pricing-strategy
Pricing strategy
Pricing has three axes: packaging (what's in each tier), the pricing metric (what you charge for) and the price point (how much). "The value metric picks the pricing model", value sets the price between the next best alternative and perceived value, and "The goal of your first price is learning, not precision." This skill comes from [coreyhaines31/marketingskills, pricing] (MIT, Copyright (c) 2025 Corey Haines; the teardown's AI-agent lens credited to Kyle Poyar, Growth Unhinged), checked against Sawtooth Software for Van Westendorp, Google Search Central for structured data, OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawler docs, and Apple's and Google Play's price-change rules. It is written for SaaS and web products. App-store pricing, tiers and trials are in app-growth RETENTION-AND-MONETIZATION.md; in-app upgrade prompts in onboarding-and-upgrades SKILL.md; the offer around the price (bonuses, guarantees, deadlines) in offer-design SKILL.md; Stripe's catalog and price mechanics in stripe SKILL.md; converting visitors on the pricing page in cro SKILL.md.
Read the product context file first, .agents/product-context.md (anti-slop-copy CONTEXT.md); the source calls it .agents/product-marketing.md. Then ask what it doesn't cover [coreyhaines31/marketingskills, pricing]: product type, current pricing, target market (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), go-to-market motion (self-serve, sales-led, hybrid); the primary value, the alternatives customers consider, how competitors price; conversion rate, ARPU, churn, pricing feedback; and the goal (growth, revenue or profitability; moving upmarket or down).
Apply only the routes and checks for the selected job. Read a linked skill's named file from its installed folder when available, or from the linked source. Report an unavailable required reference instead of inventing it. [skill-authoring, DISTRIBUTION.md#composing-skills]
| The job | Read |
|---|---|
| The three axes, value-based pricing, the first price ($10/$100/$1,000, the $9 trap), the value metric, the eight models, combining them, the 10:1 value ratio, low prices and retention | MODELS.md |
| Tier count, Good-Better-Best, tier levers, the example tier table, persona packaging, freemium vs free trial, trial practice, card upfront, reverse trials, enterprise tiers | TIERS-AND-TRIALS.md |
| Van Westendorp (questions, curves, intersections, limits), MaxDiff, Gabor-Granger and conjoint, usage-value correlation | RESEARCH.md |
| Signs it's time to raise, the four ways, the staged rollout, grandfathering, App Store and Play consent rules | PRICE-CHANGES.md |
| Pricing page elements and psychology, the 10-dimension two-axis rubric, the paste test, structured data and AI bots, the report template, failure patterns | PAGE-TEARDOWN.md |