SaaS & Software Industry Report 2026

How has the pandemic and AI changed the volume of SaaS?¹¹

We've sampled 5,649,294 homepages from 124 crawls from Common Crawl, a public repository of crawl data going back more than 10 years, and run sites through our machine learning classification model to determine which sites are a SaaS or not. We see that as a percentage of all homepages in the repository, the percent that are SaaS has been trending upwards, as of the most recent crawl, 2.3% of all sites are a SaaS. That is a 283% change in the past 10 years.

See the full analysis, data and methodology ›

Market Size & Growth

How large is the SaaS industry? This section tracks the total number of SaaS companies in our database, their publication rate, and month-over-month growth trends.

Monthly SaaS Discoveries (12 Months)¹²

The number of new SaaS companies discovered and published each month over the past year.

On average, 23,772 new SaaS companies are discovered per month.

Geographic Distribution

Where are SaaS companies headquartered? This section maps the global distribution of SaaS companies by country, highlighting regional concentration and emerging markets.

Top 20 Countries by SaaS Company Count

SaaS company distribution across the globe, based on detected headquarters location.

SaaS by Country

Fastest Growing Markets

Industry Categories

Which SaaS categories are the largest and fastest-growing? This section breaks down the industry by category, revealing market saturation levels and emerging opportunities.

Largest SaaS Categories

Top 15 categories by total number of published SaaS companies.

Fastest Growing Categories

Ranked by the number of new SaaS companies added in the past 30 days. Growth rate shows new additions as a percentage of the category's total.

Most Saturated Markets

Emerging Opportunities (Least Saturated)

Company Demographics

What does the typical SaaS company look like? This section profiles the industry by company size, target market, and age to reveal the shape of the SaaS landscape.

Company Size Distribution

Distribution of SaaS companies by employee count, aggregated across all categories.

Target Market (B2B vs B2C)

Breakdown of SaaS companies by target audience.

Median Company Age

Technology Landscape

What technologies power the SaaS industry? This section covers AI adoption rates, the most popular tech stacks, and whether companies favour product-led or sales-led growth.

AI Adoption

Most Popular Technologies

Top 15 technologies by number of SaaS companies using them.

Growth Model Distribution

How SaaS companies acquire customers.

Fastest Growing Technologies

Pricing Insights

How much does SaaS software cost? This section analyzes entry-level and premium pricing across categories to benchmark where the industry sits today.

Pricing by Category

Median entry and premium pricing for the top 15 SaaS categories (USD).

Most Expensive Categories

Most Affordable Categories

Affiliate Program Landscape

How prevalent are affiliate programs in SaaS? This section examines the adoption of referral and affiliate programs, median commission rates, and which categories lead the way.

Affiliate Programs by Category

Top 15 categories by number of SaaS companies with affiliate programs.

Top Categories for Affiliate Programs

SEO & Domain Authority Benchmarks

How strong is the median SaaS company's online presence? This section benchmarks domain authority across categories against global medians.

Median Domain Rating by Category

Median domain authority score for the top 15 SaaS categories compared to the global median.

Top Categories by Domain Authority

Discovery Trends

How fast is the SaaS market growing? This section tracks our daily discovery rate and web crawl activity over the past 90 days.

Daily SaaS Discoveries (90 Days)¹²

Granular view of new SaaS companies discovered each day.

Over the past 90 days, we have discovered an average of 1,297 new SaaS companies per day.

Web Crawl Activity (90 Days)

Total websites crawled each day as part of our SaaS discovery process.

Survival & Churn (Past Year)

Of every SaaS we discovered in the past year, how many are still active today? This section measures survival and churn rates across the industry, and surfaces the most and least durable categories.

Past-Year Survival

Across the industry, 339,987 SaaS were discovered in the past year, of which 74.8% are still active. The remaining 25.2% (114,798 companies) were discontinued, removed, or otherwise stopped passing our quality checks.

Most Durable Categories

Categories with the lowest annual churn rate, ranked from most resilient. Only categories with at least 20 new or churned SaaS in the period are included.

Least Durable Categories (Highest Churn)

Categories with the highest annual churn rate, where new SaaS struggle to survive. Only categories with at least 20 new or churned SaaS in the period are included.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick answers to the most common questions about the SaaS industry, drawn directly from the data in this report.

Methodology

Notes & definitions

1. Active SaaS Companies. Companies that are currently published - they have passed our automated quality checks (legitimacy scoring, an active online status, and minimum content requirements). Discontinued, redirected, and low-quality entries are excluded.
2. New Past 30 Days. The net number of companies newly published in the last 30 days (new publications minus any that were unpublished).
3. Categories Tracked. The number of distinct categories we classify products into. Each product is matched to the closest category using vector-embedding similarity.
4. Technologies Tracked. The number of distinct technologies we detect across the tech stacks of indexed products.
5. Verified Profiles. Profiles that a company's owner has claimed and verified.
6. Total SaaS Indexed. Every company in our database, including those that are discontinued, redirected, or have not yet passed quality checks. This is always larger than the published count.
7. Global Median Domain Rating. The median domain rating (0–100) across all published companies. The median is the middle value - half score higher, half lower - so it is less distorted by outliers than an average. Higher is stronger.
8. Discovered (1y). The number of companies first discovered and published in the past 365 days.
9. Survival Rate. Of the companies discovered in the past year, the share still active and published today.
10. Churn Rate. Of the companies discovered in the past year, the share since discontinued, removed, or no longer passing our quality checks. Survival and churn always sum to 100%.
11. SaaS Volume Trend. Each month randomly samples whole Common Crawl files; our model classifies their English-language homepages and we plot the share that are SaaS. It is a sampled estimate, so the percentage is what's comparable over time - absolute counts are not. Known biases - English homepages only, crawls vary in size, sparse early months are noisier, Common Crawl discovers sites by following links so well-established sites with many inbound links are far more likely to be found than new or rarely-linked ones, a growing number of sites now block AI crawlers including Common Crawl's CCBot, which may reduce coverage of more recent crawls, and months where no SaaS was found are excluded, which slightly overstates the rate.
12. New SaaS since 2 November 2026. From 2 November 2026, we only add a SaaS by ourselves when its website has a domain rating of 5 or more. A domain rating is a score from 0 to 100 that shows how many other websites link to a site. So from that date, the number of new SaaS here drops a lot. The SaaS already in our directory stay. Read why.

All figures are computed from our own database and refreshed every 6 hours. Medians and percentages are calculated only across companies that have data for the metric in question.