Rivals raised SaaS prices as often as private equity did, but only 5% hid them (PE: 33%)

Yesterday we published that 53 of 75 SaaS companies bought by private equity (71%) raised their list prices or took them off the pricing page after the deal. The obvious objection is that SaaS prices went up everywhere after 2021, with or without private equity. So we ran the same check on 20 companies that private equity never owned.

Each rival is matched to one company from the census by Crunchbase category and headcount. Its pricing page was captured by the Wayback Machine in the same 24 months before that company's deal and again at least nine months after it. We read the pages with the same prompt and the same verdict rules as the census.

If prices rose everywhere, the rivals should land near 71%. They landed at 50%, and the split surprised us. The rivals raised prices as often as the private equity companies did, but only 1 of the 20 removed prices from its page (5%), against 25 of the 75 companies bought by private equity (33%).

Findings

1. 9 of the 20 rivals (45%) raised at least one price. Among the 75 private equity companies it was 33 (44%).
2. 1 of the 20 rivals (5%) took prices off its pricing page. Among the 75 private equity companies it was 25 (33%).
3. Counting both, 10 of the 20 rivals (50%) raised or hid prices, against 53 of 75 (71%) for private equity.
4. The 20 private equity companies that got a rival raised or hid prices at 13 of 20 (65%): 8 raised and 6 hid, and one of them did both.
5. 8 rivals kept the same prices and 2 cut them. UiPath's cheapest paid plan went from $420 to $25 a month.
6. 5 of the 20 rivals (25%) ended a free plan or a free trial. Among the 75 private equity companies it was 19 (25%).

45% of rivals raised prices, 44% of private equity companies did

The rivals' increases look like the ones in the census. WooDelivery moved its Starter plan from $18 to $49 a month. Thinkific raised Basic from $36 to $40, Start from $74 to $82 and Grow from $149 to $164 a month on annual billing. Cinamaker's annual Director Studio Pro went from $199 to $299.99. Agency Platform's local SEO plan went from $149 to $178 a month. The biggest jump is at WorkSlam, whose Team plan for 20 users went from $8.99 to $129 a month.

Some calls are close. elementTIME merged a $10 government licence and a $12 private licence into one $11 licence per user, and the reading counted that as a rise.

With 20 rivals the 95% interval on the 45% runs from 26% to 66%, and the 44% for private equity sits in the middle of it. On raising prices this sample does not tell the two groups apart.

1 of 20 rivals hid prices, 25 of 75 private equity companies did

Visrez listed its Floor Plan Builder at $300 per space a year. Its pricing address now opens a page that still offers it, with "Contact Sales" and no price. None of the other 19 rivals removed a price. On the private equity side, Zendesk, Mindbody, Nintex, Mangopay and Accelo are among the 25 that did.

If both groups hid prices at the same rate, a gap this large between 1 of 20 and 25 of 75 would come up by chance about 1 time in 100 (Fisher's exact test, p = 0.011). The 95% interval on the rivals' 5% runs from 1% to 24%. Inside the 20 pairs the gap shows up the same way: 6 of the 20 private equity companies hid prices, and 1 of their rivals did.

So most of the difference between 71% and 50% comes from hiding prices. In this sample, price rises happened at about the same rate in both groups.

The 20 pairs

In 6 pairs the private equity company raised or hid prices and its rival did not. In 3 pairs it was the other way round. The match is by Crunchbase category, so some pairs are loose: Rydoo, an expense management app, got Tencent EdgeOne, a content delivery network.

Method

1. We shuffled the 75 comparable private equity companies from the census (seed 20260928) and went down the list until 20 had a rival.
2. For each one we pulled candidates from our copy of Crunchbase: companies in the Software category group that share at least one of its specific categories (SaaS, Software and similar generic tags count only when a company has nothing else), with an employee band at most two steps away, founded at least two years before the deal, never bought according to Crunchbase, with no investor typed as a private equity firm, no private equity round, and not in the census. We ranked them by shared categories, then by headcount distance.
3. For the first 72 candidates we asked the Wayback Machine for a pricing page at /pricing, /plans and similar addresses, captured with HTTP 200 in the 24 months before the matched deal and again at least nine months after it and since January 2025. We rendered both captures with JavaScript through ScrapingBee.
4. Claude read each pair with the census prompt and verdict rules. The census readings used claude-opus-5, these used claude-opus-5-5. A script matched every quoted price against the page text (0 failures). We kept the first candidate whose prices before the deal could be compared and moved on to the next candidate otherwise. As in the census, every reading of hidden prices was repeated on today's live page. That changed one: Agency Platform moved from raised and hid to raised.
5. We searched the web for each rival's owner. Reviso belongs to TeamSystem, and a comparison site reports that team.blue bought Oviond in January 2026. LearnWorlds came in through a second Crunchbase record for its domain; its own record lists Insight Partners, which Crunchbase types as a private equity firm. We dropped all three. Their private equity companies, Holded, Egoditor (QR Code Generator) and Brincr, had no other rival among their 72 candidates.
6. We drew 30 private equity companies to get 20 pairs. Seven more had no rival with a comparable pricing page among their 72 candidates: AirDNA, Billin, Encoding.com, Poka, WhosOnLocation, IdentityIQ and Securly. We checked 1,056 candidates in the archive in all.

Twenty rivals is a small sample, and the intervals above are wide. These are list prices, and our copy of Crunchbase ends in February 2025, so a rival bought after that date shows up only if the web search found it.

Data

The files below are under CC BY 4.0.

• rivals.csv, the 20 pairs: the private equity company with its buyer, deal date and verdict, the rival with its Crunchbase categories and headcount band, both capture dates, the verdict, what changed and links to both pages
• companies.csv and census.csv from the first post, with METHOD.md