Money, pricing & model

How many pricing tiers should I have and how should I package them?

Three tiers is the sweet spot: a clear entry plan, a 'most people pick this' middle tier, and a premium tier that makes the middle look reasonable. Package around customer segments and their willingness to pay, not around random feature lists. Always have an enterprise 'call us' option so you never leave big money on the table.

Go deeper

3 resources, 3 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Patrick Campbell built ProfitWell on pricing data from thousands of companies, and this is the single best free deep-dive on SaaS pricing strategy. It's the canonical starting point for value metrics, segments, and packaging.

Pricing Your SaaS Product

From lennysnewsletter.com by Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell), via Lenny's Newsletter long-form guide

  • Get your value metric right and you can afford to get other things wrong
  • Pricing is built on quantified buyer personas and willingness to pay
  • Optimize pricing quarterly, it's an ongoing process, not a one-time decision
Open lennysnewsletter.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

The most concrete guide to actually measuring what customers will pay, including survey methods and tier design. It turns pricing from guesswork into a research-driven process.

The Ultimate Guide to Willingness to Pay

From lennysnewsletter.com by Lenny Rachitsky & Patrick Campbell long-form guide

  • Measure willingness to pay directly through structured customer research
  • Design tiers around distinct customer segments, not arbitrary feature bundles
  • Localize pricing by market and currency to capture willingness to pay everywhere
Open lennysnewsletter.com →
▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Kevin Hale from Y Combinator lays out the acquisition-cost and lifetime-value math in plain language, framed around how much you can afford to spend to win a customer. It is aimed at first-time founders, so there is no jargon wall, just the reasoning you need to set a target CAC. He is also refreshingly blunt that leaning only on paid acquisition is a weak growth story, which is worth hearing early.

Startup Pricing 101

On Y Combinator (Startup School) by Kevin Hale

Startup Pricing 101
  • How much you can spend to acquire a customer falls out of your pricing and how long that customer stays, so pricing and CAC are the same conversation.
  • You can estimate a target CAC before any sales by working backward from margin and expected customer lifetime.
  • Treat paid channels with suspicion: if ads are the only way you grow, your unit economics have to be tight to survive.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

People also ask

How do I decide how much to charge for my product? 3 → What is a value metric and why does it matter for pricing? 2 → Am I charging too little for my product? 3 → How do I raise prices without losing my existing customers? 3 → How should I price for the Indian market versus global customers? 3 → How do I actually run a pricing conversation on a sales call without freezing when they ask 'what does it cost'? 3 →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & unit economics, our D2C track.

I'm not a finance person, what books/records do I actually need to keep from day one? 3 → What is cohort analysis, and why does it matter more than a single repeat-rate number? 3 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Finance & Accounting.

How do founders use AI for bookkeeping, invoicing, runway and burn analysis? 4 → Why build financial models with AI instead of from a blank spreadsheet? 5 →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Close deals and price right, our GTM track.

I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it? 4 → I have no idea what to charge. How do I pick a first price? 4 →

Also in Wealth

The same ground, over in Founder money foundations, our Wealth track.

How much should I pay myself as a founder? 2 → How big should my emergency fund be when my income is lumpy? 3 →
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