How often does a tool change its price?
787 tools in this index have at least two dated price snapshots — enough to tell whether the number ever moved. 553 of them (70%) never changed their entry price once. That silence is the finding, not the gap in it.
70%
never changed their entry price (553 of 787 tools with a price history)
120 days
median wait from first snapshot to the first change, among the tools that did move (234 tools)
65%
of those movers changed within six months of their first recorded price
112 days
median gap between two consecutive changes, once a tool has started moving (77 gaps)
How many times a tool has moved
| Changes recorded | Tools | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Never changed | 553 | 70% |
| Once | 176 | 22% |
| Twice | 47 | 6% |
| Three times or more | 11 | 1% |
A tool needs two snapshots before a change can be seen at all, so this counts only the 787 tools that qualify — the other 1,600 have a single price point and are not evidence either way.
Who moves: by price band
| Entry price | Tools | Changed | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| ≤ $25 | 529 | 151 | 29% |
| $26–49 | 133 | 34 | 26% |
| $50–99 | 66 | 26 | 39% |
| $100–199 | 25 | 9 | 36% |
| $200+ | 14 | 5 | 36% |
The most crowded band is not the most restless one. Tools charging $50–99 change price more often than tools under $25 — cheap tools tend to set a number and leave it alone.
By category
| Category | Tools | Changed | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other tools | 90 | 31 | 34% |
| Productivity | 83 | 28 | 34% |
| Social | 110 | 37 | 34% |
| SEO | 65 | 22 | 34% |
| Site analytics | 34 | 10 | 29% |
| Video and audio | 56 | 15 | 27% |
| AI chat | 48 | 13 | 27% |
| AI writing | 37 | 10 | 27% |
| Image and design | 50 | 12 | 24% |
| Developer tools | 58 | 13 | 22% |
| Finance and ops | 34 | 5 | 15% |
Categories with fewer than 30 observable tools are left out — at that size a single tool moves the percentage by four points.
What this page does not say
It does not say what happened after a change. We have a date and two prices; we do not have that tool's revenue or user count on either side of the move, so any sentence about whether a rise worked would be invented.
It does not rank the most active repricers either. We checked: the tools with the most recorded changes are mostly artefacts of a pricing page that switches between monthly and annual views, or between currencies. One tool shows seven changes that end at $1. Publishing that as a ranking would be publishing noise as behaviour.
Treat every number here as a fact about our crawl as much as about the market: a tool that changed price on a day we did not look is counted as unchanged. The direction of that error is known — it makes real change look rarer than it is — which is why the headline above is a floor, not an estimate.