Pricing research finds the price your buyers will actually pay, not the one they say they would. We start with what they pay today, measure their willingness to pay across a range of prices and the point where demand drops, and come back with a price and a tier structure rather than a chart.
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Ask someone what they would pay for your product and you get a guess. On average that guess runs about a fifth above what people actually spend, and it is worse for expensive and specialist products.
“What would you pay for this?” invites people to bargain, to be polite about an idea they like, or to name a number they have never thought about. None of those is a price.
A user tells you what feels fair. The person who signs the order tells you what gets approved. In B2B those answers can be far apart, and only one of them sets your price.
Nobody judges a price in a vacuum. They compare it with whatever they use and pay for today, so a study that never asks about current spend is measuring reactions to a number out of context.
Good pricing research works around all three. It anchors on what buyers pay now, asks structured questions rather than an open one, screens for the people who actually decide, and treats stated intent as an upper bound rather than a forecast.
Interviews first, then a survey. The interviews find what buyers pay now and which features carry the value, and the survey measures the numbers across enough people to trust them.
Interviews with buyers about what they use today, what it costs them, and what would make them switch. This sets the anchor every later number is judged against.
A Van Westendorp survey: four questions that find where the price starts to feel cheap, fair, expensive and out of the question.
Gabor-Granger questions at specific prices inside that range, giving a demand curve and the point where demand drops sharply.
A price, a tier structure, what goes in each tier, and what to say on the pricing page. Not a chart you have to interpret.
An illustrative example, using the figures in the card above. The first chart finds the range, the second finds where in it to sit.
Van Westendorp survey: the price range buyers find acceptable
| Price | Too cheap | Bargain | Expensive | Too expensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| €20 | 70% | 96% | 4% | 0% |
| €25 | 45% | 88% | 12% | 1% |
| €30 | 22% | 74% | 27% | 4% |
| €35 | 12% | 56% | 42% | 9% |
| €40 | 6% | 40% | 58% | 17% |
| €45 | 3% | 28% | 72% | 30% |
| €50 | 1% | 18% | 84% | 50% |
| €55 | 0% | 10% | 92% | 70% |
| €60 | 0% | 5% | 96% | 84% |
Gabor-Granger: share who would buy at each price
| Price | Would buy | Revenue per 100 |
|---|---|---|
| €29 | 93% | €2697 |
| €35 | 79% | €2765 |
| €39 | 74% | €2886 |
| €45 | 55% | €2475 |
| €49 | 38% | €1862 |
| €55 | 21% | €1155 |
Use the simplest method that answers your question. Most pricing decisions do not need anything heavier than the first three.
What range of prices buyers find acceptable, from too cheap to trust to too expensive to consider.
How many buyers say yes at each specific price, and where demand starts to fall away.
Which capabilities buyers would pay more for, which they expect as standard, and so which belong in which tier.
Separate groups each see one price, so price is the only thing that changes. Cleaner, but needs a larger sample.
How buyers trade several features against price. Right for complex tier design, and only then, because it needs 200 or more completes per segment.
Current spend, alternatives, and why a price feels wrong. Run first, because they decide what the survey should ask. User research.
Two versions of an offer at different prices, with the reasons counted. Concept testing.
The final check on real traffic, once research has narrowed the options to two. We help you design it and read it.
Concrete briefs, roughly in the order they arrive.
No price history and no customers yet. We find what buyers pay for the problem today, the range they would accept, and where to launch inside it, ideally before the pricing page is built.
Who we recruit: buyers who have the problem now and pay for a workaround.Which features justify a higher tier, which belong in every plan, and how many tiers there should be at all. Most packaging mistakes are a valuable feature given away in the cheapest plan.
Who we recruit: current and target customers, split by size or use so tiers match real segments.How far the price can move before customers start looking elsewhere, and what needs to be added or said to make the increase hold. Cheaper to learn from a study than from churn.
Who we recruit: existing customers and comparable buyers who use a competitor.What the user thinks is fair and what the budget holder will approve, measured separately, because the gap between them is usually where deals stall. See B2B market research.
Who we recruit: users and budget holders, LinkedIn-verified on role and company size.Whether the price that works at home holds somewhere else, where incomes, alternatives and expectations differ. Fielded in the local language.
Who we recruit: the same buyer profile, recruited directly in the target market.Whether buyers would rather pay monthly, annually or once, and what discount makes annual worth committing to.
Who we recruit: buyers in your category, screened on how they pay for similar tools today.A recommended price, a tier structure with what goes in each tier, the acceptable range and demand curve behind them, and the reasons buyers gave in their own words. Plus the raw data and interview recordings, so anyone on your team can check the number against its source.
Pricing research estimates what a defined group of buyers will pay for a product, and how demand changes as the price moves. A useful study answers three things: what buyers pay today for the problem, the range of prices they find acceptable, and how many would still buy at each specific price you are considering.
Pricing analysis works from data you already have: your costs, your sales history and what competitors charge. Pricing research goes to buyers and measures what they would pay and why. Analysis tells you where you stand, research tells you where you could move. Good pricing decisions use both, with research filling the one gap analysis cannot: how buyers will react to a price they have not seen yet.
Because they guess, and the guess is unreliable in both directions. Some anchor low to get a deal, others flatter an idea they like, and on average stated willingness to pay runs well above what people actually spend: a 2020 meta-analysis of 77 studies put the gap at about a fifth. Good pricing research never takes the answer to that question at face value. It anchors on current spend, uses structured questions, and discounts stated intent.
Van Westendorp asks four questions about when a price feels too cheap, a bargain, expensive and too expensive, and returns the range buyers find acceptable. Gabor-Granger asks whether people would buy at a set of specific prices and returns a demand curve, which shows where demand drops sharply. Van Westendorp tells you the range, Gabor-Granger tells you where in that range to sit, so we usually run both in the same survey.
Usually not. Conjoint is the right tool when buyers have to trade several features against each other and against price, for example when designing tiers with many moving parts. It needs a larger sample, typically 200 or more completes per segment, and a tightly limited set of features. When the question is the price of one product or a simple good, better and best structure, Van Westendorp, Gabor-Granger and a feature priority question answer it for a fraction of the effort. We tell you when you genuinely need conjoint.
Roughly 100 completes per segment you want to compare, so a study that splits results by company size or by market needs 100 in each. The interviews that come first need far fewer, usually eight to fifteen, because their job is to find what buyers pay now and which features carry the value, not to measure anything.
Yes, and B2B is where the choice of respondent matters most. A user will tell you what feels fair, the person who signs the order will tell you what gets approved, and the two answers are often far apart. We screen for the budget holder as well as the user and report them separately.
Three to four weeks from brief to recommendation for interviews followed by a survey in one market. A survey-only study with a reachable audience can be faster. Senior B2B audiences and several markets take longer, mainly because of recruitment.
Projects start from €399 for one question in one market, and scale with the number of interviews, the survey sample size, the number of segments and markets, and how hard the audience is to reach. Participant incentives are quoted separately so you can see what is fieldwork and what is participant time.
Send the product, the price you have in mind and who buys it. We will come back with the method, the sample and a figure.