Here’s something most founders don’t want to hear: that slow growth you’re experiencing? It might not be a marketing problem.
I know, I know. You’ve been grinding on acquisition, tweaking your messaging, testing new channels. But when we troubleshoot growth with SaaS companies, pricing ends up being one of the first things we look at – and it’s often one of the biggest levers they’re not pulling.
The thing is, most founders don’t think pricing is actually what’s holding them back. And that’s exactly why it stays broken.
Why pricing gets ignored (and why that’s dangerous)
Pricing doesn’t get the same love that customer acquisition does. There’s way more content about marketing tactics than there is about monetization strategy. And it makes sense – in the early days, founders are just trying to survive. They’re focused on getting customers, any customers, and pricing feels like something to figure out later.
But here’s what happens: you set your pricing once by looking at competitors, make some educated guesses about your value metrics, and then… you basically never touch it again. Or worse, you tinker with it randomly based on conference advice without any real data backing your decisions.
I’ve seen companies change pricing five or six times in two years with everything staying flat. I’ve also seen companies follow the “just double your prices” advice too literally for too long – and while they might not see immediate churn, six to eight months later customers start questioning why they’re paying so much and quietly leave.
That long-term churn? That’s what kills you. Because by the time you notice it in your net revenue retention charts, you’ve already been hemorrhaging revenue for months.
The three phases of pricing
Most companies move through three distinct phases when it comes to pricing. Understanding where you are helps you know what to do next.
Phase 1: Survival pricing
This is where everyone starts. You look at competitors, figure out your value metrics (seats, usage, whatever makes sense for your product), and put something out there.
And you know what? That’s fine. When you’re pre-$1M ARR, this is totally acceptable. You really don’t know if you have product-market fit until you charge for something, so whatever it takes to get pricing up there and start collecting money – do it.
Just make sure you’re not creating pricing that’s unsustainable (where it costs you more to deliver than what you’re making). But beyond basic profitability, don’t overthink it.
Phase 2: Optimization and testing
This is where the real work happens. Phase 2 is about pulling different levers in pricing to understand your ceilings and floors – what’s the most people will pay, what’s the least that makes sense, and how can you structure things to make buying a no-brainer for your best customers.
The key word there is “qualified customers.” Not everybody and their grandma. Your absolute best paying customer should feel like your pricing is obvious, seamless, effortless. No emotional, mental, or physical barriers to handing over their credit card.
Most of the companies we work with are in Phase 2. They know something’s not quite right with pricing, but they’re not sure what. This is where you need a real process – which we’ll get into in a second.
Phase 3: Flying
This is the promised land. Your pricing is dialed in. You’ve got solid net revenue retention. Expansion revenue happens naturally through add-ons or plan upgrades. Your distribution across plans makes sense – not necessarily perfectly even, but balanced enough that you know people are finding the right fit.
In Phase 3, you’re not done with pricing forever. Markets shift (hello, AI), your product evolves, new competitors enter. You’ll still need to adjust pricing as you go. But when you have a solid foundation, those adjustments are way easier. You’re not overhauling everything from scratch – you’re iterating on something that already works.
Companies like Intercom and Zendesk have had to completely overhaul pricing after years of incremental tweaks made it less palatable for customers. Sometimes you do have to go back to Phase 2. But if you do the work right the first time, you can avoid those painful, public pivots.
How to actually do pricing (the Phase 2 process)
Alright, so you know you need to work on pricing. What’s the actual process?
Fair warning: this is work. If you’ve never done this before, the first time will feel intense. There’s a lot of information flying around and it’s hard to know what’s signal versus noise. But it’s also learnable, and once you build the muscle, it gets easier.
Here’s the three-step framework we use:
Step 1: Pricing interviews (including UX interviews)
Start by talking to 10 of your absolute best paying customers. Not just your highest LTV customers – mix in some who are very active but maybe more neutral in terms of feedback. Incentivize these interviews.
Your goal is simple: get feedback on the pricing as it is. What works? What doesn’t? Where do they get stuck? Would they upgrade? Why or why not?
