their discretionary income. Who signs the cheque sets the ceiling.
Note the last column too. Mobile Apps and Education reach their median revenue through 22 to 23 subscribers at low prices; Analytics gets there with 4 at high ones. Both are viable. They are completely different companies, and you are choosing which one you are running when you set the price.
Charge monthly if you keep delivering value monthly: hosting the data, shipping updates, answering support, absorbing the cost of the thing running. Charge one-time for something genuinely used once, like a generator or a template pack.
The honest case for one-time pricing, which subscription orthodoxy tends to skip, is that it is easier to sell when nobody has heard of you. A buyer who does not know whether you will still exist in six months is being asked to take a much bigger risk on a subscription than on a single payment.
if people do not know you yet, asking them to pay every month can be a harder decision. they do not know if they will use the app long term. they do not know if you will keep improving it.
via r/SaaS
If your costs scale with usage, and with AI features they now usually do, neither model is safe on its own. Put a usage component in from the start. Retrofitting one onto customers who signed up for unlimited is one of the worst conversations in software.
Pricing feedback is slow. A price needs enough traffic to produce a pattern, and at the volumes an early product sees, two weeks of data is noise. Founders who change the number monthly never learn anything from any of the numbers.
Set it, publish it, leave it for 90 days, and record every objection verbatim. Then read the objections. If they are about the price, you have a pricing problem. If they are about whether it works, you have a proof problem, and no price fixes that. When you are ready to move the number up, the mechanics are in how to raise SaaS prices without losing customers.
ARPU is computed as monthly recurring revenue divided by active subscriptions, on 22 September 2026, across the TrustMRR corpus of 8,651 tracked startups. The 3,696 included are those reporting both MRR above zero and at least one active subscription. Category medians are shown only for categories with at least 40 qualifying products. These are self-reported figures from founders who chose to publish revenue publicly, so they over-represent products willing to show a number and under-represent both silent failures and private enterprise pricing.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). How to price a SaaS with no competitors. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/guides/how-to-price-a-saas-with-no-competitors