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Estd 4.22.2023
Displaying pricing on your SaaS homepage (or pricing page) is a counter intuitive strategic decision that can profoundly impact your sales funnel. Many SaaS companies wonder if publishing prices upfront will accelerate growth or scare away prospects. At Monetizely, we believe the choice to show or hide pricing should align with your GTM strategy - not just default to what others are doing. There is today a general consensus within SaaS circles that publishing your pricing is a de-facto good thing, where we have our different opinion. In this post, we'll break down why homepage pricing matters, how to evaluate your situation, lessons from real SaaS companies, and Monetizely’s framework for making the right call.
Why Homepage Pricing Matters (and Its Real Impact on Your SaaS Sales)
Your pricing page is often one of the most visited sections of your site, and how you present (or withhold) pricing has cascading effects across the entire customer journey. As soon as you publish your pricing on the website it forces you to have robust differentiation between tiers as all types of customers, channel partners, and even competitors will start to use this as a reference. Let’s break down the real-world impact of homepage pricing transparency, and what it means for your business.
1. Sales Efficiency & Funnel Qualification
B2B buyers today do extensive research before talking to sales. In fact, 86% of buyers want full pricing transparency upfront. Making pricing visible means prospects self-qualify quickly. This saves your team from chasing bad-fit leads who later drop off due to budget mismatch. Transparency improves sales velocity, reduces unnecessary demos, and brings in better-quality inbound leads.
On the flip side, if your prices are hidden, you may get more inquiries, but many of them could be low-quality or “just curious” prospects. In these cases, your sales team must invest time educating the lead before even discussing pricing, which can be resource-heavy. The key decision here is whether you want pricing to pre-qualify your leads upfront or rely on human filters further down the funnel.
2. Buyer Trust & Decision Heuristics
Transparency builds trust. Full stop. If a buyer sees “Contact us for pricing,” many assume the product is expensive or the buying process is going to be difficult. In fact, 81% of B2B buyers say they need to trust a company before buying from them, and 48% said the lack of pricing on a website is a top deterrent to purchase. That’s a huge red flag, especially with younger, self-serve-driven decision-makers.
And let’s not forget the psychological shortcuts buyers use: if something is hard to find, it must cost more. Just like hidden airline fees or opaque hotel taxes, lack of pricing clarity erodes confidence. Even if you choose not to list exact figures, be upfront about ballpark ranges, “starting at” tiers, or clear messaging on what drives pricing. At a minimum, train your SDRs and AEs to offer pricing guidance proactively without forcing a discovery call just to disclose a base price.
3. Value Perception, Anchoring & Deal Sizes
The moment you put a price on your homepage, you’re not just informing the buyer… you’re shaping their perception of your product’s value.
Here’s how the chain reaction plays out:
- First, the buyer sees your price.
- That price becomes their anchor, the number they subconsciously compare everything else to.
- That anchor then influences what they’re willing to pay, how they view your product, and ultimately, how big or small the deal becomes.
Let’s break that down.
The Anchoring Effect in Action
Imagine your pricing page says: "Team Plan - $1,000/month"
Even if you routinely close $2,000+ deals through sales conversations, that $1,000 becomes the anchor in your buyer’s mind. Everything you pitch beyond that now feels “expensive,” even if it's justified by value. That makes it harder to upsell, bundle, or tailor enterprise packages, because your baseline price already sets the ceiling in the buyer’s head.
This is why many enterprise companies, like Amplitude, chose to remove their public pricing after a certain point. As they moved upmarket, they realized that listing a fixed price was capping deal sizes. Instead, they let their sales team control the anchor, tailoring pricing to each customer’s size, use case, and willingness to pay.
But Anchoring Isn’t Always Bad
Now flip the script.
Say you’re a PLG SaaS business offering three tiers:
- Starter - $49
- Growth - $199
- Pro - $499
If your pricing page clearly highlights “Pro” as the “Most Popular” plan and shows the feature value, many buyers will self-select into a higher tier than they initially intended. That’s smart use of anchoring. You’re nudging buyers toward the package that best reflects your product’s full value.
In this case, pricing transparency helps you grow deal sizes and reduce discounting conversations. The list price becomes your leverage.
The Balancing Act
So should you show pricing or not?
It depends on what you’re optimizing for:
- Want fast adoption and higher plan upgrades? → Show pricing and control the anchor visually.
- Selling into large, varied accounts with different budgets? → Hide pricing so your team can anchor high in the sales process.
