SaaS Stocks Split 280 Points on Pricing Model, Not Category

Public software clawed back to green for 2026, with roughly 280 points separating the best and worst performers, per SaaStr's recap of the year so far. That spread means a security vendor and a collaboration tool can trade in opposite directions for the same reason: how they bill. Boards evaluating pricing changes now have a real number attached to the decision.

DigitalOcean is up 227 percent. Datadog is up 76 percent. CrowdStrike is up 55 percent, Okta 41, Twilio 33. On the other side: Klaviyo down 52 percent, HubSpot down 46, Monday.com down 45, Zscaler down 39, Atlassian down 36. Infrastructure, security, and collaboration tools show up on both lists. Category isn't the variable.

Pricing model is. The winners bill on consumption, usage, or outcome. The losers bill per seat. That split is cleaner than anything sector analysis would predict. Two companies in different markets with the same pricing model now trade more alike than two companies in the same market with different pricing models.

The take

If pricing model beats vertical as a stock predictor, board conversations about which market a company is in matter less than how it bills. Watch for per-seat companies announcing consumption or hybrid pricing this year, since the market has already told them what it rewards. A related SaaStr piece frames quote-to-cash tooling as the bottleneck blocking companies from leaving per-seat pricing. That may be why seat-priced incumbents haven't moved yet, even with the spread this obvious.

SaaStr's recap doesn't break out how much of the consumption side's gain is usage growth versus multiple expansion. So it's not clear yet whether this is durable repricing or a rate-cycle rotation that reverses.