The 2026 SaaS Rent Index — What a Small Business Actually Pays to Rent Its Software
We priced 82 SaaS vendors from their own pricing pages, then ran a ten-tool small-business stack out to five years. The bill is $11,188 — and a quarter of the market charges per seat, so it grows every time you hire.
Every price in this article comes from one place: the Ownware Price Observatory, a public ledger of 83 pricing figures across 82 SaaS vendors, each one transcribed verbatim from the vendor's own rendered pricing page, dated, and linked back to its source. The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0 and is available as JSON at /observatory.json. Nothing below is an estimate, a survey, or a number from another article.
The ledger's stated method is worth quoting, because it is the reason the figures below can be checked:
"Each figure below was read from the vendor's rendered pricing page (a real browser, not a cached scrape) on the date shown, and is quoted verbatim next to its source link… No estimates, no 'starting from about…', no third-hand numbers."
Figures were verified between 5 July and 22 July 2026. Where a vendor publishes no price, that fact is recorded rather than guessed.
The headline: $11,188 over five years, for a small team
Here is a ten-tool stack a genuinely small business might run — scheduling, time tracking, invoicing, bookings, leave, expenses, assets. Every vendor is in the ledger. Every figure is the vendor's own published entry price or its published minimum, not a large-team number.
| Tool | Published monthly (USD) | Own-once equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Deputy | $30.00 (published monthly minimum spend) | $59 |
| FreshBooks | $23.00 | $34 |
| AssetTiger | $20.00 | $39 |
| Clockify | $16.47 | $49 |
| Acuity Scheduling | $16.00 | $34 |
| Setmore | $15.00 | $34 |
| Vacation Tracker | $50.00 (published EUR 50 monthly minimum) | $49 |
| When I Work | $7.50 | $59 |
| Timetastic | $4.50 | $49 |
| Zoho Expense | $4.00 | $49 |
| Total | $186.47 / month | $455 once |
Run that out:
| 12 months | $2,237.64 |
| 36 months | $6,712.92 |
| 60 months | $11,188.20 |
| The same ten tools, owned once | $455.00 |
| Five-year gap | $10,733.20 |
This is the conservative version of the number, and it is important to understand why. Three of those ten figures are minimums — the smallest amount the vendor will invoice, regardless of how few people you have. Deputy's published minimum is "USD $30/AUD $30/GBP £20 per month per invoice"; Vacation Tracker's is "EUR 50 minimum." A stack built on entry tiers and floors is the cheapest this can possibly be. It only goes up.
The same figure, computed a second way
Because a hand-picked stack invites the reasonable objection that the picking did the work, here is the same question answered from the whole ledger instead.
The median priced figure across all 57 vendors with a usable monthly USD price is $39.00 per month. The median own-once alternative across the 81 figures that have one is $59.00.
| 10 tools at the median SaaS price | $390.00 / month |
| Over 60 months | $23,400.00 |
| 10 tools at the median own-once price | $590.00, once |
| Five-year gap | $22,810.00 |
Two methods, two numbers: $10,733 and $22,810 over five years. The hand-picked stack is deliberately the low end. The median is what the market actually charges.
The per-seat league table — the part that grows while you sleep
A flat monthly price is a known quantity. A per-seat price is a bet on your own growth, placed in the vendor's favour.
Of the 57 ledger figures with a usable monthly USD price, 15 — just over a quarter — are priced per user, per seat, or per employee. Here they are, ranked by their recorded monthly figure, each with the vendor's own words:
| Vendor | Ledger monthly | Verbatim from the vendor's page |
|---|---|---|
| Concord | $499.00 | "$499 /per month — Additional users $49/mo" |
| Fiix | $135.00 | "$45 Per user, per month" |
| QuotaPath | $105.00 | "$35 per user per month + monthly platform fee" |
| UpKeep | $72.00 | "$24/user/mo" |
| MaintainX | $60.00 | "$20 per user*/month billed annually" |
| Vacation Tracker | $50.00 | "EUR 2 / month — EUR 50 minimum — Billed monthly" |
| Deputy | $30.00 | "minimum monthly spend of USD $30 … per month per invoice" |
| Featurebase | $29.00 | "plans at $29, $59 and $99 per seat per month" |
| Harvest | $27.00 | "starting from $9 seat/month — $108 per seat, billed annually" |
| AssetTiger | $20.00 | "FREE* / for 250 Assets … (paid tiers shown)" |
| Clockify | $16.47 | "US$5.49 / 7.99 / 11.99 / 12.99 per seat /month billed annually" |
| Setmore | $15.00 | "$5/user/month" |
| When I Work | $7.50 | "$2.50 and $5.00 per user per month tiers" |
| Timetastic | $4.50 | "$1.50 and $2.50 per user per month" |
| Zoho Expense | $4.00 | "standardPlan: monthlyPrice '4', yearlyPrice '3'" |
(All quotes and prices: Ownware Price Observatory, verified 2026-07-05 to 2026-07-22. Each row links to the vendor's own page from the ledger.)