Either way, understand this: what your buyer sees first will shape what they believe your product is worth. And that belief influences how much they’ll pay.
Pricing visibility sets the tone. The number you show, or choose not to show, isn’t just about transparency. It’s about positioning your product at the right perceived value, and ensuring your deal sizes reflect it.
4. Deal Control & Competitive Dynamics
One of the most common arguments against showing pricing is, “Our competitors will use it to undercut us.”
That fear is understandable, but often overstated. In reality:
- Competitors will likely find your pricing anyway (through prospects, partners, or shared customers)
- More importantly, your buyers are already comparison shopping, with or without your help
If you sell in a commoditized market where price is your only differentiator, hiding your pricing may give you a brief advantage. However, if you have a strong value proposition, unique features, exceptional onboarding, and superior support, your price can work in your favor when paired with clear ROI storytelling. You also maintain more deal control when pricing is not anchored publicly. This is particularly valuable in multi-industry SaaS, where different verticals have very different WTP (willingness to pay).
A balanced approach is to publish base pricing and offer enterprise customization. For example: “Plans starting at $999/month. Contact us for enterprise pricing.” This gives your team pricing flexibility while reducing buyer friction.
5. Customer Success & Expectation Management
Pricing visibility doesn’t just affect acquisition, it impacts retention and satisfaction too.
When pricing is clear:
- Customers know what they’re signing up for
- They’re less likely to churn due to “price shock”
- They’re better aligned to the right plan from day one
But, hidden or confusing pricing can lead to:
- Misaligned expectations
- Churn from under-informed buyers
- Awkward renewal conversations
Also, don’t underestimate the impact on your existing customer base. If you change public pricing (e.g. launch new plans, adjust tiers), customers will notice. You’ll need to proactively communicate why changes occurred and why they’re still getting great value, or risk losing goodwill.
In short, transparency helps customers choose the right product, understand the value, and stay satisfied longer.
When to Show Pricing (and When to Hold Back)
When deciding whether to display pricing on your homepage, you should consider several core factors:
1. Audience & Deal Size
Who are you selling to? The smaller or more transactional your deals, the more transparency pays off. Companies with low average deal sizes (<$1K/year) often benefit from openly displaying pricing, as 84% of such SaaS businesses do. These companies thrive on volume and quick sales, so any friction, like hiding prices, can hurt. In contrast, companies with large enterprise deals (>$25K) typically hide pricing, these deals are often customized and vary widely by contract, making public pricing misleading or impractical.
2. Sales Motion & Velocity
Look into your sales process. Is it a high-velocity, product-led motion (free trials, self-service signups, short sales cycle)? If yes, showing pricing is usually essential. Buyers of a $50/month tool want to see the price now, not book a demo just to find out. If you’re selling a $5/month product, the last thing you want is tons of friction for a customer just trying to learn the cost.
Conversely, in enterprise or consultative sales (multi-step, long cycles), detailed public pricing can be less critical and even problematic. For a $500K annual enterprise software deal, there’s “probably no need to have transparent pricing, and plenty of downside” in doing so. Complex deals often involve custom scopes, pilots, and negotiations, where a price tag on the website could be misleading or limiting.
3. Product Complexity & Packaging
The more complex or customizable the product, the less likely pricing is displayed publicly. Companies with broad, flexible offerings often avoid one-size-fits-all pricing online:
- Highly Configurable Products: If a SaaS solution has many modules, add-ons, or very custom implementations, listing a single price can be impractical. Industry experts note that in markets with heterogeneous needs (e.g. different verticals, or only a handful of large enterprise customers), vendors often forgo publishing prices to allow tailored quotes. For example, “enterprise SaaS companies…opted not to publish any pricing publicly” to give sales more ability to craft custom deals. This lowers price transparency but lets them adjust packaging and pricing for each client’s requirements.
- Over-Customization” Hinders Transparency: It’s easier for younger companies with a simple product line to show pricing, whereas mature products with lots of packages face challenges. Over half of SaaS unicorn startups published their pricing, but only ~25% of public (multi-product) SaaS companies did - likely because legacy products and bespoke packaging make a universal pricing page much harder.
In short, simpler offerings = easier to put prices on the site; highly complex solutions = more likely to use “call for pricing.”
4. Market Maturity & Brand Positioning
The stage of the company plays a major role. Startups and newer market entrants lean into transparent pricing, whereas established enterprises often hold back.
