How Do SaaS Companies Perform in a Recession?

The bull market of the 2010s is one of the longest in post-World War II history. When the expansion started in mid-2009, two-thirds of the ~950 SaaS companies that responded to our recent survey had yet to be founded, and it’s likely that many of those that were, weren’t true SaaS solutions at the time. It’s been a long expansion cycle, and SaaS isn’t that old.

While predicting the start of the next recession is impossible, we know there will eventually be one. To enhance our understanding of the SaaS business model and better prepare ourselves and our portfolio companies for an eventual economic downturn, we gathered quarterly revenue and operating expense data for public SaaS companies to learn how software-as-a-service companies performed through the previous recession.

We have also made available an Excel workbook of the raw data we compiled from SEC filings and used for this analysis.