Every SaaS pricing page leads with a number you will never pay.
I spent a few months rebuilding the pricing of 20+ marketing tools from their own published rate cards, then pricing each one at usage levels a real business actually hits. Not the cheapest tier. The tier where the features you bought the product for actually live.
Across 13 tools with a paid entry tier, the plan you realistically end up on costs 3.9× the advertised entry price. Median 3.3×.
Here is the full data, and what I think it means if you are pricing your own product.
1. The entry price is not the price
| Tool | Advertised entry | Realistic working plan | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | $9 | $99 | 11.0× |
| Klaviyo | $20 | $150 | 7.5× |
| Mailchimp | $26 | $135 | 5.2× |
| MailerLite | $15 | $73 | 4.9× |
| Ahrefs | $29 | $129 | 4.4× |
| GetResponse | $19 | $65 | 3.4× |
| ActiveCampaign | $15 | $49 | 3.3× |
| Pipedrive | $14 | $39 | 2.8× |
| SE Ranking | $129 | $279 | 2.2× |
| Moz | $49 | $99 | 2.0× |
| Semrush | $139 | $249 | 1.8× |
| Mangools | $49 | $69 | 1.4× |
| monday CRM | $12 | $17 | 1.4× |
Close is the extreme case: the $9 Solo plan supports one user and has no workflows, so every serious recommendation of Close starts at Growth at $99.
Four more tools — Zoho CRM, Kit, Brevo and HubSpot — lead with a free tier, which makes the multiple mathematically infinite. Kit is the sharpest example: free to 10,000 subscribers, then $139/month at that same list size.
2. Monthly billing carries a 44% premium
Paying month to month is the flexibility a growing business needs most. It is also what vendors charge most for.
| Tool | Monthly | Annual (per mo) | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | $19 | $9 | +111% |
| Pipedrive | $24 | $14 | +71% |
| Mangools | $49 | $29.90 | +64% |
| Zoho CRM | $20 | $14 | +43% |
| monday CRM | $12 | $9 | +33% |
| ActiveCampaign | $19 | $15 | +27% |
| Moz | $49 | $39 | +26% |
| SE Ranking | $129 | $103.20 | +25% |
| Ahrefs | $129 | $107.50 | +20% |
| Semrush | $139.95 | $117.33 | +19% |
Note where the premium is steepest: the cheap end. The tools a small business can actually afford are the ones that punish monthly billing hardest. Close, Pipedrive and Mangools all charge 60% or more for the privilege of not committing to a year.
3. The same list costs 3.9× more depending on who you pick
Eight email platforms, priced at an identical 10,000 contacts.
| Platform | Per month | Per year | vs cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brevo | $49 | $588 | — |
| GetResponse | $65 | $780 | +$192 |
| MailerLite | $73 | $876 | +$288 |
| Omnisend | $132 | $1,584 | +$996 |
| Mailchimp | $135 | $1,620 | +$1,032 |
| Kit | $139 | $1,668 | +$1,080 |
| Klaviyo | $150 | $1,800 | +$1,212 |
| ActiveCampaign | $189 | $2,268 | +$1,680 |
Same list. Same job. A $1,680 annual difference.
Brevo is cheapest here because it bills on emails sent rather than contacts stored — which also means the ranking inverts completely for high-frequency senders. Worth knowing which meter you are actually being charged on.
4. Per-seat surcharges reach $100 a month
Team pricing is where advertised comparisons break down entirely, because the sticker price is almost always a single seat.
| Tool and tier | Extra seat |
|---|---|
| Semrush Business | +$100/user/mo |
| Semrush Guru | +$80/user/mo |
| Semrush Pro | +$45/user/mo |
| HubSpot | +$45/user/mo |
| SE Ranking | +$16/user/mo |
| Brevo | +$12/user/mo |
Worked example: a three-person team on Semrush Guru pays $249.95 plus two seats at $80 = $409.95/month, or 64% above the advertised price.
5. Free tiers are rarer than the marketing suggests
Of the 17 tools priced, only 4 offer a free tier a real business can work inside: Zoho CRM (3 users, no time limit), Kit (to 10,000 subscribers), Brevo (~9,000 emails/month within a 300/day cap), and HubSpot's free CRM.
Everything else offers a trial, not a tier. The distinction matters more than the marketing admits: a trial ends on a date, a free tier ends at a limit you can plan around.
6. The costs that never appear on a pricing page
These only turn up if you read the documentation.
- Mandatory onboarding. HubSpot charges $500–$3,000 for Professional onboarding, $3,500–$7,000 for Enterprise. Not optional, not on the pricing page.
- Seat minimums. monday CRM enforces a three-seat minimum. A two-person team pays $288/year for a seat nobody uses.
- Contact blocks. HubSpot sells extra contacts in 5,000-blocks at roughly $135–$225/month.
- Branding removal. Brevo charges $12/month to remove its branding from your emails — not bundled, even on paid tiers.
- Dedicated IP. ~$251/year on Brevo, and worth budgeting for because of shared-IP deliverability.
- Billing-meter quirks. Mailchimp counts contacts you have not manually archived, and does not deduplicate across audiences. The same person in two lists is billed twice.
- Usage fees. Close bills calling at ~$0.02/minute and phone numbers at ~$1 each per month, on top of seats.
- Credit systems. Ahrefs meters report generation, so a heavy user can be pushed to the next tier without adding a single seat.
Methodology
List prices came directly from each vendor's public pricing page and documentation during 2026. Every tier was then priced at identical, realistic usage: matched list sizes for email platforms, matched seat counts for CRM and SEO tools.
"Realistic working plan" means the lowest tier that includes the features the product is chosen for — for a CRM, one with automation; for an SEO tool, one with usable rank-tracking limits; for an email platform, one without vendor branding and with automation. Where annual billing exists, both figures are shown. Prices are USD and change frequently.
Nothing here is modelled or estimated. It is the vendor's own published numbers applied to a stated scenario.
What this means if you are pricing your own product
The pattern is consistent enough that I stopped reading it as vendors being sneaky and started reading it as structural. Entry tiers are not products — they are lead magnets. The actual product starts two tiers up, and the entry tier exists to win the comparison-shopping click.
That is a rational strategy and it demonstrably works. But it has a cost the spreadsheets do not show: every customer who arrives via the $9 tier and discovers they need the $99 one has learned something about you. Some of them churn immediately. The ones who stay start every renewal conversation from a position of mild distrust.
If you are setting your own tiers, the question worth asking is not "what is the lowest number I can put on the page" but "what is the lowest number at which someone can succeed?" Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is the amount of goodwill you are choosing to spend.
I would genuinely like to hear from people who have made this call in either direction. Did you price tier one below what most customers need, or make it genuinely usable and accept the worse conversion rate?
The full per-tool breakdowns, including the tier-by-tier working for each figure above, are published at RealCostLabs. All figures are free to cite with attribution.
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