Set or revise pricing for any product by triangulating value, competition, and cost floor into a recommended structure, price points, and a test plan. Use when someone asks "what should I charge", "how do I price my product", "are we priced too low", "should we go usage-based or flat", or is preparing a repricing or a new-product launch. Do NOT use for designing SaaS tier ladders, value metrics, and expansion packaging in detail - use saas-pricing instead; for gym front-end offers and guarantees use gym-pricing-and-guarantees; for checking whether the resulting price produces healthy CAC payback use unit-economics.
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name: Pricing Strategy
description: Set or revise pricing for any product by triangulating value, competition, and cost floor into a recommended structure, price points, and a test plan. Use when someone asks "what should I charge", "how do I price my product", "are we priced too low", "should we go usage-based or flat", or is preparing a repricing or a new-product launch. Do NOT use for designing SaaS tier ladders, value metrics, and expansion packaging in detail - use saas-pricing instead; for gym front-end offers and guarantees use gym-pricing-and-guarantees; for checking whether the resulting price produces healthy CAC payback use unit-economics.
---
# Pricing Strategy
Price is positioning: it tells the market what the product is worth before anyone uses it. The costly mistake this skill prevents is defaulting to cost-plus or copying a competitor's number - pricing is usually the least-tested lever in the business, and underpricing quietly donates margin the founder never gets back. Anchor on the value delivered, then sanity-check against competition and cost.
## Operating procedure
Work the steps in order. Value must be quantified before a structure makes sense, and the structure must be chosen before individual price points mean anything.
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Collect these before recommending anything. Where the user cannot answer, apply the default and label the number a guess.
1. Buyer segments: who buys, split by size, use case, or urgency. Default: assume two segments - a self-serve smaller buyer and a larger buyer with real budget.
2. The measurable outcome per segment: hours saved, revenue gained, cost avoided, risk removed - in the customer's units, not the product's.
3. What the realistic alternatives cost: direct competitors, a spreadsheet, a hire, or doing nothing.
4. Variable cost to deliver one unit (this is only the floor input, never the anchor).
5. The growth vector: does a customer's value grow through more people using it, more volume flowing through it, or more capability unlocked?
6. If already selling: current price, win rate, and how often price objections actually come up.
### Step 2: Quantify willingness to pay by segment… install to load the full skill