suede-pricing

Suede Pricing & Packaging

Suede Pricing turns verified product economics, buyer evidence, and commercial constraints into testable prices, value metrics, tiers, and migration plans. It produces a decision brief and measurement plan while keeping billing changes behind explicit approval.

Before Starting

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/product-marketing.md exists (or .claude/product-marketing.md, or the legacy product-marketing-context.md filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

1. Business Context

• What type of product? (SaaS, marketplace, e-commerce, service)
• What's your current pricing (if any)?
• What's your target market? (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
• What's your go-to-market motion? (self-serve, sales-led, hybrid)

2. Value & Competition

• What's the primary value you deliver?
• What alternatives do customers consider?
• How do competitors price?

3. Current Performance

• What's your current conversion rate?
• What's your ARPU and churn rate?
• Any feedback on pricing from customers/prospects?

4. Goals

• Optimizing for growth, revenue, or profitability?
• Moving upmarket or expanding downmarket?

---

Pricing Fundamentals

Three axes, decided in this order: packaging (what's included per tier), pricing metric (what you charge for), price point (how much).

Price sits between the next best alternative (the floor) and the customer's perceived value (the ceiling). Cost to serve is a baseline, never the basis.

---

Value Metrics

What is a Value Metric?

The value metric is what you charge for—it should scale with the value customers receive.

Good value metrics:

• Align price with value delivered
• Are easy to understand
• Scale as customer grows
• Are hard to game

Common Value Metrics

Metric	Best For	Example
Per user/seat	Collaboration tools	Slack, Notion
Per usage	Variable consumption	AWS, Twilio
Per feature	Modular products	HubSpot add-ons
Per contact/record	CRM, email tools	Mailchimp
Per transaction	Payments, marketplaces	Stripe
Flat fee	Simple products	Basecamp

Choosing Your Value Metric

Ask: "As a customer uses more of [metric], do they get more value?"

• If yes → good value metric
• If no → price doesn't align with value

Defaults to Beat

These are the answers a model reaches for unprompted. Each is allowed, but only once you state why it beats the alternative for this product — never by default: $9/$29/$99 (or any flat 3x ladder); Starter/Pro/Enterprise names that carry no product meaning; exactly three tiers when the buyer set is two or four; 20% off annual as the reflex discount; "Contact us" on the top tier, which hides price from buyers and from the agents that now shortlist tools (see Pricing Page Teardown); per-seat when usage, records, or transactions track value better.

---

Tier Structure Overview

Good-Better-Best Framework

Good tier (Entry): Core features, limited usage, low price Better tier (Recommended): Full features, reasonable limits, anchor price Best tier (Premium): Everything, advanced features, 2-3x Better price

Tier Differentiation

• Feature gating — Basic vs. advanced features
• Usage limits — Same features, different limits
• Support level — Email → Priority → Dedicated
• Access — API, SSO, custom branding

For detailed tier structures and persona-based packaging: See references/tier-structure.md

---

Pricing Research

Van Westendorp Method

Four questions that identify acceptable price range:

1. Too expensive (wouldn't consider)
2. Too cheap (question quality)
3. Expensive but might consider
4. A bargain

Analyze intersections to find optimal pricing zone.

MaxDiff Analysis

Identifies which features customers value most:

• Show sets of features
• Ask: Most important? Least important?
• Results inform tier packaging

For detailed research methods: See references/research-methods.md

---

When to Raise Prices

Signs It's Time

Market signals:

• Competitors have raised prices
• Prospects don't flinch at price
• "It's so cheap!" feedback

Business signals:

• Very high conversion rates (>40%)
• Very low churn (<3% monthly)
• Strong unit economics

Product signals:

• Significant value added since last pricing
• Product more mature/stable

Price Increase Strategies

1. Grandfather existing — New price for new customers only
2. Delayed increase — Announce 3-6 months out
3. Tied to value — Raise price but add features
4. Plan restructure — Change plans entirely

---

Pricing Page Best Practices

Above the Fold

• Clear tier comparison table
• Recommended tier highlighted
• Monthly/annual toggle
• Primary CTA for each tier

Common Elements

• FAQ section
• Annual discount callout (17-20%)
• Money-back guarantee

Pricing Psychology

• Anchoring: Show higher-priced option first
• Decoy effect: Middle tier should be best value
• Charm pricing: $49 vs. $50 (for value-focused)
• Round pricing: $50 vs. $49 (for premium)

---

Pricing Page Teardown

When someone wants to audit an existing pricing page for clarity, transparency, and AI-readability (not the pricing strategy itself, and not conversion-rate optimization — that's suede-site-alchemy), run a teardown that scores it across two axes and returns prioritized fixes:

• Human buyer experience — value-prop clarity, plan differentiation, cognitive load, trust signals, pricing psychology, and price transparency.
• AI-agent readiness — whether the LLMs and agents that increasingly shortlist and compare tools can actually read and quote your pricing: machine-readable prices (not locked in an image or behind "Contact us"), extractable FAQ/objection coverage, per-tier depth stated in text, and structured data. Buyers now ask ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude "what's the best X and what does it cost?" before visiting — a pricing page an agent can't parse loses deals you never see.

Fast check — the "paste test": give the pricing URL to a browsing-capable AI (Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, Claude with web) — or paste the rendered page text — and ask "what are the plans and prices?" A clean miss means agents fetching your page will struggle too (a heuristic, not proof every agent fails).

The AI-readiness fixes are usually high-impact, low-effort (put prices in text, add Offer schema). Hand implementation to suede-seo-audit (Product/Offer JSON-LD and supported-schema checks) and suede-ai-seo (extractability, AI-bot access, llms.txt).

For the full 10-dimension rubric, scoring, and report template: See references/pricing-page-teardown.md. (AI-agent-readiness lens adapted from Kyle Poyar / Growth Unhinged.)

---

Output: Pricing Decision Brief

Every pricing or packaging engagement that is not a teardown returns this exact structure. Use these headings verbatim; leave a heading in with "not decided — [what's missing]" rather than dropping it.

# Pricing Decision Brief — [product]

## Value metric
[What you charge for, and the one sentence proving usage of it tracks value.]

## Tier map
| Tier | Who it's for | Included | Limits | Price |
|------|--------------|----------|--------|-------|

## Price points + rationale
[Each number, and what it is anchored to: alternative, perceived value, or research.]

## Assumptions
[Every number taken on faith, flagged as assumption not measurement.]

## Validation plan
[What test or research confirms each assumption, and the metric that reads out.]

## Migration + grandfathering
[Existing customers: who moves, when, on what notice, and who is held.]

## What I did NOT decide
[Anything left to the user: committed price, published copy, billing changes.]

---

Boundaries

• Do not create or change billing products, prices, subscriptions, or customer migrations without verified live state, a maximum-cost check, and explicit approval.
• Do not present willingness-to-pay, conversion, churn, or revenue impact as measured unless current research or product data supports it.
• Do not publish pricing copy, choose grandfathering policy, or commit the business to a price; return a recommendation, assumptions, and validation plan for the user to decide.

Routing

• Use suede-paywalls for in-product upgrade and paywall experiences.
• Use suede-offers for bonuses, guarantees, and offer framing.
• Use suede-ab-testing to validate pricing-page or packaging hypotheses.
• Use suede-revops for approved deal-desk and pipeline implementation.