Real SaaS Pricing Examples: What 90 Apps Actually Charge

Stop guessing your price. Ninety bootstrapped app founders already ran the experiment, and their numbers cluster tightly enough to give you a defensible starting point in about ten minutes. Everything below is dissected from Starter Story's interviews, with the exact price on every line.

The single most important base rate: about 72 of 90 run a subscription as their primary model. Recurring revenue is the overwhelming default. If you're agonizing over a clever pricing model, the odds say you should charge a subscription and move on.

One honest caveat: these are all successful apps. You're seeing prices that worked for products that worked — not proof any single number is optimal for you. Use the clusters as a starting line, then let your own users' behavior move you.

The model distribution, across all 90

Consumer mobile: the $10/week playbook

Fifteen-plus consumer apps in this dataset converge on nearly identical numbers, and it's the clearest pattern in the whole pricing file: ~$8–10/week OR ~$30–60/year, with a hard paywall after onboarding.

The annual plan is anchored to look like a steal — often 4–6 weeks of the weekly price. And the paywall comes after onboarding, before value: the user never sees a free product. Gravl ($440K/mo) paywalls before the user sees the product (video).

Three refinements that moved real money:

• Onboarding does the selling. Prayer Lock hit 43% conversion at $9.99/wk / $49.99/yr by obsessing over its onboarding screens (video).
• Abandonment offers recover checkouts. Locked shows a discounted $20/yr offer when a user abandons the $40/yr checkout (video) — cheap to copy.
• Weekly plans monetize impulse and young users. 3AK priced $10/mo or $30/yr because teens "prefer smaller, frequent purchases over expensive annual plans" (video). But push annual for LTV — Follow Buddy makes $50/yr its primary plan (video).

Short trials are standard: 3-day (Pep AI, Locked, Coherence) or 7-day (Money AI, Momego). And know your math — Puff Count ran paid ads at a $20–24 CAC against $55–70 LTV and advises a 3:1 LTV:CAC floor (video).

B2B SaaS: start at $25–$100/month, don't go lower

Twenty-plus B2B founders cluster their entry tiers between $25 and $100/month, and several explicitly warn against underpricing.

Three rules the B2B founders repeat:

No free plan is viable in B2B. Shipper runs no free plan at $25.6K MRR (video); Magai is strictly paid at $100K+ MRR (video). Use a longer trial instead — 30-day (Hero Analytics, Profit AI) or 14-day (Tech Lockdown).

Charge high early if your buyer has money. Setter AI starts at $50/mo with customers paying up to $5,000/mo: "Charge early on. Don't be afraid to charge because charging creates urgency and commitment," and "Go high ticket… sell to rich people, they pay better." (video) Launch Fast went public at $199/mo and hit $21.8K MRR in 90 days (video).

Tier on a value metric, not features. Hero Analytics prices on client count — 10 clients = $500/mo, plus per-seat for agency staff (video). Late tiers on connected accounts (video); Chatbase on messages; Lancer on proposals ($79 for 30 → $500/mo unlimited). Pick the number your customer already counts. Deeper play-by-play in B2B SaaS growth.

Lifetime deals: a launch weapon, not a home

Twelve founders touched one-time or lifetime pricing, but the pattern is almost always: use an LTD to launch and validate, then switch to subscription.

• Flogga: $120K in 24 hours from a limited-time LTD, then monthly/quarterly/yearly subs (video).
• Supergrow: $65K in 3 days from an LTD launch, now $19K+ MRR (video). Caveat: 40% platform fees and demanding low-value customers. "LTD exposes bad products really faster."
• Cleo: a 50%-off lifetime discount at launch → $30K MRR in 4 days (video).

Flogga's framing is the reason it works as a validation test: "Monthly subscribers have optionality, lifetime buyers have commitment." (video)

Keep lifetime as your actual model only when the market demands it: Savewise pivoted to lifetime after customer requests and now earns 97% of revenue from it (video); Elephas notes Mac-app buyers specifically expect lifetime options (video).

Freemium and usage pricing: know the math

Freemium needs a huge top-of-funnel and low conversion is normal. YouForm keeps 90%+ of features free and converts at ~1.5–2% (video). The Wellness Company sees 8% free-to-paid (video). Only pick freemium when free users are your distribution — Wishlist has 1.1M users monetized via in-app purchases and affiliate links (video).

Usage/credit pricing wins as a wedge in subscription-fatigued or API markets (4+ founders). Yadaphone chose pay-as-you-go credits against subscription competitors and hit $14K MRR in 7 months (video); Scrape Creators runs $10/5K credits → $500/500K credits at 80% margin (video).

Open-core — free self-hosted, paid cloud — worked for Chartbrew ($9K MRR), Papermark ($75K MRR), and Posties. And remember who pays isn't always who uses: Parakeet Chat charges families $15–20/mo for a product used by incarcerated relatives (video); Once prices per event, $2 for 10 guests up to $50 for 150 (video). Find the payer with the credit card.

Wrong price? It's fixable in both directions

The most reassuring finding: nobody in the dataset reported price experimentation killing the business. Corrections went both ways.

• Profit AI launched at $5,000/month, found fit at $800/month (video).
• AudioPen launched cheap and raised prices "as you refine the product" — now $99/yr (video).

Supergrow's blunt validation rule underneath all of this: "Free users don't actually validate your product. They will just consume it." (video) The only pricing that validates is pricing someone pays. More on that in validating your app idea.

Your pricing decision, in five lines

1. Consumer mobile utility/habit/AI app → hard paywall, $8–10/wk + $30–60/yr, optional 3-day trial, obsess over onboarding.
2. B2B tool → paid-only with a 14–30 day trial, entry at $25–100/mo, tiered on the metric your customer already counts.
3. Need launch cash or validation → limited-time lifetime deal to your own list, then convert to subscription.
4. API or subscription-fatigued market → credits / pay-as-you-go as the wedge.
5. Freemium only if free users ARE your distribution; expect 1.5–8% conversion.

Unsure? Launch and adjust. The dataset shows corrections from $5,000 down to $800 and from cheap up to $99/yr — with zero fatalities. Ship a price, watch what people actually pay, and move.

Want a price recommendation matched to your exact product and buyer? Ask the advisor or browse the full casebook.