Ever tried benchmarking your SaaS & AI quotes? You might phone a friend, make an educated guess based on list prices or outdated reports, or pay a few thousand dollars for a benchmarking service.
That’s exactly where our latest webinar started, and what SpendHound’s newest release was built for. Alongside Sam Voshall, Rafael Bolonha, Sr. Product Manager and the feature's lead builder, introduced In-Platform Benchmarking: instant, SKU-level pricing benchmarks on SaaS & AI, right inside the SpendHound platform.
The session covered how In-Platform Benchmarking works, what it covers today, and what's coming next. We also heard from Dakota Doukas, Director of Client Strategy, and Natalie DiTomaso, VP of Business Operations, on SpendHound’s expert services offerings.
Watch the full replay here.
Key takeaways:
Sam opened by naming the reason most benchmark data doesn't hold up under a real negotiation. You pull a number from a peer group, a survey, or a market report, and it tends to fall short in one of three ways.
First, it's stale. SaaS and AI pricing moves fast enough that a benchmark built on data from a few quarters ago can already be inaccurate by the time you use it.
Second, it's rarely apples to apples. Most benchmarking relies on self-reported survey data or groups together companies with different sizes, usage, and contracts, so the comparison looks precise without actually mirroring your buying situation.
Third, it's generic. A benchmark that tells you what companies pay for a tool overall says nothing about what you're paying for your specific seats, tiers, and add-ons. And that's exactly where your negotiating leverage lives.
The credibility of a benchmark comes down to where the number came from, and Sam was clear about SpendHound's data source.
“These aren't based on surveys, guesses, or scraping the web. Our benchmarks are built from thousands of actual SaaS and AI contracts that customers upload to SpendHound.” — Sam Voshall
Every new contract added to the platform makes In-Platform Benchmarking stronger, and SpendHound normalizes each benchmark against company size, contract value, SKU, seat count, and contract terms. So, off the bat, a 50-seat contract never gets measured against a 500-seat one. The goal is to tell you what companies buying under similar conditions paid.
Rafael explained that a benchmark won't display for a given SKU until SpendHound has enough comparable data to draw from.
“For each SKU, we require at least five comparable contracts for that specific cohort. Five contracts with similar seats, similar contract value, and similar term length.” — Rafael Bolonha
Rafael’s live demo made it clear why SKU-level benchmarking makes a difference. Pulling up a contract inside the platform, he showed 256 seats priced at $330 per unit, for a total contract value of $82,000.
Measured against comparable contracts across SpendHound’s dataset (companies buying similar seats, at a similar contract value, on similar terms) that price landed in “favorable” territory, with the market range for the same tier running $270 to $400.
In-Platform Benchmarking tags every contract worst-in-class, average, favorable, or best-in-class, and for anything sitting above target, it shows the range worth pushing toward in a renewal conversation. And that target number can be the difference between a negotiation that feels expensive to one that you know is priced fairly.
It's also built to be searched without limits. Rafael confirmed there's no cap on how many applications or contracts a customer can benchmark.
“There's no limit to In-Platform Benchmarking. You can search benchmarks for every available application in your catalog.” — Rafael Bolonha
Knowing where your pricing sits is only the first half of the problem, and Sam was upfront about the gap that remains.
“Knowing that you're paying in the 80th percentile doesn't automatically tell you whether your vendor has room to move. It doesn't tell you what concessions are realistic, when to push, or how hard to push.” — Sam Voshall
That's the handoff Dakota walked through next, describing benchmarking, vendor trends, and SpendHound's procurement experts as layers of the same system rather than separate tools.
Benchmarking tells you whether the price is good and where to spend your team's time first; vendor trends adds market context on a vendor before a purchase or renewal decision; and the procurement experts layer in what to push for, which levers matter, and when a deal is worth negotiating.
For teams that would rather hand off the negotiation entirely, Natalie introduced SpendHound's newest offering: Managed Negotiation. After you’ve negotiated as far as you can on your own, you can now bring the deal to SpendHound to run the last mile.
If we don’t find additional savings beyond what you already secured, there's no charge. If we do, SpendHound takes a portion of the incremental savings as compensation — and the earlier in the process SpendHound gets involved, the smaller that portion is. The service is currently focused on contracts $50,000 and up, where a dedicated negotiator has the most room to work.
The session closed with an early look at AI Spend Visibility, teased on SpendHound's prior webinar and already in beta with dozens of customers. Sam cited a stat from SpendHound's upcoming research report that makes the case for it: nearly 60% of finance and procurement leaders believe they're paying too much for AI, with no clear sense of what the right number should be.
AI Spend Visibility, launching in July 2026, helps companies understand, track, and manage AI spending by surfacing token usage and costs across leading AI providers in a single dashboard.
Everything from this session points to the same gap: between benchmarks precise enough to act on and negotiation strategy that turns data into outcomes. With In-Platform Benchmarking, SpendHound is now closing that gap for good.
If you want to see what your own contracts look like against real pricing data from 1,000+ companies, book a demo with the SpendHound team.
Book a demo below and we'll get you set up with our team.
