Schedars · Resource
SaaS Pricing Strategy Worksheet
A worksheet to land the first price for your SaaS product and validate it through interviews. The same steps we run when we help clients with pricing.
TL;DR
Don't derive your first price from a spreadsheet — it comes from 10–20 interviews. Ask "what would feel fair?", "what would feel expensive?", "what would feel suspiciously cheap?". The Pro tier sits between fair and expensive. Ship, measure conversion + churn, raise prices quarterly on data.
Three patterns — what and when
Per-seat
Per-user pricing scales with the customer's usage and revenue naturally. Make Starter free or very cheap, Pro the obvious upgrade, Enterprise with SSO + admin + SLA.
- Best for
- Collaboration tools (Notion, Slack, Linear, Figma)
- Structure
- Free / $X per user / month / Enterprise
- Sweet spot
- $15–$30 per user / month at Pro tier (B2B SaaS, 2026)
Usage-based
Customer pays for what they use; predictable cost only at scale. Pair with a free tier for self-serve onboarding, then charge per request, GB, minute. Need accurate metering.
- Best for
- Infrastructure-adjacent (Vercel, Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI API)
- Structure
- Free tier / $X per request / volume discounts at scale
- Sweet spot
- Trickier to implement, aligns price with value perfectly
Tiered subscription
Right when the value scales with feature access, not seats. Three tiers, anchored at $29 / $99 / $299/mo or $49 / $199 / $499/mo depending on positioning. The middle tier should be the price-anchored target.
- Best for
- Self-serve B2B SaaS where value scales with feature access
- Structure
- Starter $29 / Pro $99 / Enterprise $299/mo (or $49 / $199 / $499)
- Sweet spot
- Three tiers, middle as the obvious target
Worksheet — fill it in for your product
Print and walk through the steps. Each section is 5–15 minutes. The end of the worksheet gives you a defensible first price.
Step 1 · Product + ICP (5 min)
-
Your product in one sentence — what it does and for whom:
-
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — company size, vertical, role:
-
What problem are you solving — and what's it costing them today (time / money / risk)?
Step 2 · Pick your pattern (5 min)
Tick one (and why):
Why (one sentence):
Step 3 · Interview 10–20 prospects (1–2 weeks)
For each prospect, ask three questions:
- "What would feel fair for a tool like this?"
- "What would feel expensive?"
- "What would feel suspiciously cheap?"
Log answers — at least 10 rows:
| # | Prospect | Fair | Expensive | Suspiciously cheap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||
| 2 | ||||
| 3 | ||||
| 4 | ||||
| 5 | ||||
| 6 | ||||
| 7 | ||||
| 8 | ||||
| 9 | ||||
| 10 |
Step 4 · Draft 3 tiers (15 min)
Pro tier sits between "fair" and "expensive" from your interviews:
| Tier | Price / mo | Anchor (1-line) | Top 3 features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | |||
| Pro ★ | |||
| Enterprise |
Step 5 · Ship + iterate (ongoing)
- Annual plan with 15–20% discount from day one
- Track these 3 metrics weekly: signup → paid conversion, monthly churn, ARPU
- If conversion holds at current price for 90 days, raise 25% on new signups and measure
- If conversion drops less than 25%, you net more revenue per signup — done
- Grandfather existing customers for 12 months when raising
- Communicate raises clearly with the value added since the original price
Common mistakes to avoid
- Pricing too low to "get traction" — caps your CAC math without you knowing
- Copying competitor pricing without their cost structure or customer mix
- "Contact us" pricing on a self-serve $99/mo product — kills conversion
- No annual plan in v1 — leaves 15–25% revenue on the table
- Free tier without a sharp cut to paid — power users stay free forever
- Five tiers with twelve features each — nobody can decide
Want help with pricing?
We'll run this worksheet with you, do the interviews, and deliver a 3-tier proposal and iteration plan. Pricing Sprint is usually 1 week.