- Startups & Scale-ups: Younger SaaS companies frequently display pricing to build trust and reduce friction. They often need to generate demand and credibility, so being open about pricing can signal confidence in their product’s value. (Many iconic PLG companies - e.g. Atlassian, Zoom - made pricing info readily accessible during their rapid growth phases.) Additionally, as noted above, private SaaS unicorns were 2x as likely to publish pricing as publicly traded SaaS firms. This suggests newer companies see transparent pricing as a competitive advantage or a growth hack.
- Established Enterprises: Large, incumbent software brands often leverage a sales-driven approach and brand prestige, so they feel less pressure to reveal list prices online. Historically, only about one-quarter of big public SaaS companies have transparent pricing pages. Many well-known enterprise vendors (Oracle, Salesforce in its early days) prefer to engage prospects through sales reps, using custom pricing for each account. This can be a positioning choice - e.g. to imply a “premium, consultative solution” - but it’s also rooted in the complexity of their offerings. The trade-off is that it may frustrate modern buyers who expect at least a ballpark price upfront.
5. Pricing Model (Subscription vs. Usage vs. Other)
Your pricing model influences transparency practices. Usage-based and hybrid pricing schemes are rising in popularity, and these models handle public pricing in different ways compared to traditional per-seat pricing:
- Surge in Usage-Based Pricing: In recent years, usage-based pricing (UBP) has moved from niche to mainstream. By late 2022, roughly 46% of SaaS companies had adopted some form of usage-based model, up from 34% in 2020.
Many others use a hybrid approach (combining usage fees with base subscriptions). This trend - popular among developer tools, cloud services, and PLG companies - often comes with a need for transparency on unit costs. For instance, API platforms and cloud providers typically publish rate cards (e.g. $X per API call or per GB) so developers can estimate spend.
- Transparency vs. Complexity: Seat-based pricing (e.g. $Y per user per month) is simple to display, and indeed most SaaS with simple seat models list those prices for each plan. Usage-based or tiered pricing can be trickier. Companies want to be clear about rates, but if usage can vary greatly, the “price” a customer pays is not one number. Many UBP companies still choose to show pricing publicly (often via calculators or pricing examples) to encourage trial and adoption. However, some with very complex usage metrics opt for “Contact us for pricing” for high-volume or enterprise plans, since predicting costs can require a discussion.
- Hybrid Models and Price Comparison: Vendors with hybrid pricing (subscription + overage fees) often publish the subscription part and outline the variable fees. The result is semi-transparent pricing: buyers get a sense of costs but might need to model their usage. It’s worth noting that vendors sometimes use unique value metrics to charge for usage, which can make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. In fact, Tomasz Tunguz says that even within one category companies will price on different units (API calls vs. hosts, etc.), “making it harder for customers to directly compare prices” and reducing price competition. In other words, a usage-based model can be transparent about its own pricing, yet still obscure comparability - a strategic move in competitive markets.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. It all comes down to your business model and what works best for your customers. To give you a better idea of how this plays out in real life, let’s look at how some big-name SaaS companies handle pricing visibility.
How SaaS Leaders Handle Homepage Pricing
Let’s look at how some well-known SaaS companies approach pricing transparency:
1. Amplitude
Amplitude’s pricing strategy evolved as the company grew. Amplitude offers a Free plan to drive product-led growth, but for its paid Growth and Enterprise plans, they deliberately do not publish exact prices on the website. The site indicates that those are tailored solutions, prompting prospects to contact sales. The rationale (as per our analysis in the Price to Scale Book) is that Amplitude serves a broad range of customers across industries, and a fixed public price could leave money on the table. A Fortune 500 retail company and a mid-market tech startup might have very different budgets and data volumes - Amplitude’s sales team can price accordingly when the pricing isn’t set in stone online. So, Amplitude did list some prices in earlier years; once they had the market validation and a strong foothold, they removed those numbers to allow more pricing flexibility as they went upmarket. This illustrates a common path: many SaaS start transparent to gain customers, then introduce more tailored pricing as they expand to enterprise accounts.
2. Salesforce
Salesforce is often cited as an example of partial transparency. As a dominant CRM platform serving everyone from startups to global giants, Salesforce uses a “starting price” approach. Go to their website and you’ll see packages like Sales Cloud Enterprise - $165/user/month (for example) advertised.
That gives buyers a baseline. However, any seasoned buyer knows that the actual cost for a large Salesforce deployment will be higher after add-ons, required modules, and enterprise discounts.
