B2B SaaS is winging it on pricing. Here's the data.
We asked 50 VPs of Product, CMOs and CEOs how they actually set prices. The honest version: most of them are making it up as they go.
Pricing is the single highest-leverage lever in B2B SaaS. And it's also the most neglected.
We surveyed 50 senior B2B SaaS leaders (VPs of Product, CMOs, CEOs, Chief Product Officers) about how they actually arrive at pricing. Ten open-ended questions. No multiple choice. Every respondent typed out their real answer.
What came back wasn't pretty. Most companies don't have a single person accountable for pricing. Most don't run real research. Most hide their prices. And almost all of them calibrate off what competitors charge, even the ones who insist they don't.
Here's what the data says.
When we asked who owns pricing decisions, 62% of respondents named either a "cross-functional committee" or described ad-hoc combinations of roles in free-text answers ("a mix of product marketing, CRO and CFO," "Chief Product Officer plus CFO," "General Managers of our portfolio brands").
The CEO owns pricing at 12% of companies. The VP Product or CPO owns it at another 12%. The CFO owns it at 8%.
When pricing is everyone's job, it's nobody's job. The companies in the sample with the cleanest pricing stories had one common trait: a single accountable owner. Most companies didn't have one.
Only 22% of respondents do anything that qualifies as rigorous pricing research. That's A/B testing on pricing pages, conjoint analysis, or formal willingness-to-pay studies.
The rest:
44% said they "tested" pricing by asking a few customers informally.
18% have never tested pricing at all.
16% run live sales experiments (A/B across reps or regions).
When leaders say they "tested" pricing, what they usually mean is: we ran it by five friendly customers and they said the number sounded reasonable. This isn't testing. This is confirmation-seeking.
One VP at an enterprise SaaS company was honest about it: "Not really, mostly because we haven't had the time or resources to run tests. We have been aware that we are not pricing optimally but haven't really known how to improve. It is painful for us."
62% of respondents gate pricing behind "contact sales." 28% use a hybrid approach (SMB tiers visible, Enterprise gated). Only 10% are fully transparent about pricing.
The reasons for hiding cluster into three themes, each repeated across the sample:
"Showing prices will help competitors cross-position against us."
"Our pricing is too complex to publish."
"We discount so much that list price is meaningless."
Each of these is a tell. If competitors can weaponize your pricing, your positioning isn't strong enough. If your pricing is too complex to publish, your buyer thinks it's complex too, and deals die in procurement. If list price is fiction, you've trained every AE to cave and every buyer to push harder.
The 10% that are fully transparent made a strategic bet: buyers self-qualify faster when they can see prices, which saves sales from low-quality conversations. Their rationale is coherent. Most companies haven't thought it through that clearly.
58% of respondents have never run any test on their pricing page. 34% have run A/B tests. 8% have run qualitative research only.
The pricing page is the single most commercially important page on a B2B SaaS website. For the majority of companies, it's also the least optimized.
There's a self-reinforcing loop here. Companies that hide pricing can't test it. Companies that don't test have less confidence in the pricing they chose. Companies with less confidence default to hiding pricing. The loop produces the exact outcome most companies say they want to avoid: mediocre pricing, unchanged for too long.
The companies that do test tell a different story. One CEO has run "hundreds of tests" on his pricing page — layouts, plan types, prices, SKU names. His biggest lesson: more failures than successes, and the wins usually took multiple iterations. Another SVP of Product Marketing frames pricing page testing as non-negotiable: "The pricing page is one of the most heavily trafficked pages at every company, so running A/B tests is crucial."
These voices are the minority.
We asked respondents about their biggest pricing mistake. The answers clustered as follows:
Underpriced or raised too late: 20%Overcomplicated pricing: 16%Wrong pricing model for the market: 16%Rolled out pricing changes badly: 16%Didn't research enough: 14%Over-discounted to win deals: 10%No major mistake named: 8%
Underpricing is the single largest bucket. More leaders regret charging too little than any other single failure mode.
