86% of SaaS companies bought by private equity raised or hid their prices
Published 27 September 2026
Our copy of Crunchbase lists 1,171 private equity deals for software companies announced between January 2019 and June 2024. We drew 420 of them at random and looked up each company's pricing page on the Wayback Machine twice: the last capture before the deal was announced, and the latest capture from 2025 or 2026. We kept the first 20 companies with both captures and read every pair of pages.
We went in expecting price rises. The first surprise was how rarely these companies publish a price at all. Only 26 of the 420 had a pricing page archived at both times, and 8 of the 20 we kept showed no price in either capture.
Private equity SaaS pricing statistics 2026
- 6 of the 7 companies that listed prices before the deal (86%) have raised them or removed them from the page since.
- 3 of the 7 removed their prices: Sumo Logic, Securly and Accelo.
- 3 of the 7 raised them. Zendesk's Suite Professional plan went from $99 to $115 per agent a month, a 16% rise.
- 4 of the 7 ended a free plan or a free trial.
- 8 of the 20 companies (40%) showed no price before the deal and still show none.
- 7 of the 20 (35%) added Qualified, a sales chat tool, to their site after the deal.
6 of the 7 companies that listed prices raised them or took them down
Seven of the 20 companies showed a price for at least one paid plan before the deal. Six of them (86%) have raised a price or taken prices off the page since. Source: FundingWatcher, September 2026.
| Company | Buyer | Deal announced | Before the deal | Latest capture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sumo Logic | Francisco Partners | Feb 2023 | $3.00 per GB of logs, $2.10 per GB of traces, always-free account | Two plans, both Contact Sales; free trial only |
| Securly | Golden Gate Capital | Mar 2021 | $4.00 per user a year on a 1-year contract, free trial | Pricing address redirects to a demo request page |
| Accelo | Bow River Capital | Feb 2024 | $20, $50, $70 and $90 per user a month, 7-day free trial | Request Pricing on every plan, no trial |
| Zendesk | Hellman & Friedman | Jun 2022 | Suite Team $49, Suite Professional $99, Suite Enterprise $150 per agent a month | $55, $115 and Talk to Sales |
| SuperOffice | Axcel | Apr 2020 | €45 to €66 per user a month, 30-day free trial | €45 (now up to 5 users) to €160, no trial |
| Wowza | Clearhaven Partners | Jun 2021 | Streaming Engine from $125 a month, prepaid annually | $195 a month; annual plans by quote |
| Trackerbot | Quadra Group | Jan 2023 | Six plans from $14.99 to $109.99 a month | The same six prices |
Zendesk's Suite Team rose 12%, from $49 to $55 per agent a month, and Suite Professional 16%, from $99 to $115, both billed yearly. Suite Growth, $79 in 2022, is gone, and the $19 Support Team plan kept its price. SuperOffice's top plan went from €66 to €160 per user a month. Wowza's lowest listed price for Streaming Engine went from $125 a month, prepaid annually, to $195 a month, up 56%.
Sumo Logic dropped its per-GB prices. The only number left on its pricing page is a calculator estimate of $3.14 per TB scanned for its flex option. Trackerbot kept every plan price; the one change we found is its bonus conversions, which went from $0.04 to $0.05 each.
8 of the 20 never showed a price, before or after the deal
Gainsight (Vista Equity Partners), HCSS (Thoma Bravo), LumApps (Bridgepoint), Axonify (Luminate Capital Partners), ClearCompany (Gemspring Capital), UserTesting (Thoma Bravo), Anaplan (Thoma Bravo) and Greenhouse (TPG) said "Request pricing" or something close to it in both captures. Anaplan's pricing address now redirects to its contact page.
Recurly, bought by Accel-KKR in 2020, is the one company that went the other way. Its 2020 entry plan said "Try it free" with no price. It now lists Starter at $249 a month, with the first 3 months free for new customers.
4 of the 20 loaded their old prices by script, and the archive did not keep them
Alchemer (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Squarespace (Permira), Teamgate (Xenon Partners) and Pluralsight (Vista Equity Partners) had pricing pages before the deal, but the prices were filled in by script. We rendered the archived pages with JavaScript and still found no prices, so these four are left out of the comparison. Squarespace now lists $19 to $99 a month, billed yearly. Pluralsight's pricing address now opens a "Get started" page.
7 of the 20 added Qualified's sales chat after the deal
We ran the homepage and pricing page from both dates through Installmap's detector for marketing and sales software. 7 of the 20 companies (35%) added Qualified after the deal: Gainsight, Recurly, Axonify, Pluralsight, UserTesting, Anaplan and Securly. ClearCompany had it in both captures, so 8 of the 20 (40%) run it now, and none removed it. Installmap found Qualified on 7.1% of 1,000 unicorn homepages in September 2026. That figure comes from a crawl of live sites, so the two numbers were measured differently.
The funnel runs from 14,472 software acquisitions to 20 companies
- 14,472 acquisitions of software companies announced from January 2019 to June 2024 in our copy of Crunchbase.
- 1,171 where the buyer is typed as a private equity firm in our investor file, or the deal is typed as a leveraged or management buyout.
- 812 with a company website on record.
- 420 drawn at random.
- 323 dropped: no pricing page under /pricing, /plans or a similar address in the Wayback Machine.
- 54 dropped: no capture of that page in the 24 months before the deal was announced.
- 17 dropped: no capture since 1 January 2025.
- 26 left. 2 dropped for unusable captures: MyFitnessPal's /pricing address was a member profile, and Linnworks' captures were an empty page and a 403 error.
- The first 20 of the remaining 24 kept, in draw order. The other four are MyHeritage, Egoditor (QR Code Generator), Mangopay and Agiloft.
Method
For each company we asked the Wayback Machine's index for captures of its pricing page. We took the last capture before the deal announcement, no more than 24 months earlier, and the latest capture since 1 January 2025, and fetched both through a rotating proxy. Because some sites fill in prices by script, we also rendered every capture with JavaScript through ScrapingBee. Claude read each pair of pages and listed the plans, prices, free plans and trials on both. We then matched every price in this post against the text of the archived pages. Zendesk's prices also match its live pricing page on 27 September 2026.
A price counts as raised when a plan with the same name, or the lowest listed price for the same product, costs more in the latest capture. A price counts as hidden when the plan is still offered with no number shown, or when the pricing address now redirects to a contact or demo page. These are list prices. Discounts and contract prices are not visible on the pages.
We did not check software companies that stayed out of private equity over the same years, so this post cannot say how much of the change comes from the new owner. Buyers and deal dates come from Crunchbase, which lists one buyer per deal.
Data
The files below are under CC BY 4.0.
- companies.csv, the 20 companies with buyer, deal date, both capture dates, what each page showed and links to both Wayback captures
- draws.csv, all 420 draws and why each was kept or dropped
- tools.csv, marketing and sales software detected on each site at both dates
- README.md and METHOD.md