Jason Lemkin calls Salesforce’s approach “sort of transparent” - the info is right there as a guide, even if it doesn’t reflect the final price after all the negotiations. The genius of this hybrid approach is that it anchors the discussion: a prospect gets a general sense (“Okay, it’s in the ~$165/user range for standard packages”) which provides context and comfort. But Salesforce still encourages big customers to talk to sales for a tailored bundle and pricing.
If even Salesforce - with its massive enterprise focus - provides public pricing context, it’s a signal that outright hiding everything may not be necessary. You can give a reference point to start the conversation, rather than a blank slate “Contact us.” If Salesforce can do it, maybe pure “Contact Us” with zero info isn’t the way to go anymore.
These examples show that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Amplitude moderate transparency as they move upmarket, and Salesforce provides pricing hints despite enterprise complexity. The common thread is that each company’s approach matches its sales motion and customer base. Your decision should do the same.
Monetizely’s Guidance: How to Decide and What We Recommend
So, should you display your SaaS pricing on the homepage? Our take is that it depends on your GTM motion, deal size, and pricing complexity. But when in doubt, lean toward transparency, especially for mid-market or self-serve segments. We advise a scenario-based approach:
1. Pure PLG or Low-Touch SaaS (Fast Sales Cycles, <$5K ACV)
Yes, display pricing. In low-friction sales motions, customers expect to see pricing upfront. If buyers can sign up via a free trial or credit card, hiding pricing only slows things down and reduces trust. Your homepage or pricing page should clearly show plan options, pricing tiers, and feature breakdowns. If your model is usage-based, consider including a calculator or usage examples to help customers estimate costs. This saves your team from fielding unnecessary “how much does it cost?” questions and keeps your funnel focused on serious buyers.
2. Enterprise-Only Sales (High-Touch, >$100K ACV)
Generally no, full pricing shouldn’t be on the homepage. When every deal is customized with variable scopes, procurement steps, and negotiation cycles, listing fixed prices can do more harm than good. In this case, focus your homepage on communicating capability and credibility. Include strong calls-to-action like “Talk to Sales” or “Request a Quote,” and consider offering a high-level reference such as “Starting at $50,000/year” to filter out misaligned leads. Most importantly, ensure your sales team is ready to talk budget early, enterprise buyers expect clarity, even if the final number is custom.
3. Mixed Model - Mid-Market and Enterprise
Use a hybrid approach. This is where most SaaS companies land, serving both team-based buyers and large enterprises. You can publish pricing for standard plans (e.g., for SMBs or mid-market teams) and offer an enterprise tier labeled as “Contact Us.” You might also include:
- “Starting at…” pricing for enterprise plans
- Segment-based plans (e.g., Startup, Growth, Enterprise)
- Footnotes or FAQs explaining add-ons, volume discounts, or usage limits
This approach gives transparency to most buyers while retaining flexibility for larger, more complex deals.
4. Innovative Pricing Models
If your pricing is non-standard, don’t default to silence. Instead, focus on explaining how your pricing works. Effective methods include:
- Rate cards with clear unit prices (e.g., per API call or event)
- Usage sliders or simple pricing calculators
- Example scenarios (“For 50 users and 10K monthly events, estimated cost = $1,500/month”)
Even partial transparency improves trust and helps prospects frame budget expectations, without locking you into rigid quotes.
5. Competitive Positioning
If your pricing is a differentiator, because you’re significantly cheaper, more predictable, or structured around a novel value metric, you should consider showcasing it.
If your positioning is premium and your value requires more explanation, you may want to withhold full pricing until after value has been demonstrated. In that case, consider:
- Publishing pricing for your lower tiers or self-serve plans
- Using content (like ROI calculators, analyst reports, or total cost comparisons) to preempt pricing objections
The goal is not to hide, it’s to present pricing in a context that highlights value.
Final Verdict
Whether or not you display pricing, the key is to match visibility to your sales motion, deal structure, and buyer expectations. The more transactional and self-serve your business is, the more transparency helps. The more customized and high-touch your model is, the more flexibility you’ll need. If you choose transparency, do it confidently and clearly. If you choose not to show pricing, make the next step obvious, fast, and friction-free. There’s no single right answer, but there is a right answer for your GTM reality.
Now if you are wondering how a pricing change might impact your pipeline? Our SaaS pricing consultants are here to help. Request a free Pricing Assessment to evaluate your current strategy and get tailored advice on optimizing your pricing and packaging. Book your free 1:1 with our experts today to get started!