Read the bottom of that table, not the top. Timetastic at $1.50 per user is the cheapest per-seat entry in the whole ledger — and it is precisely the kind of number that never triggers a review. At three people it is $4.50. At thirty it is $45. Nobody ever made a decision to spend $45 a month on leave tracking; they made a decision to hire twenty-seven people, which was the right decision, and the software bill followed them quietly.
That is the mechanism. Per-seat pricing converts a good outcome — growth — into a cost you never explicitly approved.
Subscription creep, defined honestly
"Subscription creep" gets used loosely. Here is a definition this dataset can actually support, stated so you can check it:
Subscription creep is the share of your software bill that increases without you making any new purchasing decision.
By that definition, the ledger gives one clean, checkable number:
26% of priced vendors (15 of 57) charge per seat. For that quarter of your stack, the bill rises every time you hire, with no renewal conversation, no approval, and no new invoice line to notice.
We are deliberately not publishing a "SaaS spend grew X% year over year" statistic. The ledger is a point-in-time snapshot verified over an eighteen-day window in July 2026; it does not contain historical prices, so any growth rate we quoted would be invented. The honest version of that statistic does not exist yet — it will exist after the second annual verification cycle, and we will publish it then.
A third of the market won't quote a price at all
Of the 83 figures in the ledger, 26 (31%) have no usable published monthly USD price. Some are genuinely free tiers. Many are quote-gated: the vendor requires a sales conversation before you learn the number.
The ledger records these as facts rather than skipping them. AppFolio's entry, for example, reads: "No public price — quote-gated, with a stated 50-unit minimum (verified)", quoting the vendor's own footnote: "Minimum spend and 50 unit minimum apply. Contact us for details."
A price you cannot see is a price you cannot compare, and roughly a third of this market has made that choice deliberately.
What to do with this
Nothing in the above says subscriptions are bad. They buy you an on-call team, a mobile app somebody else maintains, and a problem that is not yours at 2am. For some tools, in some businesses, that is worth every cent — and if you need scheduling, attendance and payroll to be one integrated system, no one-time licence replaces it.
But three things follow from the numbers:
1. Audit the stack, not the line item. No single subscription here is scandalous. The $186.47 total is. Every one of those ten cleared the "small enough to approve without thinking" bar, which is exactly how the total assembled itself.
2. Find your per-seat lines first. They are the ones that grow without asking. A quarter of the market prices this way, and those are the tools where a one-time licence changes the shape of the cost, not just its size.
3. Own the boring ones. The tools you should consider buying outright are the ones that do not need to be anybody's 2am emergency — a leave tracker, an asset register, a rota. Browse the self-hosted alternatives by category, or start with the rent-vs-own three-year math.
Method, and how to check us
- Source: ownware.io/observatory — 82 vendors, 83 figures, each quoted verbatim with source URL and verification date.
- The owning side of the index, in one line: Ownware OS — the whole catalog as a single one-time purchase, priced at less than three months of the ten-tool stack.
- Machine-readable:
https://ownware.io/observatory.json— CORS-open, hourly cache. - Licence: CC BY 4.0. Cite it, quote it, chart it. Link the page or a row's anchor.
- Verification window for this article: 2026-07-05 to 2026-07-22.
- Every figure in this article is reproducible from that dataset. If one is wrong, the vendor's own page is authoritative, not ours — and the ledger says corrections ship within days.
If you publish an analysis using this data, we would rather you linked the dataset than trusted our arithmetic.