Right but on-prem doesn't mean you escape SaaS pricing. It'll still be $10/user/mo but now you have to run it too. A lot of times you'll pay a premium on the hosted price to get an on-prem version.
Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.
That depends heavily on how competitive the sector is. Restaurant POS software covers a the largest array of different companies and businesses models I’m aware of. SaaS is generally quite expensive in that market.
In the bits in the box days, quite a lot of the world was skipping version numbers. That was a huge reason for SaaS pricing in the first place. Worse boxed software generally needed some improvement to justify upgrading, SaaS is heavily optimized for rent seeking.
Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.