Do I Really Have to Do Pricing?
Pricing is a huge discipline, yet most product leaders are expected to make these decisions alone. You don’t need to master all of it to start well. You need to know where to begin.
People ask me about pricing all the time. It’s such a juicy topic, with immense impact (for good and bad) and very little clarity around ownership. It touches revenue, positioning and growth, and still, in many companies, nobody really holds it. Some product people are surprised when it lands in their hands, but I think it’s a good call.
Regardless, it is a non-trivial topic.
My pricing strategy workshop starts with a slide that calls it Pricing Like a Pro. At the end of it, I go back to the opening slide and change it to Pricing with a Pro. Nobody becomes a pricing expert in a day, but you can and should understand the foundations and come prepared even when you do have someone working on it with you.
Most product leaders don’t even have that someone, and are still tasked with solving it. So when people ask me about pricing, I start with the basics — how to even start thinking about it.
Start with value
We aim to price by value. Most people agree with that in principle, and then find they have no clue how to do that.
Generally speaking, if you want to price by value, you have to be able to measure the value so you know what to price by.
To measure the value you first need to define it, and that’s why I think product leaders must be at least involved in any pricing decision, especially around the pricing model itself.
Measuring the value comes in two shapes.
Sometimes it can be measured directly, and the price derived from it. For example, a payments platform can price by the money that actually passes through it: the more the customer moves through the product, the more they get out of it, and the price follows.
Often, though, the value is indirect. Think about an email marketing platform for example. What the customer really gets is the sales the emails bring in, and nobody can bill on that (unless you are part of a larger platform that sees things end to end). So the price follows the number of contacts instead. It’s a proxy to the actual value, since the more people you have there the more eyes you get for your communication and ideally that converts to more sales.
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Either way, none of it really works until you understand the value, and can explain it so your customers get it. Measurement is the most tangible part but it is meaningless without the first two layers.
Make it right for the customer
When people think about pricing that is good for their customers they think about affordability, but that’s just one consideration.
A price can be fair and still fail the customer in many ways. A price needs to fit the value they perceive, but also make it easy for them to move on with the purchase. In many cases the pricing model interferes and it’s not about the budget at all.
Take for example a video hosting platform that charges by the number of views the customer’s videos get. Theoretically that aligns with the customer value, but there are additional considerations in play. In this example, the customer has no way of knowing what next month’s bill will be. If you are buying it for yourself you might be fine with such an approach still, since you know how much you are willing to pay for your viewership, and you are less concerned about over budgeting. But in an organization, even if it helps bring more revenue eventually and it’s worth it overall, they still need to run a tight budget that they can plan by, because many other decisions — unrelated to your product at all — depend on it.
The pricing model needs to be simple to understand, estimate and forecast — for your customers, not just for you.
Make it right for you
The same way it works for the customer, your pricing needs to work for you. This touches both the pricing model and the price itself.
Your unit economics must work out, and these days it’s more relevant than ever because of AI costs. Software used to be cheap to run, and kept getting cheaper. With AI that’s not true for everyone anymore. If you’re building an AI startup, for example, every customer comes with a real cost, because the models run on their data every time they use the product. If your price stays the same no matter how much they use, your largest customers might be the ones you lose money on. Unless you’re Anthropic, you can’t fund that.
The model itself also has to work for you. It needs to allow you to grow naturally when the customer gets more value (usually because they grow as a company or grow their usage), and it must not get in the way of them using more.
If your customers have to pay extra for every action that gives them more value, they will start thinking whether or not it’s worth it. And by trying to extract all the value out there, you might end up leaving money on the table, just because getting more out of your product wasn’t easy enough for them.
Pricing really is a whole discipline, and nobody masters it from one article, or from one workshop. You don’t need to, but you can’t afford to shy away from it entirely either.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on October 22, 2026.
