SaaS examples: 30 products you probably already use, by category
Thirty SaaS products grouped by what they do, with one line each on why they count as SaaS and what a 10-person team pays for a typical set.
Part of the guide What is SaaS? A plain-English guide with examples
You have to explain SaaS to your team next week, and a definition will not land. What lands is a list of things they already use: the inbox, the chat app, the tool that sends invoices. Here are 30 of them, grouped by job, with one line each on how the vendor charges. The pricing model is the fastest way to see that a product is rented, not owned.
If the term itself is still fuzzy, start with What is SaaS?, the root guide. This article assumes you know that SaaS means software that runs on the vendor’s servers, reached through a browser or an app, paid for on a recurring basis.
The office, before and after, in plain terms
Picture an office in 2005. A mail server hummed in a closet. Files lived in a cabinet, then on a shared drive that somebody backed up to tape on Fridays. Sales kept customer notes in a spreadsheet. The accountant installed a program from a CD every January.
Now picture the same office today. The mail server became Gmail or Outlook on the web. The cabinet became Drive or Dropbox. The spreadsheet became a CRM. The CD became a login. Every one of those replacements is SaaS, and every one is paid for monthly or yearly. That is the whole change: the office did not buy new software, it started renting access to somebody else’s.
How the 30 were chosen
Three criteria, all of them checkable:
- Widely used. Products a business reader is likely to have seen, not the best in any category. SaaSCron does not rank products.
- Publicly priced. The vendor publishes a pricing page, so the pricing model can be stated with a link. Products that only say “contact sales” were skipped.
- Self-serve sign-up. You can create an account and start without a sales call, at least on the entry plan.
Every pricing model below was read on the vendor’s pricing page in October 2026. Prices change often; the link is the source, not this page.
The 30 products
The “How it charges” column uses four labels. Per seat: a price per user per month. Usage: a price per unit consumed. Tiered: fixed plans with growing limits, often per company rather than per user. Free plan: a permanent free tier, usually combined with one of the other three. The SaaS pricing models guide compares the four on one fictional product.
Productivity and documents
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace | Email, files, docs, video | Per seat, tiered editions: Business Starter $7, Standard $14, Plus $22 per user per month on an annual plan |
| Microsoft 365 | Office apps, email, Teams | Per seat, tiered plans (Business Basic, Standard, Premium) |
| Notion | Docs, wikis, databases | Free plan; Plus $10 and Business $20 per member per month |
| Dropbox | File storage and sharing | Free Basic (2 GB); Standard $15 and Advanced $24 per user per month, minimum three users |
| Airtable | Spreadsheet-database hybrid | Free plan; Team $20 and Business $45 per seat per month billed annually; only editors are charged |
| Trello | Task boards | Free plan; Standard $5 and Premium $10 per user per month billed annually |
Communication
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Team messaging | Free plan (90 days of history); Pro shown at $4.35 per user per month billed yearly with $7.25 crossed out, $5.25 billed monthly; inactive users are credited under its Fair Billing Policy |
| Zoom | Video meetings | Free Basic (40-minute meetings); Pro $14.16 per user per month billed annually, $16.99 monthly |
| Loom | Recorded video messages | Free Starter; Business $18 per user per month |
| Miro | Online whiteboard | Free plan; Starter $8 and Business $20 per member per month billed yearly |
| Calendly | Meeting scheduling | Free plan; Standard $10 and Teams $16 per seat per month billed yearly |
CRM, sales and support
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Sales Cloud | CRM | Per seat, tiered: Starter Suite $25, Pro Suite $100, Core $195, Advanced $395, Max $550 per user per month |
| HubSpot | CRM and marketing | Free CRM; paid plans by hub and tier |
| Zoho CRM | CRM | Free for up to three users; paid editions per user |
| Zendesk | Customer support | Per agent, tiered suites; AI “automated resolutions” priced separately, with a number included per agent |
| Intercom | Customer messaging and AI support | Per seat (Essential $29, Advanced $85, Expert $132 per seat per month) plus usage: Fin AI Agent from $0.99 per outcome |
Finance and commerce
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online | Accounting | Tiered per company: Simple Start $38, Essentials $85, Plus $140, Advanced $340 per month, with user limits of 1, 3, 5 and 25 |
| Xero | Accounting | Tiered per organization: Early $27, Growing $59, Established $97 per month, no per-user fees |
| Stripe | Online payments | Usage: a percentage plus a fixed fee per successful transaction, no monthly fee on the standard plan |
