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Pricing research is one of the most underused tools in product. Most companies set prices based on gut feel, competitive benchmarking, or cost-plus logic. The ones that do proper pricing research consistently find they’ve been undercharging - sometimes significantly 💰

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Why it’s hard

The core problem: you can’t just ask customers what they’d pay. They’ll either lowball you (anchoring to the cheapest option they can imagine) or tell you what they think you want to hear. Direct willingness-to-pay questions produce unreliable data. Good pricing research uses indirect methods that reveal preferences through behaviour or structured trade-offs, not stated intent.

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Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter

The most widely used pricing research method. You ask four questions:
  1. At what price would this be so cheap you’d question the quality?
  2. At what price would this start to feel like a bargain?
  3. At what price would this start to feel expensive but still worth considering?
  4. At what price would this be too expensive to consider?
Plot the responses and look for the intersection points. The “acceptable price range” sits between where too-cheap and too-expensive cross. The “optimal price point” is where not-cheap and not-expensive intersect. It’s a blunt instrument but fast to run and surprisingly reliable for directional decisions 💡

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Conjoint analysis

More rigorous and more complex. Conjoint presents respondents with pairs or sets of product configurations at different price points and asks them to choose. By analysing many choices, you can model how much each feature and price point influences the decision. It’s the gold standard for understanding feature-price trade-offs - useful when you’re deciding what to put in which tier as well as what to charge. Requires larger samples and more analysis than Van Westendorp.

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Fake door tests

Rather than asking about price, you show it. Put a pricing page with real numbers in front of real potential customers and measure click-through and sign-up behaviour. The pretotyping approach applied to pricing - let behaviour tell you what surveys can’t.

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What to do with the data

Pricing research gives you a range, not an answer. The research tells you where the market will tolerate a price. Your pricing model, positioning, and competitive context determine where within that range you should land 🙌 Lesson learned: every pricing research project I’ve seen has surprised the team. Usually upward. The instinct to price conservatively is strong, and it’s almost always wrong.