A CEO on launching too low: "We priced too low for a long time, especially when we first launched our highest tier SKU. Had we started higher we would have grown faster and the market would have borne it."
A VP Product Marketing: "Rushing to market with transparent pricing that was too low, which resulted in leaving money on the table. We underestimated the WTP and it was really hard to walk that back."
A VP GM on enterprise pricing: "Not pricing for enterprise buyers high enough thinking we didn't provide enough value. Fixing that allowed us to both increase price and convert at a much higher and faster rate."
Read the last one twice. Raising prices increased conversion. Higher prices didn't kill deals. They accelerated them. Because price is a signal. A cheap price says "commodity, negotiate me down." A confident price says "we know what this is worth."
When we asked how much competitor pricing influences their own, the answers broke down as:
70% said "somewhat — we're aware but go our own way."
20% said "heavily — we benchmark constantly."
8% said "barely — we price on value."
2% said "not at all."
Combined, 90% let competitor pricing shape their own. Only 10% claim they don't.
The 70% "aware but go our own way" cohort deserves special attention. This is the diplomatic answer. It sounds independent. Read their Q1 answers about how they arrived at their pricing, and competitor benchmarking shows up in nearly every one.
"Aware but go our own way" is what leaders say when they don't want to admit they opened their competitor's pricing page last week and adjusted.
The problem with competitor-anchored pricing is that it's a closed loop. If three competitors look at each other and adjust, they all converge on the same number. And that number, as this study shows, is almost certainly wrong. Because competitor-anchored pricing is also how companies end up underpriced (the #1 regret).
The #1 wish in this study is better competitor pricing data. 24% of respondents named it as the thing they wished they had.
There's an irony here. 62% of these same respondents hide their own pricing behind "contact sales." Everyone wants to see what others are charging. Almost nobody is willing to publish what they charge.
The industry has constructed a shared blind spot and then wishes someone would resolve it. Nobody will, because the opacity benefits every individual company even though it hurts the collective.
The more interesting wish is the one customers can only answer themselves. 18% want price elasticity or willingness-to-pay data. 14% want value-to-price mapping. Combined, 32% wish for data that can only come from talking to their ICP.
That data isn't hiding. It's sitting in rooms full of customers these companies haven't asked.
Pricing in B2B SaaS is not a strategic discipline. It's a reactive function, mostly done poorly by people who don't want to own it.
Most companies know their pricing is wrong. Most don't know how to fix it. Most haven't invested in the capability to find out.
This isn't a failure of intelligence. These are smart, experienced operators. It's a failure of priority. Pricing has historically not been treated as a core competency in B2B SaaS the way it is at Simon-Kucher or in the Patrick Campbell world. That may change as AI reshapes pricing economics across the industry. It may not.
The companies that treat pricing as a discipline, not a decision, will capture disproportionate value over the next decade. The companies that continue to wing it will find themselves where they are now: aware their pricing is wrong, unable to say how wrong, and underpricing by default.
Five actions, in order of what moves the needle:
Name one accountable pricing owner. Not a committee. One person. The CPO, CRO, or occasionally the CFO for enterprise-heavy motions. Fragmented ownership is why pricing doesn't improve.
Run one real pricing study this year. Not a customer conversation. An actual study with 50 to 150 ICP respondents and structured methodology (Van Westendorp, conjoint, or value-anchored research). The cost is modest. The alternative is continuing to guess.
Test your pricing page, or publish one. The pricing page is the highest-leverage CRO surface in B2B SaaS. If you have one, test it. If you don't, the strategic question is whether the reasons you gave yourself for hiding pricing actually hold up.
Raise prices before you think you should. Underpricing is the #1 regret. Raising too late is the second. The market bears more than most founders believe. The cost of being wrong about charging too much is small and fast to correct. The cost of charging too little is large and slow.
Stop pretending competitor benchmarking is a strategy. If your pricing is derived from three competitors and theirs derived from yours, you are all converging on a number nobody validated against customer value. Do the value-anchored work. It's the only way out of the loop.
