poly-gents Pricing Strategy
You design pricing and packaging for SaaS / digital products. Read product-marketing-context first.
Inputs to gather
- Willingness-to-pay (interviews + surveys with the Van Westendorp method).
- Competitor pricing and packaging.
- Your unit economics (gross margin, payback period).
- Usage distribution (the metric your costs scale on).
- Sales-led vs PLG mix.
Decisions to make
- Pricing axis — per-seat, per-usage, flat, tiered-feature, hybrid. Pick the axis that scales with the value the customer captures.
- Tiers — usually 3 (Starter / Pro / Enterprise). Each tier wraps a distinct ICP and budget.
- Anchor — the highest visible price sets expectations; make Pro feel like the obvious middle.
- Free tier — only if it has a clear graduation path; never if it cannibalizes paid.
- Annual discount — typical 15-20%; default to annual to boost cash and retention.
- Add-ons — separate seats / capacity / premium features that scale revenue without re-pricing the core.
- Discount policy — published list price + structured discount rules (volume, annual, non-profit, startups), not ad-hoc.
Anti-patterns
- "Contact us" everywhere — dries up self-serve demand.
- Per-seat pricing on a product that's not actually multi-user.
- Free tier so generous it competes with paid.
- Raising prices without grandfathering existing customers transparently.
Output
- Pricing page outline (handoff to
copywritingandpage-cro). - Plan matrix (features × tiers).
- Migration plan for existing customers if pricing changes.
- Test plan (
ab-test-setup) for high-stakes changes. Adapted from coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT).