![]() ![]() PieSync went up the most, with its price nearly tripling since its acquisition by HubSpot. Asana, Teamwork Projects, and PivotalTracker each went up around 10%-so Asana now costs a dollar more per user each month. If pricing did go up, though, on average it went up 47% since its last price change (which, on average, came 4 years ago). There’s a good chance your software bills aren’t actually higher this year, as only 10% of the software we tracked got more expensive. 2020 saw a software inflation rate of 2.2%-double the overall US inflation rate, but far lower than previous years’ price increases. But when software prices went up an average of 63% over the decade from 2009 to 2019, it starts to add up. Adobe added $50 to the price of Creative Suite every few upgrades, while boxed Quickbooks pricing steadily crept upwards each year. It’s not like boxed software kept the same price forever either. And the plethora of new business software meant you had an increasing number of software bills to pay. You increasingly had to commit to at least a year-long subscription. Those and others in commoditized, strongly competitive categories-competing often with tools bundled with Office Suites and computing platforms-had to deliver more for less.īut. GoToMeeting had to follow-it costs less than a third of what it did in 2019, for 10x as many meeting attendees. Video calls got commoditized, as free services like FaceTime, Google Meet, and Zoom filled the market. $9.99/month got you 50GB of Dropbox storage in 2009, while $11.99/month got you 2TB of storage-40x more-a decade later. File storage pricing stayed the same while giving you dramatically more. Some software even got dramatically cheaper over the decade, in almost Moore’s law for software. SaaS also made software far more accessible Office went from $220 upfront to $9.99/month, while buying all of Adobe’s software in bundle went from $2,599 to $52.99/month. SaaS brought us unique, new services like Dropbox, Slack, Airtable, and more, apps that would be hard to imagine without subscriptions. Adobe and Microsoft followed in 2011, switching their bundled software to subscriptions and cementing SaaS as the default business software model.Īnd at first, it was a win. Countless other SaaS applications would follow, as services like Stripe, Twilio, and new AWS offerings increasingly made it easy to launch a SaaS business. Wufoo launched in 2006, Todoist in 2007, Dropbox in 2008. So the world went SaaS, right around the end of the 21st century’s first decade. Salesforce, one of the original web apps, had proved for nearly a decade that people would subscribe to online software. Amazon AWS-the service that’d power much of the SaaS boom-was 3 years old. In 2009, the App Store was a year old, an early part of the switch to subscription-powered cross-platform software. If anything, your company may pay less for software this year, as bundles are the new norm again, giving you everything in one package so you need to buy fewer software products. The dramatic price changes from the switch to SaaS have stabilized. 10% of software got more expensive this year, counterbalanced by the 8% that lowered prices. This year, your software budget has a bit more breathing room: Software pricing only went up 2.2% in 2020. Perhaps it wasn’t the time to raise prices. Then came a global pandemic, paired with a boom in tech stocks. Software had gotten 63% more expensive over a decade, or around 5% a year, vastly outpacing the inflation rate. So last year we picked 100 popular business software, dug through blog posts and the invaluable Wayback Machine, checked each year’s pricing for the decade from 2009 to 2019, and calculated the software inflation rate. Yet was it, really? Had the move from boxed software and one-time licenses to subscriptions and SaaS had actually resulted in higher prices, we wondered? ![]() ![]() It almost felt like common knowledge that software was increasingly expensive. ![]()
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