I kept pricing off gut instinct + one competitor for way too long.
You know the move. competitor is $29 so you're $19. or you're $49 because "premium." neither is a strategy. it's just… anchoring with extra steps, so i did something kind of dumb and kind of useful: opened a bunch of public pricing pages and wrote them down. analytics tools, email tools, form builders, newsletter stuff, hosting, that kind of indie/bootstrappy SaaS. no login walls. if i couldn't see a number, i didn't invent one.
Sticker prices were less useful than noticing the shape:
- where free cuts off
- what the mid tier is actually selling (usually "remove friction," not "more features")
- whether the unit is seats, usage, projects, subscribers, etc.
copying one competitor's number skips all of that.
if you want the sheet
I packaged it as an excel workbook (pricing tab + a patterns tab + a blank experiments sheet). yellow/uncertain cells mean i refused to make a number up.
- free 12-row sample: https://payhip.com/b/0Ubzu
- full ~100 comps: https://payhip.com/b/l72jY ($19)
otherwise curious how people here actually did comps when they first shipped. interviews? gut? one rival's page? something else?
ended up with ~100 rows in a spreadsheet. product, category, url, model (flat / seat / usage / freemium+paid / whatever), entry/mid/top when it was on the page, free tier y/n, annual discount if obvious, a short note, date checked.
what got boring after enough of them
some of it stops being interesting once you've seen it twenty times:
- usable free tiers that do one real job, then you pay to remove branding / raise limits / unlock collab. not the "7-day demo of everything" free.
- annual is weirdly consistent. like, ~two months free / ~15–20% off shows up a lot.
- a ton of indie entry prices live in this unglamorous $9–25 band. not always, but enough that "$79 starter" starts looking like a choice, not a default.
- not everything is per-seat. flat-by-project / flat-by-workspace shows up more than i expected. i wasn't really looking for that at first.
none of that is a law. it's just what kept repeating on public pages.
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