When there's no competitor to benchmark, you price a SaaS product by asking customers directly what it's worth to them, not by guessing what feels fair.
Every SaaS pricing guide on the internet tells you to open five competitor pricing pages, build a comparison table, and land somewhere in the middle. That works fine if you're the tenth project management tool or the fortieth CRM. It falls apart the moment you've built something nobody else sells yet. How do you price a SaaS product when there's no comparison table to build? You go straight to the people who'll actually pay for it, and you stop pretending a spreadsheet of imaginary competitors will tell you anything true.
Founders in genuinely new categories keep making the same mistake: they invent a phantom competitor set anyway. They say things like "we're kind of like Notion crossed with Zapier," then price at 80% of that imagined blend. That's not a SaaS pricing strategy. It's a guess dressed up as research, and it usually prices you either far below what the product is worth or so low you can't fund the roadmap that made it novel in the first place.
Before you touch a pricing page, talk to twenty people who've used your product or your closest working prototype. Not a survey blasted to a mailing list. Actual conversations, ideally on a call, where you ask what they were doing before your tool existed, what that cost them in time or money, and what they'd have paid to make that problem disappear a year ago. You're not asking "would you pay $49 a month?" That question produces useless, polite yeses. You're asking them to describe the cost of the problem in their own terms, then you do the math on what solving it is worth.
This is where most early pricing research goes wrong. Founders ask leading questions and get flattering answers. A prospect who likes you will tell you almost any price sounds fine, right up until the invoice arrives. The fix isn't a smarter question, it's a different kind of question, and that's exactly what the Van Westendorp method was built for.
The Van Westendorp Method, and Why Superhuman Used It
Van Westendorp price sensitivity testing asks four questions instead of one: at what price would this be so cheap you'd doubt its quality, at what price would it be a bargain, at what price would it start to feel expensive, and at what price would it be too expensive to consider. Plot the answers across your interview sample and you get a range, not a single number, bounded by a floor where people get suspicious and a ceiling where they walk away.
Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman, used exactly this approach when the email client had no real precedent to price against. He didn't just run the four Van Westendorp questions once and pick a number. He built what he called a product-market fit engine: surveying users on how disappointed they'd be if Superhuman disappeared, then cross-referencing that disappointment score against what different segments said they'd pay. The founders who said they'd be "very disappointed" without it were willing to pay far more than the median respondent, and that gap is what told Superhuman its price sensitivity data wasn't one market, it was several. That's a real, checkable case, Vohra wrote it up in detail for First Round Review, and it's the clearest public example of a founder pricing a genuinely new category by asking rather than guessing.
The lesson isn't "copy Superhuman's exact process." It's that willingness-to-pay data, gathered properly, replaces the competitor benchmark you don't have. You don't need thirty responses to see the pattern. You need honest ones.
Value-Based Pricing Beats Cost-Plus When You're First
Cost-plus pricing, tallying your infrastructure and support costs and adding a margin, feels safe because it's defensible on a spreadsheet. It's also the wrong instinct for a novel product, because it prices you against your own costs instead of against what the product replaces or unlocks for the customer. If your tool saves a ten-person operations team fifteen hours a week, that's the number that matters, not what your AWS bill looks like.
Value-based pricing means anchoring your price to a fraction of the value you create, not a markup on what you spend. If a customer interview tells you your product replaces a $60,000-a-year contractor, or prevents a compliance fine that hit them once for $40,000, that's your anchor. Price at a fraction of that value and you're still an obvious yes. Price at your hosting cost plus 30%, and you've left most of the value on the table while also, often, underpricing the product relative to what it's actually worth.
This is harder when you're first to market, because there's no public number to point to that validates your reasoning. That's exactly why the interviews matter more here than anywhere else. You're building the number yourself, from what customers tell you the alternative costs them.
Setting Tiers Without a Reference Point
Once you have a defensible range from Van Westendorp data and value conversations, don't rush to build five tiers. Early-stage SaaS pricing model design for startups should start with one or two tiers, not the elaborate ladder you see on mature companies' pricing pages. Basecamp famously ran on a single flat price for years before adding options, precisely because a simple price is easier to test and easier to explain to a customer who has no reference point of their own either.
Pick a metric that scales with the value the customer gets, seats, usage volume, outcomes delivered, not one that's convenient for your billing system. Then price your entry tier near the low end of your Van Westendorp range and treat your top tier as the ceiling number, adjusted down slightly so it isn't the exact price people said they'd walk away at.
None of this is permanent. Revisit the interviews every quarter for the first year, because in a new category the willingness-to-pay ceiling moves fast as customers understand the product better and as competitors, inevitably, show up. Pricing blind isn't a one-time exercise you finish before launch. It's the first data point in a process you keep running until a real market, with real comparables, finally exists around you.
Also read: How to Value a Pre-Revenue Startup When There Is No Revenue • How to Build a Personal Finance Dashboard With AI Before You Talk to a Wealth Advisor • How Much Runway Do You Need Before Raising, and How to Model It
