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How to sanity-check your pricing before you commit the number

Before you commit to a price, run it through five checks, and if any one fails you are not ready to ship the number. Is your value metric set, the thing your best customers grow on? Did the number come from real willingness to pay, the way Rahul Vohra priced Superhuman, rather than from your cost plus a margin? Is the anchor high enough that a buyer almost gasps, per Alex Hormozi? Is the roughly 20% of features that drive 80% of willingness to pay protected in paid tiers, per Madhavan Ramanujam? And are you pricing for the ICP that renews, not the one chasing a discount? Below is each check, cited, plus the one place operators genuinely split.

Why this matters. The most common pricing mistake is not picking the wrong number, it is committing a number without checking the four things that actually determine whether it holds: what you charge for, who you charge, and how you framed it.

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10-20%

the price-driven walk-away rate that signals you have found the ceiling. If nobody walks on price, per Alex Hormozi your number is still below the gasp line.

Alex Hormozi Hormozi on pricing

The short answer

The five-point pricing sanity check

Run each one before you publish the price. A no on any line is a stop, not a warning.

  1. 1

    Value metric set?

    Are you charging for the thing your best customers grow on, seats, usage, outcomes, before you decide how much?

  2. 2

    Priced to willingness to pay, not cost?

    Did the number come from what real buyers will pay, not from your costs plus a margin you hoped for?

  3. 3

    Anchored high enough to gasp?

    Say the price out loud. If it produces no reaction, it reads as ordinary and you left money on the table.

  4. 4

    Is the high-WTP 20% protected?

    The roughly 20% of features that drive 80% of willingness to pay belong in paid tiers, not given away in the free one.

  5. 5

    Priced for the ICP that renews?

    Are you pricing for the segment that sticks, not the one that signs up on a discount and cancels next month?

Four of the five are about who and what you charge for. Only one is the number itself, which is why founders who jump straight to the number get it wrong.

The cited playbook

The cited checklist, one operator per check

Each check traces to an operator who has priced a real product. Run them in order, because each one narrows the next.

  1. 1

    Check the value metric, and protect the 20%

    Before the number, decide what you charge for, the thing your best customers grow on. Then protect it: roughly 20% of your features drive 80% of willingness to pay, and the common bug is giving that 20% away in the free tier. Move those features into the tier where the buyer who needs them lives before you set a price.

    Madhavan Ramanujam · Monetizing Innovation, on Lenny's Podcast
  2. 2

    Check the number came from buyers, not a cost spreadsheet

    A price built from cost plus a margin is a guess. Rahul Vohra priced Superhuman at $30 a month by asking roughly 100 early users the four Van Westendorp questions and taking the median of the one that matched his positioning. Pull your number from real willingness to pay, not from your own costs.

    Rahul Vohra · Superhuman pricing, on Lenny's Podcast
  3. 3

    Check the anchor is high enough to gasp

    Say the price out loud on a real call. If the buyer does not react, per Alex Hormozi you did not go high enough, because underpricing signals low value as often as it wins the deal. Anchor high, then walk down, and treat a 10 to 20% price-driven walk-away rate as the sign you found the ceiling.

    Alex Hormozi · Hormozi on pricing and anchoring
  4. 4

    Check you priced for the ICP that renews

    A price is only as good as the customer it attracts. Jason Lemkin's point is that churn which looks like a pricing problem is usually a wrong-ICP problem, so price for the segment that renews, not the one that signs up on a discount and cancels the moment the spend stops paying back.

    Jason Lemkin · SaaStr, on 20VC

Where experts disagree

Where operators disagree: where should the number come from?

Alex Hormozi

says the survey lies about willingness to pay and the live call does not. Quote a high anchor on a real sales conversation and read the gasp, because what a buyer says on a form and what they pay when the card is out are different numbers.

Madhavan Ramanujam

would measure first. Learn willingness to pay from best-fit customers, let the value metric and the 20/80 split set the number, and treat any single quote on a call as one data point rather than the decision.

Both are right in different motions. Run the gasp test if you sell person to person; run the measured survey if you sell at scale through a checkout. ChatGPT picks one and sounds certain. Gavel shows you both and the condition that decides it.

FAQ

Pricing sanity-check questions, answered

How do I sanity-check my pricing before I launch?

Run five checks: is your value metric set, is the number pulled from real willingness to pay rather than cost, is the anchor high enough to almost make a buyer gasp, is the roughly 20% of features that drive most willingness to pay protected in paid tiers, and are you pricing for the ICP that renews. A no on any line means you are not ready to publish the number.

Should my price come from a survey or from a sales call?

That is exactly where operators split. Madhavan Ramanujam would measure willingness to pay from best-fit customers first; Alex Hormozi says the survey lies and the live call does not, so quote a high anchor and read the gasp. Use the survey if you sell at scale through a checkout, the gasp test if you sell person to person.

How do I know if my price is too low?

If no prospect ever walks away because of price, it is almost certainly too low. Alex Hormozi treats a 10 to 20% price-driven walk-away rate as the signal you have reached the ceiling. A price nobody flinches at is a price you could have raised.

Can ChatGPT sanity-check my pricing?

It can explain the checks and do arithmetic on numbers you paste in, but it cannot survey your buyers, judge whether your sample is the right ICP, or tell you where credible operators disagree. It hands you the internet's average with a confident tone, which on a decision worth months of revenue is the expensive answer.

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