Ask HN: How do you set prices?
(Note: cofounder responsible for pricing decisions many times.)<p>The closest thing to a "methodology" I've found is asking these four questions and having the users generate their own pricing curve [1]:<p>Here's a real set of curves this process generated for me recently: <a href="http://imgur.com/lPKLk53" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/lPKLk53</a> ($ values redacted)<p>The four questions are:<p>1. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?<p>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?<p>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?<p>4. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be a bargain—a great buy for the money?<p>Require a specific $ amount as the answer to each question.<p>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.<p>The neat thing about this is that this creates a price sensitivity curve without anchoring the interviewee with any prior numeric values.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensi...</a>