Charging for it
Someone has to pay. This is the part I’m weakest at.
Can you put a price on it yet?
I’ll be honest: this is the part I’m weakest at, and I think it’s common among designers. We are comfortable talking about value right up until it has a number attached to it.
The first time I put a price on something of my own, I picked the number by looking at what other people charged and going slightly under. Nobody bought it. Then somebody wrote to ask whether there was a version with support, and offered roughly three times what I was asking. I had not been too expensive. I’d been describing the wrong thing, cheaply.
What I have learned since is that the signal you’re waiting for is simpler than the one you’re looking for. It’s not a survey and it’s not a competitor’s pricing page. It’s whether anybody has asked what it costs before you brought it up. That question is a person telling you they have already decided.
The other thing worth knowing: a price is far easier to change than to introduce. Waiting until the number feels right is a way of not deciding, and free users teach you almost nothing about what somebody will pay for. The first number will be wrong. Pick it anyway, tell your existing users before it goes public, and watch who leaves.
If nobody leaves, you were too cheap. That’s information, not a failure, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to hear it that way.
Three ways to lose
time here.
- Building a pricing page before a single person has asked the price.
- Tiers. They are usually a sign of not being sure what you’re selling, and people read that uncertainty accurately.
- Discounting to close the first customer. You learn nothing about what it’s worth and you have set the anchor.
Somebody asked how much it costs before you told them.
What to check
before you commit.
Everything at this stage comes back to one question — Can you put a price on it yet? Each of these takes a different run at it, and gives you a verdict rather than a score.
They are free and they take under a minute. That is the point: the cheapest thing you can do at this stage is find out you were about to be wrong, and the most expensive is finding out a quarter later.
There’s a version
where I help.
A working session on pricing
Bring what you know about who pays for what today. We pick a number, decide what would make you change it, and write down how you will tell the people already using it.
Four questions on that page tell you whether this is worth it for you — including when it’s not.
Words this check uses.
- One-way door
- A decision you live with rather than reverse: pricing customers have seen, a hire, a market, a promise made in public. Everything built afterwards inherits its shape.
- Willingness to pay
- Whether somebody would actually hand over money, which usage does not measure. The strongest signal is somebody asking what it costs before you bring price up.
About this stage.
When should I start charging for my product?
When somebody has used it a second time on their own, without you in the room. Before that, any price you set is measuring your persuasion rather than the product. After that, waiting mostly protects you from finding out.
How do I know what to charge?
Ask what they pay today for the thing they do instead, the spreadsheet, the agency, the afternoon of somebody’s time. That number is real and a survey answer is not. It is not a competitor’s pricing page either; that tells you what they hope to charge.
What if nobody pays?
That is information, and it arrives much cheaper than a year of building. If nobody leaves when you introduce a price, you were too cheap. If everybody leaves, the thing they liked was that it was free, which is a different product.