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, while preserving your selected prices and constraints.
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. Show the cost-to-serve, usage, and margin or payback arithmetic; label observations, estimates, and hypotheses separately and name data gaps.
4. Choose research methods. When evidence cannot identify a price, the result is a research or experiment plan, not an invented optimum. Choose the relevant method—Van Westendorp, Gabor-Granger, MaxDiff, conjoint, or a price test—and state its limitations rather than running every method.
5. Develop options. It proposes tier structures, value metrics, free versus trial approaches, enterprise boundaries, migration choices, and trade-offs.
6. Plan validation. Every recommended price change has a validation step and metric, such as conversion, ARPU, or churn. Include revenue, margin, refund, support, retention, fairness, and trust measures where relevant.

Discovery questions, pricing fundamentals, and checklists remain available when needed. The Skill consults at most one relevant reference per task, reusing context you already supplied.

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.
• Give existing customers advance notice of a price change and an easy way to downgrade or leave; do not silently migrate them or preselect an upgrade.

Review the outputs and evidence

A useful result includes:

• A decision statement preserving your selected prices and constraints, an evidence inventory, gaps, and separately labeled observations, estimates, and hypotheses.
• Segment and pricing-persona definitions supported by data rather than labels.
• Multiple packaging, value-metric, and price options with trade-offs.
• Unit-economic scenarios and sensitivities with cost, usage, and margin or payback arithmetic, explicit currency and billing periods, and unmet targets or missing inputs flagged; no fabricated revenue or conversion forecast.
• A research or experiment plan when evidence cannot identify a price, with method limitations and a validation step and metric for each price change.
• Migration, grandfathering, communication, operational, compliance, and trust risks, including advance notice and an easy downgrade or exit for existing customers.
• 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.

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