Here’s where it gets interesting: ask Van Westendorp questions. These are four specific pricing questions that sound like:
- At what price would this feel like a bargain?
- At what price would this feel like a stretch but still worth it?
- At what price would this feel so expensive you wouldn’t buy it?
- At what price would this feel so cheap you’d question the quality?
Most researchers only use Van Westendorp in surveys, but we ask it in person first. Getting people to commit to a number in real-time is psychologically revealing. Even if the exact number isn’t reliable (people overestimate or underestimate what they’d actually pay), the why behind the number is gold.
You should also do UX pricing interviews – about five of them with customers or even strangers who’ve never seen your product. Have them review your pricing page. What makes sense? What’s confusing? What anxieties come up? What did they miss?
Just doing these interviews alone—before you change a single thing – will give you 10 actionable insights. I’ve literally given this advice for free in calls and had people come back saying they increased revenue by 30% just from what they learned.
Step 2: Willingness-to-pay survey
You need more than 10 data points, so now you’re running a survey. Aim for at least 25-50 responses from a mix of customers (and maybe some qualified prospects if your customer base is small).
This survey should include:
Van Westendorp questions (the same four from the interviews, but now you’re getting volume). You can do open text boxes or ranges/sliders depending on how much you want to normalize the data. Open text gives you more color but requires cleanup. Ranges give you structured data but you need to be careful not to cap yourself too low.
MaxDiff questions instead of Likert scales. Instead of asking people to rank each feature 1-5 on importance (which just results in everything being “very important”), use MaxDiff. Show them a set of features and ask: which is MOST important to you, which is LEAST important?
This forces prioritization. When you analyze the results, you subtract the “least important” votes from the “most important” votes for each feature, and suddenly you have a clear hierarchy.
You can use MaxDiff for:
- Feature prioritization
- Understanding which add-ons would be most valuable
- Figuring out preferred value metrics (seats vs. usage vs. transactions, etc.)
Qualification questions so you can segment responses later. Role, company size, industry, how they use the product – whatever helps you identify your best customer segments.
One note on optics: if you have a large customer base, you might not want to blast this to everyone (it signals you’re changing pricing). Send it to a subset. But if you have a small base, go ahead – just make sure people understand you’re being thoughtful about this, not just randomly changing things.
Step 3: Product analytics
Now you’re diving into your product data. If you’re using Amplitude, PostHog, Mixpanel, whatever – this is where you open up the hood.
The fancy pricing consultants go hard on this step. They’re analyzing overlap between features getting used in each plan versus how much usage is actually happening. They’re segmenting by customer type, looking at cohorts, finding patterns.
What you’re looking for: which segments use which features? How does that vary by plan? By LTV? By industry?
For example, you might discover that certain segments use specific types of features in a particular way, and that should actually influence how you structure your plans. Maybe Industry A barely uses Feature X but it’s prominently featured in your top plan. Maybe your mid-tier plan is perfect for one segment but completely wrong for another.
Here’s the thing though: what you analyze in Step 3 depends entirely on what you learned in Steps 1 and 2. The interviews and survey tell you where to dig. Product data can’t tell you why something is happening – it just shows you patterns. That’s why you need both qualitative and quantitative.
Used data is more reliable than what people tell you (humans overestimate and underestimate their behavior constantly), but it doesn’t tell you where to look. The combination is what creates real insights.
Synthesizing into pricing hypotheses
After those three steps, you’ll have a mountain of information. Now you need to synthesize it into 2-3 pricing hypotheses.
Here’s what’s interesting about pricing: there are many wrong answers, but usually a few right ones. You’re not looking for the one perfect pricing model. You’re looking for 2-3 different structures that could work based on what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re willing to test.
From there, you’re moving into Step 4: actually implementing pricing experiments. You’re testing your hypotheses, learning from them, and iterating. This is the scientific method applied to pricing – observe, hypothesize, gather data, design experiments, learn, repeat.
Your options: DIY, assisted, or full-service
Reading through that process, you might be thinking: “This sounds like a lot of work.” You’re right. It is.
So what are your options?
