Most founders underprice their SaaS out of fear or copy competitors blindly, both of which leave real money on the table. Here's how to run your own willingness-to-pay research and find a price that actually reflects what your product is worth.
Most founders get stuck figuring out how to price their SaaS product and end up making the same two mistakes: they either set a number that feels "safe" and hope nobody notices it's too low, or they open a competitor's pricing page and copy whatever's on it. Neither is a strategy. Both are guesses dressed up as decisions.
The honest version starts with a question most founders never ask: what is this actually worth to the customer, not what did it cost to build?
When Basecamp relaunched with flat pricing at $99 per month per company in 2013, the decision was deliberate. No per-seat charges. The founders had a specific reason: they wanted customers to stop rationing access and just use the product. That's a value metric decision, not a discount decision. They chose to compete on simplicity of pricing as much as simplicity of product.
Most founders don't have that clarity. They pick a number that feels low enough to be "reasonable" and high enough not to feel like a giveaway. That's not pricing. That's anxiety expressed in a spreadsheet.
The research on this is consistent. Price Intelligently, which has surveyed thousands of SaaS companies on their pricing practices, found that the average founder spends less than six hours on their initial pricing decision across the entire lifetime of the company. Less time than a single customer discovery interview. The result is predictable: most SaaS companies leave between 20% and 30% of potential revenue on the table by underpricing from day one, according to their data.
Willingness-to-Pay Research You Can Run Yourself
You don't need a pricing consultant to figure out what customers will pay. You need structured conversations and a willingness to hear uncomfortable numbers.
The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is a four-question framework that's been used by market researchers since the 1970s and costs nothing to run. In a customer interview or a survey, you ask: at what price would this feel too cheap to trust? At what price would it start to feel expensive? At what price would it feel so expensive you wouldn't buy it? And at what price would it feel like a genuine bargain? The four answers, plotted across a range of respondents, give you an acceptable price range and a point of perceived greatest value. It's not magic, but it beats your gut.
The bigger insights usually come in the conversation around those questions. When customers explain why a price feels too cheap, the answers tend to cluster: they don't trust it, they assume the product is limited, or they assume you'll go out of business. That's information about perceived value no spreadsheet captures. Ask follow-up questions. Listen for what problem they're solving, not just what feature they're using.
Run this with at least ten to fifteen current or potential customers before settling on a number. If you keep hearing that your current price is "fine," dig harder. Fine is almost always code for I'd have paid more.
One more thing worth knowing about these conversations: the customers who complain loudest about price are rarely your best customers. The ones who negotiate hardest at the bottom of your range tend to churn fastest once they're in. If you keep cutting your price to win the deals that feel hardest to close, you're probably building the wrong customer base.
Choosing Your Value Metric
The biggest pricing decision for a SaaS product isn't the number. It's what the number measures.
Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. They don't charge per seat or per feature tier. They charge as a percentage of value flowing through their platform, which means their revenue scales directly with their customers' success. That alignment isn't accidental. It's the whole strategy, and it's why Stripe can serve a solo founder and a large enterprise on the same basic pricing model without either feeling like they're getting the wrong end of the deal.
Per-seat pricing works when the product's value increases with more users inside an organization. Per-usage pricing works when value is tied to output volume. Per-outcome pricing, like Stripe's model, is harder to implement but tends to produce the best long-term retention because customers only pay more when things are going well for them.
The mistake founders make here is defaulting to per-seat pricing because everyone else does it. Ask yourself what happens when a customer gets ten times more value from your product. Does your revenue go up with them? If the answer is no, you've built a ceiling into your own business model without meaning to.
Figuring out the right value metric means asking customers what more value looks like in practice. More users on the platform? More transactions processed? More hours saved per week? The answers tell you what to charge against.
Running Pricing Tests Without Burning Existing Customers
Once you have a price range and a value metric, you test. The cleanest approach is to run new pricing only on new customers while keeping existing ones on legacy terms. This protects your current relationships and gives you a genuine cohort to evaluate.
Superhuman, the email client, launched in 2019 at $30 per month per user, which was roughly three to five times what comparable email tools charged at the time. The price came from research: the team had run structured interviews asking users what they'd paid for similar productivity tools, what value they attached to speed, and what they expected a professional tool to cost. The $30 number emerged from those conversations consistently. It held, and it became part of the positioning itself. Paying $30 a month for email is a statement about the kind of professional you are, which is exactly who Superhuman was building for.
Track a new cohort at your research-backed price for 60 to 90 days. Look at activation rates, support volume, and churn in the first three months. Early churn is rarely a pricing problem. If customers are barely using the product before canceling, you have an onboarding problem. If qualified leads are consistently dropping off at the pricing page, that's signal worth acting on. The goal isn't a price that nobody objects to. It's a price that the right customers pay without much deliberation.
What Competitors Charge Is Context, Not a Strategy
Copying a competitor's pricing page is understandable. The page is right there. The numbers are public. It feels like research. It isn't.
You don't know whether your competitor's pricing is profitable. You don't know whether they're growing at that number or slowly bleeding customers. You don't know whether their cost structure, their customer segment, or their sales motion resembles yours at all. A competitor charging $49 per month might be doing it because their investors told them to grow users fast and figure out monetization later. Replicating that decision without knowing any of that isn't benchmarking. It's just copying uncertainty.
What competitors charge tells you roughly where the market's mental baseline sits, and that context is genuinely useful. But your job is to understand what your specific product is worth to your specific customer and price from there. If you're genuinely better at solving a particular problem for a particular kind of user, you can charge more. Most founders never find out because they never go looking.
Also read: How to Build a Personal Brand as a Founder Before You Have Anything to Sell • How to Automate Business Operations with AI Agents Without Hiring an Engineer • How to Write a Cold Email to an Investor That Actually Gets a Reply
