Where the money actually hides
If the median is £20 and the mean is £99, the obvious question is: what is doing the dragging? Six categories carry almost all of the expensive weight, and they cluster exactly where you would expect — the places where software is sold to teams who spend large budgets through it, not to founders running lean.
| Category | Tools | Avg entry / mo | Cheapest entry | With free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ad management | 6 | £1,674 | £0 | 1 |
| Data | 7 | £255 | £37 | 4 |
| Customer success | 3 | £233 | £150 | 1 |
| HR | 2 | £175 | £100 | 0 |
| Customer data platform | 3 | £136 | £24 | 3 |
| AI search & AEO tracking | 6 | £125 | £29 | 1 |
Ad management is the spike — a £1,674 average against a £0 cheapest. That is not a typo; it is the signature of a category sold as a percentage of media spend or to in-house agencies managing six-figure budgets. If you are not running paid at scale, you never touch that tier, and there is a free entry point sitting right underneath it.
The pattern repeats. The priciest categories are the ones where the buyer is justifying spend against revenue moving through the tool — ad spend, customer-success seats covering large accounts, data pipelines feeding a warehouse. This is usage-based pricing doing its job: the vendor scales the price with the value flowing through the tool, which is fair to a buyer at scale and irrelevant to a founder who has not reached that scale yet. Strip those categories out and the entire rest of the catalogue collapses toward the £20 median. The expensive tools are expensive because of who they are sold to, not because of what they do. A lean operator self-selects out of the spike — and should read a category's headline price as a signal of who it is for, not a verdict on whether the function is affordable.