I'm helping a friend's startup figure out pricing for their products. What are some tools/services that you use to do this? Are there any pricing analytics platforms that you'd recommend?
I can't find anything that wasn't enterprise focused ("Call for pricing!"). Are there any services that your company uses that you're happy with? Ideally, it would help calculate common metrics & make suggestions for pricing experiments (& help run them!).
The closest thing to a "methodology" I've found is asking these four questions and having the users generate their own pricing curve [1]:
Here's a real set of curves this process generated for me recently: http://imgur.com/lPKLk53 ($ values redacted)
The four questions are:
1. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?
2. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good?
3. At what price would you consider [the product/service] starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it?
4. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be a bargain—a great buy for the money?
Require a specific $ amount as the answer to each question.
Take ~100 users, ask them all four of these questions, and then compile the results. You really have to do this on a subset of your own qualified potential customers to get any meaningful data.
The neat thing about this is that this creates a price sensitivity curve without anchoring the interviewee with any prior numeric values.
At the end of the day, it's still a gut call about where to place your price point relative to the user's alternatives, and testing is encouraged, but these four questions are a decent start.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensi...