What is a fair way to price when I'm selling to a mix of small startups and large companies with the same product?
The short answer
Do not invent a single price that both can stomach, you will leave money on the table with the big ones and scare off the small ones. Use the same value metric but let it scale (seats, usage, volume) so the large buyer naturally lands on a bigger bill. The product is the same, the price is not, and that is fine.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Dan Balcauski is a full-time pricing operator, and this episode gets concrete about the machinery behind serving different buyer sizes: price metrics, packaging, and the price fences that let you charge a startup and a large company differently for the same product. It moves past theory into the moves you actually make, like giving smaller or earlier buyers a lighter program without gutting your pricing. A good listen while you are sketching your own tiers.
On
Better Done Than Perfect podcastby Better Done Than Perfect (Userlist), with Dan BalcauskiPodcast episode, around 30 to 40 minutes
Packaging (price metric, bundle, and fences) matters more for long-term outcomes than the final headline price number.
Price fences, such as a special program for startups, let you charge different buyers different amounts for effectively the same product without leaking discounts everywhere.
Revisit pricing on a regular cadence (every year or two at minimum), and give the pricing function a clear owner instead of leaving it to whoever is closing the deal.
Why we picked it
When you are the only one selling something like your product, cost-plus and competitor benchmarks give you nothing to anchor on, and this book is the clearest case for the alternative: figure out what customers will actually pay before you finish building, then shape the product around that. Ramanujam ran pricing for hundreds of launches at Simon-Kucher, so the willingness-to-pay conversations he describes are practical, not theoretical. Treat it as a starting point for how to run those conversations, not a formula to copy.
From
Wiley (2016)by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg TackeBook, ~240 pages
Have the willingness-to-pay conversation with customers early, before the product is done, so price shapes what you build instead of being an afterthought.
Different customers value your product differently: segment by willingness to pay rather than forcing one price on everyone.
Design the product and its packaging around the price customers will bear, not the other way around.
Why we picked it
This is the canonical piece on packaging one product into three tiers so it stretches across price-sensitive and premium buyers at once. Mohammed gives real guardrails: rough price gaps between tiers and how much revenue to expect from each, which is exactly the practical framing you need when small startups and large companies are looking at the same product. Treat it as a starting template for your own good, better, best structure, not a rule to copy line for line.
A stripped-down Good tier attracts price-sensitive buyers (small startups), the Better tier holds your core users, and a feature-rich Best tier lets large companies spend more.
Practical guardrails: keep Good within about 25 percent below Better, and Best within about 50 percent above Better, so the ladder reads as coherent.
The tiers do the segmenting for you: buyers self-select by need and budget instead of you negotiating every deal from scratch.
