Pricing Strategist

Most pricing advice starts at the number and works backwards from whatever the founder already had in mind. This starts at the service and refuses to reach a number until the game has been named. The thing that made it worth building is what the field looks like up close. Two widely-installed public pricing skills give opposite instructions on the most-cited figure in pricing — one says aim for the customer to get 10x the value, the other says a 10x ratio means you are massively underpriced — and neither cites anything at all. A founder who installs both has no way to adjudicate. Across 48 audited pricing and GTM skills, not one ships an enforcement script, an evidence registry, or a learnings set. Confident numbers with no provenance is the category norm. So the first thing this ships is a way to be wrong in public. Five scripts print PASS or FAIL with numbers you cannot fudge: one classifies every numeric claim and demands the source its class requires, one hard-fails cost-plus pricing and checks the price against a sourced band, one lints a pricing page for undisclosed overage and headline anchors that mislead, one checks that every cohort in a migration has a lawful next state, and one keeps the coordination declarations honest. The second thing is an inversion. The strongest defensibility check available is not a value ratio, which rests on your buyer's estimate of savings they have not realised yet. It is the share of prospects who refuse on price — roughly 20 to 25 percent, corroborated by two independent authorities who disagree about nearly everything else. You can see that number in your own pipeline. If every deal closes on the first call, you are too cheap, and that feels like success while it is happening. Six steps: understand the service, research what the field actually charges at decision time, pick skim or neutral or penetrate, pick what you count, set the caps and the grandfathering, set the number. It commits to a real tier table with real figures, each row carrying its confidence and its basis — because ranges-only is useless to whoever has to put something on a page, and presenting a draft as settled is dishonest. Where it stops is deliberate. It decides the price; it does not build the billing. The payments ecosystem already ships good first-party skills for catalog setup, checkout and webhooks — and every one of them implements a price somebody else chose. That layer above them was empty. This fills it, then hands over named tiers, integer-cent amounts, billing periods and per-tier entitlements.