Blog · 28 Apr 2026

How to price your product when you have no data

Pricing is the fastest lever in a business and the one founders touch least. Change your price by twenty percent and every other number moves. Change your conversion rate by twenty percent and you have done considerably more work for the same effect.

Early on there is no data, so pricing feels arbitrary. It is not. There are defensible ways to arrive at a first number.

Cost-plus is the wrong starting point

Working out what it costs you and adding a margin is intuitive and almost always wrong for software or services. Your cost has nothing to do with the value a customer receives. A tool that saves a pharmacy two hours a day is worth a multiple of what it costs you to run, and pricing it off your hosting bill leaves most of that on the table.

Price against the alternative

Every customer already solves the problem somehow: a competitor, a spreadsheet, a part-time employee, or living with the pain. That existing solution has a cost, and it is your reference point.

If a business currently pays someone for ten hours a month to do what you automate, you have an anchor. You are not asking them to spend money. You are asking them to move money they already spend.

Charge from the first day you can

Free pilots feel like a way to reduce friction. They mostly delay the only conversation that matters. A prospect who will not pay anything has not told you the product is bad, only that it is free, and you learn nothing.

Charge early even if the amount is small and even if you discount heavily. A paying customer gives you honest feedback because they have something at stake.

What a low price actually costs you

• It selects your worst customers. The most price-sensitive buyers churn most, demand most, and refer least.
• It caps what you can spend to acquire. If a customer is worth very little, you cannot afford sales effort, and you are locked into channels that may not work.
• It signals low value. In business markets, a price far below the alternatives raises doubt rather than interest.
• It is hard to undo. Raising prices on existing customers is one of the least pleasant conversations in business.

A simple way to find your first number

1. Estimate the annual value your product creates for one customer: time saved, revenue added, or losses avoided.
2. Ask for roughly ten to twenty percent of that value. Enough to be worth your while, obviously worth it to them.
3. Quote it to five real prospects and watch their faces. Nobody hesitating means it is too low.
4. Raise it for the next five and repeat until you meet genuine resistance.

You are looking for the price at which roughly a third of qualified prospects say it is expensive. If nobody says it, you are leaving money behind.

Keep the structure simple

Two or three tiers, one obvious recommendation, and a variable that grows with the customer's success: users, branches, transactions. Complicated pricing pages lose deals that the product would have won.