Pricing & Packaging Strategy
Design pricing, tiers and the value metric that scales with what you deliver.
A recommended pricing model, tiers, price points and what to test first.
Pricing sits at the intersection of value, psychology and arithmetic, and each seat covers a way it goes wrong: the Pricing Strategist designs the model, the Economist tests it against willingness-to-pay, and the Behavioural Economist checks how the tiers read to an actual buyer scanning the page. The Sales Leader reports what happens in real negotiations, the CFO does the margin arithmetic, and the Devil’s Advocate attacks the number everyone is being polite about.
Help us design (or fix) our pricing and packaging, and argue it out properly. PRODUCT & VALUE: [what it does, the core value, and who gets the most value from it] CUSTOMER: [segments, their willingness to pay, the budget it comes from] CURRENT PRICING (if any): [model, price points, what is and is not working] COMPETITORS / ALTERNATIVES: [what the customer would otherwise use and pay] Debate: 1. The pricing model — subscription vs usage vs per-seat vs tiered — and which aligns price with value delivered. 2. The value metric that should scale the price (the thing that grows as the customer succeeds). 3. Packaging — how many tiers, what goes in each, the good/better/best and the anchor. 4. Specific price points and the psychology around them. 5. The risk of leaving money on the table versus pricing out adoption. FINAL SYNTHESIS: - A recommended model, tiers and concrete price points with rationale. - The single value metric to price on. - The one pricing experiment to run first, and the metric that proves it.
An illustrative excerpt for a hypothetical brief of this type: A B2B analytics startup charges a flat $99/month; its heaviest customer runs 40× the queries of its lightest, and the founders are debating usage-based pricing versus three seat-based tiers. Every real run is generated fresh from your specifics, debated across rounds, and audited before the verdict.
The 40× spread is the whole case: flat pricing means your best customer is subsidised by your smallest. But the value metric should be the thing that grows as they succeed — queries are a cost metric, and customers resent paying for costs. Price on seats with query allowances, so the invoice grows with adoption rather than with a meter they fear.
Whatever the metric, unpredictability is what kills the deal psychologically. A buyer who cannot forecast the invoice will not champion the purchase internally. If any usage component survives this debate it needs a hard cap or a pre-agreed band — “roughly this much, never more than that” is what gets a budget owner to sign.
From the deals I run: three tiers works only if the middle tier is where you actually want them to land, and the current draft makes the top tier the honest fit for the 40× customer at a price that triggers procurement review. Land them mid-tier, and let usage growth force the upgrade conversation next year — with the data on your side.
Nobody has defended the flat $99, so note what you lose by leaving it: the pricing page that closes in one glance. Every tier and allowance you add buys revenue capture and costs conversion. The synthesis should name that trade explicitly instead of pretending complexity is free.
Prefer drop-and-go? Use the Pricing & Packaging Strategy tool — team pre-seated, included with Plus.
Can the council recommend actual price points, not just a model?
Yes — the final synthesis commits to a recommended model, tiers and concrete numbers with the rationale, plus the single value metric to price on. The numbers are grounded in what you share about customers, alternatives and costs, and the verdict flags which of them deserve a real-world test before you publish a pricing page.
Should I raise prices on existing customers too?
That is treated as its own decision inside the debate — grandfathering, migration windows and the trust cost of repricing loyal accounts get argued separately from the new-customer model, because the two calls fail differently. The recommendation states which change to make first and which to defer.
How is this better than copying a competitor’s pricing page?
A competitor’s pricing encodes their costs, their segment and their mistakes. The debate prices your value metric against your buyer’s willingness to pay — and the Devil’s Advocate exists precisely to attack comfortable anchors like “the market charges $99, so we should”.