Pricing Strategy

Pricing Strategy

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

Before Starting

Read .agents/product-marketing-context.md if it exists — it contains product name, audience, and positioning context.

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

1. Business Context

• What type of product? (SaaS, marketplace, e-commerce, service)
• Current pricing (if any)?
• Target market? (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
• Go-to-market motion? (self-serve, sales-led, hybrid)

2. Value & Competition

• Primary value delivered?
• What alternatives do customers consider?
• How do competitors price?

3. Current Performance

• Conversion rate, ARPU, churn rate?
• Customer feedback on pricing?

4. Goals

• Optimizing for growth, revenue, or profitability?

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Pricing Fundamentals

The Three Pricing Axes

1. Packaging: What's included at each tier?
2. Pricing Metric: What do you charge for? (per user, usage, flat)
3. Price Point: The actual dollar amounts

Value-Based Pricing

• Customer's perceived value: The ceiling
• Your price: Between alternatives and perceived value
• Next best alternative: The floor
• Your cost to serve: Only a baseline, not the basis

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Value Metrics

The value metric is what you charge for. It should scale with the value customers receive.

Good value metrics: Align price with value, easy to understand, scale with growth, hard to game.

| Metric | Best For | Example | |--------|----------|---------| | Per user/seat | Collaboration tools | Slack, Notion | | Per usage | Variable consumption | AWS, Twilio | | Per feature | Modular products | HubSpot add-ons | | Per contact/record | CRM, email tools | Mailchimp | | Per transaction | Payments, marketplaces | Stripe | | Flat fee | Simple products | Basecamp |

Test: "As a customer uses more of [metric], do they get more value?" If yes, it's a good value metric.

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Good-Better-Best Framework

• Good (Entry): Core features, limited usage, low price
• Better (Recommended): Full features, reasonable limits, anchor price
• Best (Premium): Everything, advanced features, 2-3x Better price

Tier Differentiation

• Feature gating: Basic vs. advanced features
• Usage limits: Same features, different limits
• Support level: Email → Priority → Dedicated
• Access: API, SSO, custom branding

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Pricing Research

Van Westendorp Method

Four questions that identify acceptable price range:

1. At what price is it too expensive? (wouldn't consider)
2. At what price is it too cheap? (question quality)
3. At what price is it expensive but you'd consider it?
4. At what price is it a bargain?

Analyze intersections to find optimal pricing zone.

MaxDiff Analysis

Identifies which features customers value most. Show sets of features, ask most/least important. Results inform tier packaging.

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When to Raise Prices

Signs It's Time

Market signals: Competitors raised prices, prospects don't flinch, "it's so cheap!" feedback.

Business signals: Very high conversion (>40%), very low churn (/promotionalOffers`). The sold SKU often already has the retention offer built; the real bug is then the RC retention wizard mapping (Dashboard > Lifecycle > Retention), not a price write.

1. Only if the correct offer's own price points are wrong do you write — and write to the sold SKU, never a dead duplicate.

Watch for multiple coexisting annual SKUs that are easy to confuse (a product can have several annual products live at once: e.g. ` = "Annual full price", = the one actually sold, ` = a secret/discount variant, plus sibling-app variants). A ticket can name the wrong one. Also sanity-check the discount math against the sub's CONFIRMED current base when it shows multiple tiers (e.g. two different base prices on the same product). Corruption pattern seen in the wild: a "30% off" point that was only 25% off, and a foreign point at 2.3x base (a markup labeled as a discount). The deep ASC/RC catalog-diagnostic mechanics (price-point base64 decoding, raw curl recipes) belong in your store-CLI tooling's reference docs.

Apple & Google Regional Pricing Scripts

If your app is already PPP-priced live on both stores, CHECK the live per-territory price before recommending "re-run the PPP scripts" for a market. Emerging markets often already sit at or near your floor, so re-running the scripts moves almost nothing. When a low-price market still converts poorly, the blocker is frequently payment rails (card penetration, local billing support) and intent, NOT price, so lowering further will not help. Treat any older "uniform price worldwide, scripts never ran" note as potentially stale and verify against the live catalog.

Verify live prices (do this before any PPP recommendation):

• iOS: asc subscriptions pricing summary --subscription-id --territory (ISO3 like USA/IND/PHL).
• Android: Android Publisher API /subscriptions via a service-account JSON (androidpublisher scope); read basePlans[].regionalConfigs[].price.

A typical initial-ladder script set for a NEW product's territory pricing:

• update_apple_prices.py: maps PPP source data (e.g. Spotify per-country prices) to Apple price points per territory
• pricing_utils.py: shared PPP data and country code mappings
• spotify_prices_usd.csv: source PPP data (per-country reference prices)

Key config fields in each script's CONFIGURATIONS list:

• US_ANNUAL_USD: The US base price (annualized)
• MIN_ANNUAL_USD: Floor (annualized)
• MAX_ANNUAL_USD: Cap (annualized)
• PERIODS_PER_YEAR: 52 for weekly, 12 for monthly, omit for annual

Apple requires: an API key ID and issuer ID (store them in your environment / credential store) plus a .p8 key file. Google requires: a service_account.json in the scripts directory.

Always --dry-run first. Apple price changes are scheduled (not immediate) and require advance notice to existing subscribers.

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Related Skills

• churn-prevention: Cancel flows, save offers, revenue churn
• growth: Pricing page optimization, paywall CRO
• copywriting: Pricing page copy
• marketing-psychology / persuasion review: Pricing psychology principles
• revenuecat-cli: Pull subscription metrics, product catalog, and customer data for pricing analysis

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: exiao
• Source: exiao/pm-skills
• License: Apache-2.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.