Develop evidence-led pricing options with ak:pricing-strategy

Use ak:pricing-strategy to structure a pricing decision across packaging, value metric, and price point. The Skill can outline research, compare tier and monetization options, examine freemium or trial trade-offs, and propose price tests. Its output is decision support, not an approved price or account change.

Choose ak:pricing-strategy for a pricing decision

Use ak:pricing-strategy when

• You need to review tiers, packaging, limits, value metrics, or monetization.
• You are considering freemium, a trial, a new tier, enterprise packaging, or a price change.
• You have customer, competitor, usage, conversion, churn, cost, and sales evidence that can constrain options.
• You need a Van Westendorp, Gabor-Granger, MaxDiff, or conjoint research plan and understand that each answers a different question.

Choose another workflow when

• You only need pricing-page copy or page conversion review. Use the relevant copy or page CRO workflow after the commercial decision is approved.
• You already selected one measurable change. Use ak:ab-test-setup, while accounting for pricing-test fairness and legal risk.
• You need to edit billing, migrate subscriptions, notify customers, or publish prices. Use a separately approved implementation and release workflow.
• Reliable willingness-to-pay or unit-economic evidence is unavailable. Start with research rather than choosing a precise price from examples.

Prepare commercial and economic evidence

Provide the product, market, target segments, go-to-market motion, current packaging and prices, alternatives, differentiation, usage patterns, conversion, ARPU, churn, retention, support burden, variable and fixed costs, payment fees, tax assumptions, refund behavior, contract constraints, and decision goal. Label currency, billing period, tax treatment, cohort, geography, and evidence date. Do not provide credentials or unnecessary customer records.

Complete Onboarding, and confirm Marketing Kit is installed for the runtime and scope you are using.

Run the Skill

/ak:pricing-strategy "Develop three packaging and pricing options for the supplied B2B SaaS evidence. Show unit-economic assumptions, segment uncertainty, migration risks, and research needed. Do not change billing, quote customers, or publish prices"

/ak:pricing-strategy "Develop three packaging and pricing options for the supplied B2B SaaS evidence. Show unit-economic assumptions, segment uncertainty, migration risks, and research needed. Do not change billing, quote customers, or publish prices"

$ak:pricing-strategy "Develop three packaging and pricing options for the supplied B2B SaaS evidence. Show unit-economic assumptions, segment uncertainty, migration risks, and research needed. Do not change billing, quote customers, or publish prices"

Understand the strategy stages

1. Confirm the decision and goal. The Skill identifies whether the work is about growth, revenue, profitability, market movement, or packaging clarity.
2. Separate the three axes. It distinguishes what each tier includes, what usage or value metric price scales with, and the actual price point.
3. Review evidence and economics. It compares customer value, alternatives, usage, retention, willingness to pay, costs, support, margin, and risk by segment without fabricating missing data.
4. Choose research methods. It can structure Van Westendorp price sensitivity, Gabor-Granger demand questions, MaxDiff feature preference, or conjoint bundle research and state the method's limitations.
5. Develop options. It proposes tier structures, value metrics, free versus trial approaches, enterprise boundaries, migration choices, and trade-offs.
6. Plan validation. It defines conversion, revenue, margin, churn, refund, support, retention, fairness, and trust measures before a test or rollout.

Keep the commercial decision with people

• Treat every example price, tier, percentage, and benchmark in source material as illustrative until replaced with current evidence.
• Test whether a value metric tracks customer value and remains understandable, predictable, operable, and hard to exploit.
• Model gross margin, payment and support costs, usage volatility, discounts, taxes, refunds, churn, expansion, migration, and downside scenarios.
• Do not show materially different prices to comparable customers without a reviewed fairness, disclosure, and legal basis.
• Avoid deceptive anchors, fake discounts, hidden recurring terms, obstructed cancellation, and urgency that is not real.
• Keep survey answers separate from observed purchases; stated willingness to pay does not guarantee demand.

Review the outputs and evidence

A useful result includes:

• A decision statement, evidence inventory, gaps, and dated assumptions.
• Segment and pricing-persona definitions supported by data rather than labels.
• Multiple packaging, value-metric, and price options with trade-offs.
• Unit-economic scenarios, sensitivities, and explicit currency and billing periods; no fabricated revenue or conversion forecast.
• A research and validation plan with sample rationale and method limitations.
• Migration, grandfathering, communication, operational, compliance, and trust risks.
• A recommended next decision and owner, clearly separated from implementation.

Troubleshoot the workflow

Know the limits

• Pricing research estimates preferences under its design; it does not guarantee purchases, retention, revenue, margin, or competitive response.
• Competitor pages can omit discounts, contracts, taxes, services, or negotiated terms and may not be comparable.
• The Skill cannot validate billing implementation, tax treatment, contracts, or current market behavior without specialist review and current evidence.
• The documented package releases contain identical ak:pricing-strategy content and invocations.

Continue with ak:ab-test-setup for an approved validation hypothesis, or review the Marketing Kit overview.