If you're thinking about building a new SaaS product, one of the hardest questions to answer is: which market should I enter? You need to know how crowded a space is, how established the incumbents are, whether there's still room for growth, and what the pricing landscape looks like. Until now, answering those questions meant cobbling together data from a dozen different sources. Today, we're making it a lot easier.
We've launched a detailed category view on our categories page that puts all of this data into a single sortable table, along with a brand-new market saturation score that gives you an at-a-glance measure of how competitive each SaaS category really is.
The Detailed Category View
Our categories page has always let you browse the hundreds of SaaS categories we track. But the basic view only showed total product counts and 30-day changes. The new detailed view expands this into a comprehensive market research table with over a dozen data points per category, all sortable with a single click.
Here's what you can now see for every category: total product count, new products added in the last 30 days, products published in the last 365 days, annual churn count and percentage, free trial percentage, average domain rank, average referring domains, average monthly organic traffic change, average company age, employee size distribution, B2B/B2C breakdown, affiliate program percentage, average affiliate commission, and average pricing (both low and high tiers). Each column header includes a tooltip explaining exactly what the metric means and how it's calculated.
The real power is in sorting. Want to find categories where companies have the weakest domain authority? Sort by average domain rank ascending. Looking for markets with the fastest organic traffic growth? Sort by traffic change descending. Curious which categories have the highest average pricing? Sort by average price high. Your sort preference is saved automatically, so the table remembers how you like to view the data when you come back.
Why This Matters for SaaS Research
Building a SaaS product is a significant investment of time and money. Choosing the wrong market — one that's oversaturated with well-funded incumbents — can mean years of struggle regardless of how good your product is. On the other hand, finding a category that's growing fast but still underserved can give you a massive head start.
The detailed view lets you do this research in minutes instead of weeks. You can quickly compare categories side by side and identify patterns. A category with high product counts but low average domain rank might indicate a fragmented market full of small players — a potential opportunity for a well-executed product to dominate. A category with high average age and high domain authority might suggest an entrenched market that's hard to break into. Low average pricing combined with high traffic growth could signal a market that's expanding but hasn't yet moved upmarket.
We've also included each category's overview page, which goes even deeper with discovery trend charts, top countries, most established players, recently added companies, and now pricing data and the saturation score.
The Saturation Score
While the individual metrics are valuable, comparing across a dozen dimensions for hundreds of categories is a lot of mental work. That's why we built the saturation score — a single number from 0 to 100 that summarises how saturated a market is. Higher scores indicate more competitive, harder-to-enter markets. Lower scores suggest emerging or underserved categories with more room for new entrants.
The score is color-coded for quick scanning: green for low saturation (under 40), yellow for medium (40–69), and red for high saturation (70 and above). But the number alone doesn't tell you the full story, so let's look at exactly how it's calculated.
How the Saturation Score Works
The saturation score uses a weighted percentile formula across eight different metrics. For each metric, we rank every category against all other categories to produce a percentile (0 to 1). Some metrics are "inverted" — for example, high traffic growth and low pricing actually indicate less saturation, so we flip the percentile for those. The final score is a weighted average of all available percentiles, scaled to 0–100.
Here's the formula:
saturation = (
0.20 × percentile(total_count) +
0.20 × percentile(avg_domain_rank) +
0.15 × percentile(annual_churn_pct) +
0.10 × percentile(avg_referring_domains) +
0.10 × percentile(avg_age_years) +
0.10 × (1 - percentile(avg_traffic_change)) +
0.10 × (1 - percentile(avg_price_low)) +
0.05 × percentile(enterprise_pct)
) × 100Let's break down why each metric is included and how it contributes.
Total product count (20% weight) is the most straightforward signal. More products in a category means more competition. Sheer volume of competitors is one of the most direct measures of saturation.
Average domain rank (20% weight) reflects the overall web authority of companies in a category. High average domain rank means the incumbents have built strong online presences with significant SEO investment — making it harder for newcomers to gain visibility through organic search.
Annual churn rate (15% weight) measures the percentage of SaaS products published in the last year that are no longer listed. A high churn rate signals a crowded market where many businesses struggle to survive — products launch but fail to gain traction against established competitors. This is a strong indicator that a category is difficult to succeed in, which is precisely what saturation measures.
Average referring domains (10% weight) measures backlink strength. Categories where companies have many referring domains tend to have well-established players with strong content marketing and PR efforts. This creates a higher barrier to entry for organic growth.
Average company age (10% weight) indicates market maturity. Categories dominated by older companies suggest the market has been around for a while, meaning customers have established habits and switching costs. Newer average age suggests an emerging market where buyer behavior is still forming.
Average traffic change, inverted (10% weight) captures market momentum. We invert this metric because declining traffic growth across a category actually suggests higher saturation — the market is mature and growth is slowing. Categories with strong positive traffic growth are more likely to be expanding, with room for new entrants to capture growing demand.
Average starting price, inverted (10% weight) reflects pricing dynamics. We invert this because lower average pricing can indicate a race to the bottom, which is a sign of intense competition. Higher pricing categories may have more room for differentiation and value-based positioning — paradoxically suggesting less competitive pressure on margins.
Enterprise percentage (5% weight) looks at the proportion of companies in a category with more than 1,000 employees. A high concentration of large enterprises signals a market where big players have significant resources and market share, making it tougher for small startups to compete.
One important design choice: we normalize by total available weight rather than assuming all metrics are present. If a category has no pricing data, those weights are redistributed proportionally across the metrics that do have data. This means categories with sparse data still get a meaningful score rather than being penalized for missing information.
Using the Score Effectively
The saturation score is a starting point, not the final answer. A high-saturation category isn't necessarily a bad choice — it might mean the market is large and proven, which has its own advantages. And a low-saturation score doesn't guarantee success; it might just mean the market is small or hasn't been validated yet.
The most useful approach is to combine the saturation score with the individual metrics. A category with a medium saturation score but strong traffic growth and low average company age could be a sweet spot — competitive enough to be validated, but still growing fast enough that a new entrant can carve out space.
All of this data is available right now on the categories page. Switch to the detailed view and start sorting. Your next SaaS idea might be one column sort away.