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pricing-strategy

Expert guidance for SaaS pricing and monetization strategy. Design pricing that captures value, drives growth, and aligns with customer willingness to pay.

  • Area: Marketing
  • Category: marketing strategy
  • Level: beginner
  • Input: conversation
  • Output: document
  • Setup: none
  • Roles: CEO / Founder, Head of Sales, Product Manager

Selects monetization models, analyzes competitive pricing, designs tier structures, recommends value metrics, and conducts Van Westendorp analysis.

How you ask

  • “Design a three-tier pricing structure for our SaaS product”
  • “Analyze competitive pricing in our market”
  • “Should we offer a free trial or freemium model?”
  • “Run a Van Westendorp analysis for our pricing”

Inputs

  • profile — Scope-resolved profile: company.profile for own-business work; client.profile for client work. Caller resolves the path from the active client-id (self → company; otherwise → client).
  • offerings — Scope-resolved offerings: company.offerings for own-business work; client.offerings for client work.
  • icp — Scope-resolved ICP: company.icp for own-business work; client.icp for client work.
  • marketing-context — Positioning, competitors, and differentiation used to judge which revenue model the market will accept.
  • region-context — Regional business environment for the target market — Three-Layer Context layer 2; produced by regional-context.
  • request — The monetization question to answer, including any models already ruled in or out.
  • scope — company, or a client-id under client.root — a string with one reserved value, not a closed set
  • profile — Scope-resolved profile: company.profile for own-business work; client.profile for client work.
  • offerings — Current products, packaging, and prices the new structure has to replace or extend.
  • icp — Ideal customer profile used to set tier boundaries against real buying units.
  • marketing-context — Positioning and differentiation that the tier names and feature gates have to stay consistent with.
  • region-context — Currency, purchasing power, and regulatory pricing rules for the target market; produced by regional-context.
  • pricing-analysis — Research output from the research route, read back so tier price points rest on measured willingness to pay rather than assumption.
  • won-deal-evidence — Won-deal notes, call transcripts or win-loss analyses in the customers' own words, used to classify each offer component as Leader, Filler, Add-on or Killer. Absent, the classification is labelled a hypothesis.
  • request — The packaging problem to solve — number of tiers, which value metric is under consideration, known constraints.
  • icp — Ideal customer profile defining who the willingness-to-pay figures are meant to describe.
  • marketing-context — Named competitors and differentiation claims that set the comparison set for competitor price analysis.
  • region-context — Currency and purchasing-power baseline so price points from different markets are comparable.
  • survey-data — Raw Van Westendorp or MaxDiff responses exported from the survey tool. Absent, the route designs the instrument instead of analysing results.
  • request — The evidence question — which method, which segment, and what decision the numbers will feed.
  • offerings — The pricing in force today — the baseline the change is measured against.
  • icp — Ideal customer profile used to judge which existing cohorts absorb the change and which churn.
  • region-context — Regulatory notice periods and currency rules that constrain how a live price may be changed.
  • pricing-structure — Target structure from the pricing-structure route, read back when the change is a move to a designed structure rather than a flat increase.
  • request — The change under consideration and its trigger — margin pressure, repositioning, or a competitor move.

Outputs

  • Leader check, change rationale, grandfathering rule, customer comms plan, rollout sequence, success metrics, and rollback trigger.
  • Model comparison, fit assessment against segment and GTM motion, and the validation plan for the recommended model.
  • Offer component classification (Leader, Filler, Add-on, Killer), value metric, tier definitions, feature differentiation, and price points with the assumptions behind each.
  • Research findings, competitor price set, and acceptable-price range, each labelled with its evidence quality.