Option 1: DIY
If you’re bootstrapped, profitable, and genuinely excited about learning pricing, do it yourself. I highly recommend this if the idea energizes you rather than drains you.
Start by learning from the best. Follow Patrick Campbell’s content from Price Intelligently and ProfitWell – he’s basically the king of SaaS pricing and churn. Kristen Berman at Irrational Labs has great willingness-to-pay guides. Marcos Rivera’s book Street Pricing is solid (I agree with about 90% of it).
The key is that you’re building a practice. The first time is hard, but then it becomes a muscle. And you should be reviewing pricing at least once a year anyway, so learning how to do this yourself pays dividends.
Option 2: Assisted/coaching (the scrappy option)
Maybe you don’t have time to figure this out on your own, but you also don’t have $100K-$200K to spend on a fancy pricing consultancy.
This is where providers like us come in. We run 4-6 week pricing projects that walk you through the entire process, show you how it’s done, and help you arrive at actionable pricing hypotheses. The goal is to teach you the process so you can do it yourself next year (maybe with light advisory support).
This works best when you know you need to make progress on pricing but you’re stuck. You need someone to guide you through it once so you can internalize the practice. The data fidelity here is probably around 70% – not perfect, but way better than guessing.
Price range for this type of work: typically $15K-$50K depending on complexity and provider.
Option 3: Full-service pricing consultancy
If you’re doing $5M+ in ARR, spending $100K-$200K on a specialized pricing consultancy starts to make sense. At that scale, that investment is nothing compared to what you’ll unlock – you could easily 10x the spend in new revenue.
These firms provide extremely high data fidelity (90%+ accuracy). They’re doing deep, intense analysis across product usage, qualitative research, everything. Many have proprietary platforms that can model different pricing scenarios and predict your growth. It’s impressive and it’s pricey.
Some also charge a percentage of future revenue on top of the base fee. Your mileage may vary on whether that’s worth it – for some enterprise companies it’s a drop in the bucket, for others it’s a hard pass.
The key distinction: if you haven’t touched pricing in 10 years or you’ve only been tinkering without real data, you probably don’t need 99% fidelity yet. You just need to do something structured. Once you’re at $5M-$10M+ and you’ve already optimized once, that’s when the fancy firms make sense.
How to roll out new pricing (without freaking everyone out)
Here’s a critical tip: when you launch new pricing, only roll it out to new customers first.
Put it on the website. Make it the default for new signups. But don’t immediately migrate your existing customer base.
Why? Because if it doesn’t work, you’ll know within a few months. And if it does work, you’ll see dramatically better net revenue retention in those new cohorts. Once you’ve confirmed it’s working (usually by the 6-month mark), then you can think about how to migrate existing customers.
This approach lets you run real experiments without burning your current customer base. It’s like A/B testing, but for your entire business model.
And track everything. How’s distribution across plans? How’s churn compared to your old pricing? How’s NRR at 6 months, at 12 months? The data will tell you if you’re on the right track.
The real secret: just start reviewing pricing regularly
Here’s the thing – you don’t need to do a full 4-6 week pricing sprint every single year. But you do need to intentionally look at pricing every year.
Pull up your distribution across plans. Check net revenue retention at 12 months for each plan. Look at churn patterns. Ask yourself: do these value metrics still make sense? Are we hearing feedback that pricing feels off?
Maybe you make small tweaks. Maybe you realize you need a bigger overhaul. But the practice of reviewing keeps you from going five years without touching it and wondering why growth has stalled.
And if you run an annual customer survey anyway, throw in a pricing question. Get a pulse check. If you notice sentiment dropping, that’s your signal to dig deeper.
The commitment – mentally and energetically – to think about pricing and monetization regularly is the hard part. But it’s also one of the easiest levers you have to pull. Easier than trying to 3x your marketing budget or completely rebuilding your product.
You just have to actually pull it.
Need help identifying your pricing opportunities? That’s something we can help with. We run focused pricing projects that walk you through the entire process while teaching you how to do it yourself in the future. If you’re stuck or just know you’ve been ignoring this lever for too long, let’s talk.