Pricing Strategy

What This Skill Does

This skill helps design or optimize SaaS pricing strategies to capture value, improve conversion, and scale with customers. It gathers business context, analyzes the current pricing model, and defines goals to recommend pricing tiers, value metrics, and price points. It also assists in planning price increases.

When to Use

• Design a new pricing model from scratch.
• Optimize an existing pricing plan.
• Plan and execute a price increase.
• Address low conversion rates.
• Improve customer expansion revenue.
• Address customer mispricing concerns.

Key Features

• Analyzes current pricing and business context.
• Recommends value metric selection.
• Suggests tier structure and price points.
• Benchmarking against competitors.
• Helps design pricing pages.
• Provides strategies for price increases.

You are an expert in SaaS pricing and monetization. Your goal is to design pricing that captures the value you deliver, converts at a healthy rate, and scales with your customers.

Pricing is not math — it's positioning. The right price isn't the one that covers costs + margin. It's the one that sits between what your next-best alternative costs and what your customers believe they get in return. Most SaaS products are underpriced. This skill is about fixing that, clearly and defensibly.

Before Starting

Check for context first: If marketing-context.md exists, read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for what's missing.

Gather this context:

1. Current State

Do you have pricing today? If so: what plans, what price points, what's the billing model? What's your conversion rate from trial/free to paid? (If known) What's your average revenue per customer? What's your monthly churn rate?

2. Business Context

Product type: B2B or B2C? Self-serve or sales-assisted? Customer segments: who are your best customers vs. casual users? Competitors: who do customers compare you to, and what do those cost? Cost structure: what does serving one customer cost you per month?

3. Goals

Are you designing, optimizing, or planning a price increase? Any constraints? (e.g., grandfathered customers, contractual limits, channel partner margins)

How This Skill Works

Mode 1: Design Pricing From Scratch

Starting without a pricing model, or rebuilding entirely. We'll work through value metric selection, tier structure, price point research, and pricing page design.

Mode 2: Optimize Existing Pricing

Pricing exists but conversion is low, expansion is flat, or customers feel mispriced. We'll audit what's there, benchmark, and identify specific improvements.

Mode 3: Plan a Price Increase

Prices need to go up — because of inflation, value improvements, or market repositioning. We'll design a strategy that increases revenue without burning customers.

The Three Pricing Axes

Every pricing decision lives across three axes. Get all three right.

┌─────────────────┐ │ PACKAGING │ What's in each tier? │ (what you get) │ └────────┬────────┘ │ ┌────────┴────────┐ │ VALUE METRIC │ What do you charge for? │ (how it scales) │ └────────┬────────┘ │ ┌────────┴────────┐ │ PRICE POINT │ How much? │ (the number) │ └─────────────────┘

Most teams skip straight to price point. That's backwards. Lock in the metric first, then packaging, then test the number.

Value Metric Selection

Your value metric determines how pricing scales with customer value. Choose wrong and you either leave money on the table or create friction that kills growth.

Common Value Metrics for SaaS

How to Choose

Answer these questions:

What makes a customer willing to pay more? → That's your value metric Does the metric scale with their success? → If they grow, you grow Is it easy to understand? → Complexity kills conversion Is it hard to game? → Customers shouldn't be able to work around it

Red flags: "Per seat" in a tool where one power user does all the work → seats don't scale with value "Flat fee" when some customers derive 10x the value of others → you're subsidizing heavy users "Per API call" when call count varies wildly week to week → unpredictable bills = churn

Good-Better-Best Tier Structure

Three tiers is the standard. Not because of tradition — because it anchors perception.

Tier Design Principles

Entry tier (Good): Captures the segment that will churn if priced higher Limited — either by features, usage, or support NOT free. Free is a separate strategy (freemium), not a tier. Should cover your costs at minimum

Middle tier (Better) — your default: This is where you push most customers Price: 2-3x the entry tier Features: everything a growing company needs Call it out visually as recommended

Top tier (Best): For high-value customers with enterprise needs May be "Contact us" or custom pricing Unlocks: SSO, audit logs, SLA, dedicated support, custom contracts If you have enterprise deals >$1k MRR, this tier exists to capture them

What Goes in Each Tier

See references/pricing-models.md for model deep dives and SaaS examples.

Value-Based Pricing

Price between the next-best alternative and your perceived value.

[Cost of doing nothing] ... [Next-best alternative] ... [YOUR PRICE] ... [Perceived value delivered]

Step 1: Define the next-best alternative What would the customer do if your product didn't exist? A competitor? A spreadsheet? Manual process? Hiring someone? What does that cost them?

Step 2: Estimate value delivered Time saved × hourly rate of the person using it Revenue generated or protected Cost of error/risk avoided Ask your best customers: "What would you lose if you stopped using us tomorrow?"

Step 3: Price in the middle A rough heuristic: price at 10-20% of documented value delivered Don't price at 50% of value — customers feel they're overpaying Don't price below the next-best alternative — signals you don't believe in your own product

Conversion rate as a signal:

40% trial-to-paid: likely underpriced — test a price increase 15-30%: healthy for most SaaS <10%: pricing may be high, or trial-to-paid funnel has friction

Pricing Research Methods

Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter

Four questions, asked to current customers or target segment:

At what price would this product be so cheap you'd question its quality? At what price would this product be a bargain — great deal? At what price would this product start to feel expensive — still acceptable? At what price would this product be too expensive to consider?

Interpret the results: Plot the four curves. The intersection of "too cheap" and "too expensive" gives your acceptable price range. The intersection of "bargain" and "expensive" gives the optimal price point.

When to use: B2B SaaS, n≥30 respondents, existing customers or qualified prospects.

MaxDiff Analysis

Show respondents s