71% of SaaS companies bought by private equity raised or hid their prices
Published 27 September 2026. Updated 28 September 2026
The FundingWatcher startup file lists 2,159 software companies bought between 2008 and February 2025 by a private equity firm, or by a company that a private equity firm already owned. We looked up the pricing page of every one of them on the Wayback Machine: the last capture before the deal was announced, and the latest capture at least nine months after it. We ran the same check on 114 companies bought by software holding companies such as Bending Spoons.
Most of these companies never publish a price. Only 192 of the 2,273 had a pricing page archived at both times. Of the companies bought by private equity, 75 showed prices before the deal in a form we could compare, and 53 of them (71%) have raised their prices or removed them since.
Private equity SaaS pricing statistics 2026
- 53 of the 75 companies bought by private equity that listed prices before the deal (71%) have raised them or taken them off the page since.
- 33 of the 75 raised at least one price, and 25 removed prices from the page. Five did both.
- Companies a private equity firm bought directly raised or hid prices at 24 of 30 (80%). Companies bought as add-ons by a private equity-owned company did so at 29 of 45 (64%).
- 19 of the 75 ended a free plan or a free trial.
- 13 of the 75 kept the same prices, 6 cut them and 3 moved some up and some down.
- Bending Spoons raised prices at 3 of the 4 of its companies we could compare.
53 of 75 companies raised their prices or removed them
53 of the 75 companies bought by private equity that showed prices before the deal (71%) have raised them or taken them off the pricing page since. Source: FundingWatcher, September 2026.
| Company | Bought by | Deal | Before the deal | Now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk | Hellman & Friedman | Jun 2022 | Suite Team $49, Suite Professional $99, Suite Enterprise $150 per agent a month | $55, $115, Talk to Sales |
| New Relic | Francisco Partners | Jul 2023 | $0.30 per GB of data, first full user free | $0.40 per GB, $10 for the first full user |
| Cloudera | CD&R | Jun 2021 | Data Warehouse $0.054 per compute unit | $0.07 |
| Holded | Visma (Hg) | Jun 2021 | €25, €49, €79 and €159 a month | €29, €59, €99 and €199 |
| Nearpod | Renaissance Learning (Francisco Partners) | Feb 2021 | Gold $120 a year, Platinum $349 | $159 and $397 |
| Uplisting | AirDNA (Alpine Investors) | Jan 2024 | $50 a month | $100 |
| Wrike | Symphony Technology Group | Jul 2023 | Team $9.80, Business $24.80 per user a month | $10 and $25 |
| Mindbody | Vista Equity Partners | Dec 2018 | $125, $195 and $395 a month | Let's talk on every plan card, one "starting at" figure |
| Nintex | TPG | Oct 2021 | From $910 a month | Pricing address opens a contact page |
| Mangopay | Advent International | Apr 2022 | 1.8% + €0.18 per card payment | Contact sales |
| Accelo | Bow River Capital | Feb 2024 | $20, $50, $70 and $90 per user a month | Request pricing on every plan |
Some rises are small: Wrike added 20 cents per user. Uplisting doubled its entry plan. Mindbody, Nintex, Mangopay and Accelo are four of the 25 companies that took prices off their pricing page.
Companies bought directly by a PE firm raised or hid prices at 80%, add-ons at 64%
Of the 30 companies a private equity firm bought directly, 24 raised or hid prices. Of the 45 bought as add-ons by a company private equity already owned, 29 did.
Among the owners with at least three companies we could compare, Francisco Partners' companies raised or hid prices at 5 of 6, and Hg's at 5 of 6. Thoma Bravo's did so at 2 of 7. Loggly, bought by Thoma Bravo's SolarWinds in 2018, cut every paid plan: $99, $199 and $349 a month then, $79, $159 and $279 now.
Bending Spoons raised prices at 3 of the 4 companies we could compare
| Company | Deal | Before the deal | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| StreamYard | Apr 2024 | $20 and $39 a month | $35.99 and $68.99 |
| Issuu | Jul 2024 | Starter $21 a month | $31 |
| MileIQ | Jul 2025 | $7.50 a month billed yearly | $11.66 |
| Harvest | Jun 2025 | Pro $11 per seat a month | Teams, $9 |
WeTransfer is left out because both captures show an error page. Evernote is not in the count either, because its prices sit at /compare-plans, an address our rules did not look for. In September 2022, two months before the deal, its Personal plan cost $69.99 a year and Professional $99.99. Today it lists Starter at $99 a year and Advanced at $249.99.
Across all software holding companies, 5 of the 6 comparable companies raised or hid prices. We keep them out of the 71% because they are not private equity firms.
22 of the 75 kept, cut or mixed their prices
13 companies show the same prices before and after, among them Trackerbot, Rydoo and GotPhoto. Six cut prices, Loggly and Bugsnag among them. Three raised some prices and cut others.
The census runs from 2,273 deals to 75 comparable companies
- 2,273 deals, one per company domain: 1,331 bought by a private equity firm or in a leveraged or management buyout, 828 bought by a company a private equity firm had bought earlier, and 114 bought by software holding companies. 12 Bending Spoons deals come from Wikipedia, the rest from the FundingWatcher startup file.
- 1,339 dropped: no pricing page in the Wayback Machine.
- 506 dropped: no capture of that page in the 24 months before the deal.
- 211 dropped: no capture at least nine months after the deal and since January 2025.
- 25 dropped: the archive lookup failed.
- 192 with both captures. 3 dropped: Intuit's QuickBooks and Mailchimp, because Intuit is not a private equity firm, and one page we could not read.
- Of the 189, 56 showed no price either time, 11 published prices only after the deal, and 41 could not be compared: the currency or billing basis changed, the page now belongs to another brand, or a capture was an error page.
- 81 comparable: 75 bought by private equity, 6 by holding companies.
Method
For each company we asked the Wayback Machine's index for pricing pages, first at /pricing, /plans and similar addresses, then at any address ending in a pricing word in several languages, such as /editions, /tarifs or /preise. We took the last capture in the 24 months before the deal announcement and the latest capture at least nine months after it, and rendered both with JavaScript through ScrapingBee. Claude read each pair of pages and returned the plans, prices, trials and a verdict under fixed definitions. A script then matched every quoted price against the page text.
A price counts as raised when a plan offered both times, or the cheapest paid plan, costs more now in the same currency and billing basis. It counts as hidden when a plan is still offered with no price shown, or when the pricing address now opens a contact or demo page. For all 32 companies first read as hiding prices, we also rendered today's live pricing page and read it again, because an archived page can lose prices that load by script. That changed 7 verdicts: Dokobit turned out to have raised prices, Bugsnag to have cut them, Reflect moved from raised and hid to hid, and 4 became not comparable.
These are list prices. A follow-up checked 20 matched SaaS companies outside private equity on the same Wayback dates: they raised prices as often (45%), but only 1 of 20 hid them. The FundingWatcher startup file ends in February 2025 and lists one buyer per deal.
Data
The files below are under CC BY 4.0.
- census.csv, all 2,273 deals with buyer, owner, deal date and why each was kept or dropped
- companies.csv, the 189 companies with both captures, the verdict, what changed and links to both pages
- README.md and METHOD.md