SaaS Examples: 11 Companies That Show What Software as a Service Is

A SaaS company rents customers access to software the vendor itself operates, and gets paid again for as long as the access lasts. Salesforce is the canonical example — $41.5B in revenue recorded on its GetLatka profile in January 2026, built on subscriptions it has been selling since 1999. The eleven companies below — Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, Zoom, Slack, Atlassian, Freshworks, Canva, Notion, ClickUp and Zapier — span CRM, e-commerce, video, developer tools, design, productivity and automation, and every figure attached to them is dated and pulled from the live GetLatka database profile linked in each entry.

The dating is the point. The 2022 version of this article listed Salesforce's revenue as $2M and HubSpot's valuation as $5.7M — numbers that were wrong by four orders of magnitude the day they were published. What went wrong, and where those numbers actually came from, is covered at the bottom of the page.

What counts as a SaaS example

GetLatka's working definition, laid out in full in What Is a SaaS Company?, has three clauses: the software is rented rather than owned, it runs on infrastructure the vendor operates, and the customer pays again for as long as they want access. The test that settles arguments is what happens when the customer stops paying next month. If the software stops working, it was a subscription; if it keeps running, it was a licence.

Recurring billing alone does not qualify a company. Netflix bills monthly and is not on this list — the reasoning is at the end of the page, because the old version of this article got it wrong. What the eleven companies below share is that the product itself is vendor-operated software sold to people doing work, and the renewal is the product.

Eleven SaaS examples, with dated numbers

Each figure is the most recent dated revenue row on the company's GetLatka profile as of August 2026. Slack's row is frozen at August 2020 because Salesforce acquired it in 2021 and it stopped reporting separately.

Salesforce — the company that named the category

Marc Benioff launched Salesforce in 1999 on the pitch that businesses should rent CRM through a browser instead of installing it. Its profile records $41.5B in revenue for January 2026, up from $37.9B a year earlier, sourced to the company's own investor relations filings, with 83.3K employees on the same January 2026 date. It raised just $65.4M across five rounds before going public — small money by modern standards for the largest pure-software subscription business in the world.

Shopify — subscriptions plus a take rate

Tobi Lütke's Ottawa company sells merchants a rented online store: profile revenue of $8.2B recorded January 2024, up from $2.9B in January 2020, across 2.6M customers. Shopify is also an honest reminder that big companies mix models — its public filings have long shown merchant solutions (mostly payments, a cut of transaction volume) out-earning the subscription line. The subscription core is what makes it a SaaS example; the take rate is a different business bolted on top, a distinction the definition post spends a whole section on.

Zoom — and what flat SaaS revenue looks like

Eric Yuan left Cisco's WebEx to found Zoom in 2011. The profile records $4.5B in July 2021 and $4.7B in December 2024 — three and a half years for less than 5% total growth. That is worth including precisely because it is undramatic: subscription revenue compounds only while customers keep choosing to renew, and Zoom after the pandemic is what the ceiling of a category looks like. Headcount still grew, from 6.3K in July 2021 to 11.7K in July 2025.

Atlassian — thirteen years with no venture money

The Sydney company behind Jira, Confluence and Trello bootstrapped from 2002 to its December 2015 IPO, taking only $210M across two rounds along the way. Its profile records $4.4B for December 2024, up from $3.5B in December 2023. In a September 2020 Latka interview, then-president Jay Simons put logo retention for customers spending $50 or more at 98%, on a deliberately low-touch sales model — a clean illustration of why churn, not sales headcount, governs a subscription business.

Canva — design sold by the seat

Melanie Perkins' design platform has one of the cleanest revenue ladders in the database: $60M recorded June 2017, $1B in September 2021, $2.7B in October 2024, and $4B in December 2025, the last figure sourced to TechCrunch. The profile carries a $42B valuation set in a 2025 round, against $2B raised in total. Individuals use it free; the paying unit is teams and businesses, which is what keeps it inside the definition.

HubSpot — where the arithmetic closes

Brian Halligan's marketing-automation company, founded 2006, shows $3.1B for December 2025 (sourced to its investor relations page) against $2.6B a year before. The profile also lists 205K customers at an average contract value of $15.3K — multiply those and you get $3.14B, which is the rare header block where the arithmetic checks out against the revenue line. It raised $100.5M across six rounds, the last of them in 2012.

Slack — the acquired one

Stewart Butterfield's messaging company recorded $1.7B in revenue in August 2020, and the profile's 10M customers at an average of $170 apiece multiplies out to exactly that. Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack for $27.7B in December 2020 and closed it in July 2021, which is why the profile has not moved since. One caution when reading that page: its $35.2B "total funding" line books the acquisition itself as a 2021 funding round. Slack's actual venture funding was widely reported at roughly $1.4B before its 2019 direct listing.

Freshworks — from Chennai to the Nasdaq

Girish Mathrubootham told Nathan Latka in a July 2018 interview that Freshworks had just crossed $100M ARR, growing over 40% a year, on a 2% monthly logo churn rate. The company, founded in 2010, went public in September 2021; its profile now records $713M for December 2024, up from $569M in June 2023. Its Freshdesk-led suite is the standing example of SMB customer-support software built on inbound, product-led growth.

Notion — a doubling, on the record

Ivan Zhao's all-in-one workspace recorded $300M in June 2024 and $600M in December 2025, the later figure sourced to Forbes — a doubling in eighteen months. The profile pairs that with 4M customers at an average of $150, which again multiplies to exactly $600M, and an $11B valuation set in 2025 against just $343.2M raised across three rounds.

ClickUp — the fast start

Zeb Evans told Latka in a November 2021 interview that ClickUp had reached $80M ARR that October, four years after founding. The profile's ladder since runs through rows flagged as estimates for 2023 and 2024 before a $300M figure recorded September 2025, sourced to LinkedIn — 100K customers at a $3K average contract value, which closes. Its $4B valuation dates to the $400M Series C raised in late 2021.

Zapier — $310M on $1.4M raised

The bootstrapped counterexample. Wade Foster confirmed on the Latka podcast in March 2019 that Zapier had crossed $50M ARR by September 2018; the profile now records $310M for October 2024, against total outside funding of $1.4M — a single early round. Its $5B valuation came from a 2021 secondary sale, not a primary raise. Zapier is what the third clause of the definition does when it is left alone: recurring revenue funding its own growth.

What the 2022 version of this page got wrong

The examples people argue about

Is Zoom a SaaS company?

Yes. It is freemium — the free tier caps meetings, and paid features stop working when a subscription lapses — but the paid product satisfies all three clauses: rented access, vendor-operated, paid again each period.

Is Netflix a SaaS company?

No, and this page previously said otherwise. Netflix bills monthly and streams through software, but what the customer is renting is content; the software is the counter it is sold over. Apply the stop-paying test from the definition post and what you lose is a catalogue, not a working tool. By the definition GetLatka uses — business software delivered as a service by the vendor that operates it — consumer streaming does not qualify, any more than the monthly insurance and staffing businesses examined in that post do.

Is WhatsApp a SaaS product?

No, and for a more basic reason: its users pay nothing recurring at all. Recurring revenue is the necessary first clause of the definition, even before the arguments about what is being rented. Slack is the instructive contrast — also workplace messaging, but sold to businesses per seat, per month.

For thousands more examples with CEO-reported revenue, the GetLatka SaaS database is the live version of this list.