The SaaSpocalypse Comes for Private-Market Content

I was quoted over $5,000/year today for digital content access to a freemium online magazine in the private equity space I follow. Their lowest plan.

Then responded with the current subscription fees for Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, Business Insider, and a handful of other established news sources, all within the $100 to $400/year range.

The publisher provides a contact database separately, but I specifically said I don’t need this (we have our own private equity dataset, plus other PE sites we manage, we have Clay and RB2B, and work with a handful of PE firms already).

Even with that, Axios, Crunchbase, Statista are at $500 – $700 a year as well.

“We cover the private markets” isn’t a valid reason to 20x subscription fees for something that’s largely available in other media sources like Axios or in Crunchbase – or even their free newsletter sending a snapshot or excerpt of all the news.

Unexpected pricing model and positioning in a down content market, accounting for the competitive landscape and free vs. paid.

We’ve seen similar disparity exploding in the SaaSpocalypse era since 2023 with valuations going down and users churning left and right to $50K – $200K annual subscriptions for tools that can largely be mimicked with Claude and a couple of APIs.

I don’t neglect the importance of ERPs and CRMs, but there’s a mid-tier of SaaS with a handful of features priced out of market, simply due to rising demand and capital from 2015 to 2022, and pre-AI era times.

But just as we moved away from Rackspace (becoming more expensive than Google Workspace) or several Semrush plans to Ubersuggest or DataforSEO, or do more Lovable mockups than Figma today, adapting to market tailwinds is just as important for survival and corporate longevity.