We measured the annual-billing discount on 85 project management plans
The median saving is 18%. Not one plan offers nothing.
Almost every SaaS pricing page has a toggle. Monthly on the left, annual on the right, usually with a badge promising you will save something.
The badge rounds. It also tends to describe the best case rather than the plan you are looking at.
We hold both numbers for 85 project management plans: the month-to-month seat rate and the annual-committed seat rate, both captured from the same vendor page on the same day. So the discount can be measured rather than taken on trust.
The spread
| Smallest discount | 7% |
| Median | 18% |
| Largest | 41% |
| Plans offering no discount | 0 |
Every single one of the 85 discounts an annual commitment. That is worth stating because it makes the toggle predictable: if you are willing to commit, there is essentially always a number behind it.
The size, though, ranges by nearly 6x. "Save with annual billing" covers both a 7% nudge and a 41% cut, and those are different decisions.
The biggest discounts
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motion Business AI | $49 | $29 | 41% |
| Freedcamp Pro | $2.49 | $1.49 | 40% |
| Paymo Solo | $9.90 | $5.90 | 40% |
| Any.do Teams | $7.99 | $4.99 | 38% |
| Any.do Personal Premium | $7.99 | $4.99 | 38% |
| Nifty Pro | $16 | $10 | 38% |
At the top of the range the annual price is not a discount so much as the real price, with the monthly rate acting as a premium for flexibility. Paying Motion monthly costs $240 a seat a year more than paying annually. On ten seats that is $2,400 for the option to leave.
Which may well be worth it. A tool you are unsure about is a tool worth staying flexible on, and a 41% premium buys a genuine option. The point is to price the option deliberately rather than discover it at renewal.
Where the median actually sits
18% is the middle of this distribution, and it is meaningfully below where most pricing pages imply. "Save up to 25%" is a common badge. The median plan saves 18%, and a quarter of them save less than that.
If you are modelling a switch and you assumed 20-25%, you are probably slightly optimistic on most of the shortlist and materially wrong on a few.
What this does not tell you
The discount is not the decision. A 40% saving on a tool that does not fit is not a saving.
Three things this comparison deliberately excludes:
Seat bands. Several products price in bands, a flat amount covering "1-3 concurrent users" rather than a rate per seat. Those are excluded here, because dividing a band total by a seat count produces a number the vendor never published.
Quote-only plans. 29% of the plans we track have no public price at all, and they skew to enterprise tiers. Whatever annual commitment does to those prices happens on a call.
Everything that is not price. Migration cost, whether the thing does the job, and what happens when your headcount changes mid-term all matter more than 18%.
How we know
Both numbers for each plan came off the vendor's own pricing page, in the same capture, between 10 July and 12 August 2026. Every price is stored with its source URL and the date it was read.
Where a vendor did not publish one of the two rates, the plan is not in this dataset. There are no modelled figures here and no estimates. A plan is either in with both real numbers or out.
Vendors change pricing. These figures will drift, which is exactly why they carry a date.
You can see the underlying numbers for any of these products at opendecision.com/products: every plan, every captured price, each with the page it came from and the day it was read.
Figures from the catalog as captured between 10 July and 12 August 2026. 85 plans held both a month-to-month and an annual seat rate.