Free to cite · updated 2026-08-17
Small-business software pricing statistics
Every figure below is computed from the published pricing of 661 tools across 30 categories. Quote any of them freely — we ask only that you credit BuildStackFlow and link back.
Prefer the narrative version? Read the full pricing report.
Headline statistics
- $16The median small-business software tool starts at $16 per month on its cheapest paid plan.
- $37.70The average entry price is $37.70 per month — 2.4× the median, because a small number of expensive tools pull the mean upward.
- 40%40% of small-business software tools offer a genuinely free plan.
- 5%5% publish no price at all, quoting only on request.
- $0.68–$999Entry prices span $0.68 to $999 per month across the dataset.
- 4.48The average third-party user rating across all tools analyzed is 4.48 out of 5.
Free plans are an infrastructure question
Free-plan availability is not evenly distributed. It clusters almost perfectly around whether the vendor carries a marginal cost for every additional user.
- 3 categories have no free plan at all — VoIP & Business Phone, Web Hosting, Business Email & Productivity Suites. Every one of them bills for compute, storage, or telephony minutes.
- At the other end, Team Chat & Video Meetings offers a free plan 84% of the time, followed by Project Management at 79% and Automation & iPaaS at 77% — all collaboration software, where an extra seat costs the vendor almost nothing.
- Expense Management & Corporate Cards is the most opaque category: 31% of its tools publish no price at all.
The spread between categories
The same small business buys from every one of these categories, but the entry economics differ by more than an order of magnitude. Amazon & E-commerce Seller Tools has a median entry price of $100 — 6.3× the all-tool median — while Business Email & Productivity Suites sits at $3.25.
| Category | Tools | Median entry | Free plan | Quote-only |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon & E-commerce Seller Toolssmall sample | 14 | $100 | 14% | 14% |
| Field Service & Home Servicessmall sample | 8 | $62 | 13% | 0% |
| Sales Intelligence & Outreachsmall sample | 14 | $49 | 29% | 14% |
| SMS & Chat Marketingsmall sample | 11 | $45 | 45% | 0% |
| Online Course & LMS Platforms | 19 | $44 | 16% | 5% |
| Payments & POS | 27 | $43 | 63% | 4% |
| Web & Product Analytics | 24 | $32 | 67% | 0% |
| Forms & Surveys | 24 | $29 | 75% | 0% |
| Print-on-Demand & Fulfillmentsmall sample | 10 | $29 | 50% | 10% |
| Accounting & Invoicing | 29 | $20 | 24% | 7% |
| HR & Payroll | 29 | $20 | 10% | 21% |
| Automation & iPaaS | 26 | $19.50 | 77% | 19% |
| Social Media | 31 | $19 | 48% | 0% |
| Customer Support | 30 | $19 | 37% | 0% |
| CRM & Sales | 27 | $19 | 30% | 0% |
| VoIP & Business Phone | 26 | $19 | 0% | 0% |
| Marketing & Email | 34 | $17 | 47% | 3% |
| E-Signature & Documents | 25 | $14.00 | 28% | 4% |
| AI Content & Creativesmall sample | 12 | $13.50 | 67% | 0% |
| Expense Management & Corporate Cards | 16 | $11.99 | 44% | 31% |
| Website Builders | 34 | $11.50 | 32% | 0% |
| Scheduling & Booking | 26 | $11.50 | 58% | 0% |
| Docs & Databases | 25 | $10 | 64% | 8% |
| Project Management | 28 | $9.50 | 79% | 0% |
| Cloud Storage & File Sharing | 19 | $6 | 11% | 0% |
| Proxies & Web Scrapingsmall sample | 14 | $6 | 7% | 7% |
| Team Chat & Video Meetings | 19 | $5 | 84% | 0% |
| Web Hosting | 23 | $4.39 | 0% | 0% |
| Password Managers & Business Security | 21 | $3.66 | 43% | 5% |
| Business Email & Productivity Suites | 16 | $3.25 | 0% | 0% |
Categories with fewer than 15 tools are marked; their medians are directionally useful but based on a thin sample.
Methodology
- Entry price is the lowest paid monthly plan a tool publishes. Free tiers are excluded from price figures and counted separately.
- Free plan means a permanently free tier, not a trial.
- Quote-only means the tool publishes no price on any tier.
- Prices are the vendor's own published USD figures, which frequently assume annual billing. Where a vendor advertises an annual-billing rate, that is the figure recorded.
- Ratings are aggregated from third-party review platforms and attributed per tool; they are not first-party reviews collected by BuildStackFlow.
- Figures are recomputed on every site build from the same data the individual tool pages render, so this page cannot drift from them.
Citing this page
Journalists and writers are welcome to use these figures. Please cite as:
BuildStackFlow, “Small-Business Software Pricing Statistics” (2026-08-17). https://buildstackflow.com/reports/small-business-software-pricing-statistics
Need a figure that isn't here, or a breakdown for a specific category? Email roger@buildstackflow.com and we'll run it.