Where every segment stands

Every scored segment in one sortable view: the four size bands ranked with a single score, and the segments still building their evidence base.

The full ranking


#1	Small (50–499)	8/10	9/10	9/10	6/10	75	$4,751	$2,048
#2	Mid (500–2,499)	6/10	3/10	6/10	6/10	41	$4,262	$1,942
#3	Upper Mid (2,500–9,999)	2/10	6/10	3/10	10/10	34	$4,076	$1,604
#4	Enterprise (10,000+)	2/10	1/10	1/10	1/10	2	$2,310	$1,528
provisional	Micro (0–49)	10/10	9/10	9/10	—	59–91	$4,367	$639

Higher scores mean a heavier Stack Tax; the composite combines the four measures.

Measured bill: unused seats plus price rises above the market baseline, in dollars per employee per year.
People bill: the modeled cost of the people who run the stack, in dollars per employee per year. It sits beside the rank, not inside it.

Segments marked provisional hold no rank: the evidence supports a range, not a single score.

App Sprawl: How many software applications a group runs, compared with its headcount. No such count is published for industries, so industry rankings count how many distinct software categories reviewers report instead.
Unused Seats: The share of paid seats and licenses that we measure as unused or barely used.
Spend per Employee: Annual SaaS spend per employee, compared against benchmarks for each group.
Price Increases: How much faster a group's software prices rise than the market-wide baseline. Tools with AI features have been raising prices faster than the rest of the market, so this also counts how exposed a group is to that extra increase.

Reading it

How to read the ranking

A group gets a rank only when the evidence behind every one of its measures is solid. If even one measure rests on thin evidence, we hold the single score back. Instead the group is marked provisional and shows the range its score could sit in. The smallest band is in that position: strong evidence on every measure but one, so it shows as a range, and the range happens to reach the top of the table.

Each score is a percentile: it shows where a group stands against its peers on that measure. We combine those percentiles into the overall score using fixed weights. The methodology page explains each measure and its weight in plain language.

A segment with no single-score rank has thinner evidence behind it. It does not mean the segment runs more overlapping software than it needs.

Commissioned by

Research on the Stack Tax index was commissioned by Supernal. Red Tape Index owns the research and determines the data, weights and rankings independently. The findings are openly available.