| Shopify | Online store | Tiered plans per store, billed monthly or yearly |
| DocuSign | Electronic signatures | Per seat, tiered, with envelope limits per user |
Developer tools
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub | Code hosting | Free plan; Team $4 and Enterprise $21 per user per month; usage charges for Actions minutes and Codespaces beyond the included amounts |
| GitLab | DevOps platform | Free plan; Premium $29 per user per month billed annually |
| Linear | Issue tracking | Free plan; Basic $10 and Business $16 per user per month billed yearly |
| Vercel | Web hosting for developers | Free Hobby; Pro $20 per developer seat per month plus usage (for example $0.15 per GB of data transfer above 1 TB) |
| Datadog | Monitoring | Usage: Pro $15 per host per month billed annually ($18 on demand); logs at $0.10 per ingested GB |
| Twilio | SMS and voice APIs | Usage: $0.0083 per outbound US SMS segment, plus carrier fees |
Security and infrastructure
| Product | What it does | How it charges (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Bitwarden | Password manager | Per seat: Teams $4, Enterprise $6 per user per month billed annually |
| Okta | Identity and single sign-on | Per seat, tiered suites: Starter $6, Essentials $17 per user per month, $1,500 minimum annual contract |
| Cloudflare | CDN, DNS, security | Tiered per domain: Free, Pro $20, Business $200 per month billed annually; developer services billed by usage |
Thirty products, and only three ways to charge for them, in various mixes. That is useful when you look at any new tool: find which of the three it is, and you already know how the bill will behave when your team grows.
What a 10-person team pays
Example: a 10-person company picks one tool from five of the groups above and takes the entry paid plan of each, billed annually where the vendor offers it. List prices as shown on the pricing pages in October 2026; taxes excluded; no discounts negotiated.
| Tool and plan | Price per user per month | Monthly bill for 10 users |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace Business Starter (annual plan) | $7.00 | $70.00 |
| Slack Pro (billed yearly, as shown) | $4.35 | $43.50 |
| Notion Plus | $10.00 | $100.00 |
| GitHub Team | $4.00 | $40.00 |
| Bitwarden Teams (billed annually) | $4.00 | $40.00 |
| Total | $29.35 | $293.50 |
The arithmetic: $7.00 + $4.35 + $10.00 + $4.00 + $4.00 = $29.35 per person per month; times 10 people is $293.50 a month, or $3,522 a year. Two things change that number fast. Monthly billing costs more: Google’s Flexible Plan is $8.40 instead of $7 per user per month, per Google’s billing help page, and Slack charges $5.25 instead of $4.35. And the eleventh hire adds $29.35 a month to the bill on the day she starts.
Note what is not in the bill: no server, no installation, no upgrade project. That trade is the subject of the cost example in What is SaaS?.
Common mistakes
- Calling every website SaaS. A news site, a bank’s online banking page and a government portal all run on servers and open in a browser. They are not SaaS, because nobody rents the application: there is no subscription, no admin console, no “add a user”. Why it happens: “runs in a browser” looks like the defining trait. Instead: ask whether a customer pays recurring money to use the software as a product.
- Counting a self-hosted install as SaaS. GitLab and Bitwarden both sell a hosted service and also let you run the software on your own servers. The hosted version is SaaS. The copy on your server is not, even if the code is the same, because you manage the hosting, the updates and the backups. Why it happens: same product name. Instead: look at who runs the servers.
- Mixing up the product and the company. Google is not SaaS; Google Workspace is. Microsoft sells Azure (infrastructure) next to Microsoft 365 (SaaS). Why it happens: vendor names stand in for products in conversation. Instead: name the product, then classify it.
- Reading the entry price as the price. Many vendors show the annual-plan price per user in large type and the monthly-billing price in small type. Several also charge for usage above an included amount (GitHub Actions minutes, Vercel data transfer, Intercom outcomes). Why it happens: pricing pages are designed to show the smallest number. Instead: multiply by your headcount, pick the billing cycle you will actually use, and read the usage limits.
Sources
- The 30 vendor pricing pages linked in the tables, each read in October 2026.
- Google Admin Help, Compare Flexible and Annual/Fixed-Term payment plans, checked October 2026.
In three sentences
SaaS products are the rented replacements for the mail server, the file cabinet, the sales spreadsheet and the accounting CD, and the 30 above are the ones most business readers already use. Every one of them charges in one of three ways, per seat, per unit of usage or per plan tier, often with a free entry plan. A 10-person team on five entry plans pays about $294 a month at October 2026 list prices, and that bill grows with every hire.
