How to price your SaaS: a founder's method, not a guess

Ask a founder how they set their price and the honest answer is usually “$20 felt right.” Pricing is treated as a vibe when it's one of the highest-leverage decisions in the business — a 10% price change often moves profit more than a 10% change in volume or cost.

The good news: pricing has a method. It's not intuition, it's a sequence of answerable questions.

The sequence that sets a real price

Do the market research — what comparable products actually charge, and which model they use. Segment your buyers by willingness to pay, because they don't all value it the same. Pick the value metric — the thing you charge per. Choose the model that fits. Package it into tiers with real price points. Check the unit economics so the price actually works as a business. Then plan promotions and, crucially, a way to test the price.

Skip any step and you're back to guessing. Do them in order and the price falls out of the reasoning.

Why it rarely gets done

Each step is doable, but doing all of them is a research project most founders don't have time for — so they default to a round number and leave money on the table at both ends. The price-sensitive founder who'd pay $10 balks; the serious buyer who'd pay $50 gets a discount they never needed.

Running it as a workflow

Cadenly's Pricing Strategy workflow runs the whole sequence for you: it researches competitor pricing live, maps your willingness-to-pay segments, recommends a value metric and model, designs the tiers, checks the economics, and plans the tests — ending in a pricing strategy you can act on. You bring the few numbers only you know; it does the research and the reasoning.