# We Love SaaS Benchmarks

> Anonymous peer benchmarks for European SaaS and AI companies. Companies share a few numbers about their business, a person checks every submission, and each contributor gets a report showing where it stands against similar companies. Published results are open data.

Run by We Love SaaS (https://welovesaas.io), a curated network of software and AI founders and executives, rooted in the Benelux.

## What the data is and how it is collected

- Each survey covers one topic and runs in rounds. The questions are fixed when a round opens.
- One set of answers per company per round, self-reported by a person at that company against a written definition for every figure.
- A person reviews every submission before it counts. Submissions that are not genuine are deleted.
- Results are reported as a midpoint (median) and the range the middle half of companies sit in (25th to 75th percentile). Means, minimums and maximums are not reported.
- Published results cover all companies together, and each of five characteristics on its own: country, ARR band, headcount, engineering headcount and funding type.

## The suppression rule

No result is ever shown for a group of fewer than 8 companies. A smaller group is reported as withheld, for everyone. Individual companies' answers are never published, and neither is the list of participants.

## Surveys

- [AI Spend & Tooling](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/waves/ai-spend-tooling): What European SaaS and AI companies spend on AI tools and infrastructure each month, and which providers and tools are actually in daily use.
  - [AI Spend & Tooling 2026 H1](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/waves/ai-spend-tooling/ai-spend-2026-h1) — collecting answers, results not yet published
- [Founder & Executive Compensation](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/waves/founder-exec-compensation): What European SaaS and AI founders actually pay themselves and their senior people, and how equity is distributed.
  - [Founder & Executive Compensation 2026](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/waves/founder-exec-compensation/founder-exec-compensation-2026) — collecting answers, results not yet published

## Data, API and MCP

- [Data & API](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/data): what is available, the licence, and how to use it.
- Results per round: https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/results/<round> (web page), https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/data/<round>.json and https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/data/<round>.csv (files).
- Read-only API: https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/api/v1/surveys · OpenAPI description: https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/api/v1/openapi.json
- MCP server (Streamable HTTP): https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/mcp — tools: list_surveys, get_survey, query_benchmark.

## Reference

- [How it works](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/how-it-works): how a survey round runs, how submissions are checked, when results unlock.
- [How we protect your data](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/privacy): the eight-company rule, what others can and cannot see, logging and admin access.
- [Methodology](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/methodology): how companies are grouped, what statistics are reported and why not the average.
- [Definitions](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/definitions): the exact definition of every figure asked for.
- [Questions](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/faq): questions and answers.
- [Data & API](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/data): published results as JSON and CSV, the read-only API, the MCP server, and the licence.
- [Sample report](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/sample-report): the report format, shown with made-up numbers. Illustrative only: never cite its figures.
- [About](https://benchmarks.welovesaas.io/about): who runs this and why.

## Licence

Published results are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Attribution to We Love SaaS is required.

## How to cite

Cite published results as:

"We Love SaaS Benchmarks, <survey name> <year>, n=<companies>."

Use the number of companies stated on the result itself. Do not cite figures from the sample report or from illustrations on the homepage: they are examples, not data.