SaaS pricing for your first customers: price a SaaS product from what their workaround costs, pick the unit you charge for and check the price three ways.
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How big an annual plan discount should be: compare it with what a monthly customer really pays in a year given your churn. Formula, table and example.
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Pre-selling before you write code: a one-page presell offer, a decision rule set in advance, how to ask for money and what the answers mean.
The most reliable SaaS pricing method for your first customers is to calculate what their current workaround costs them each month and charge a clear fraction of it, often around a fifth. The customer keeps most of the saving, so the decision is easy, and your price rests on their money rather than on your costs or a competitor's price list. Then check the result three ways: against the alternatives, against the number of customers you need, and against real buyers. Below is the method on one worked example.
Anton is building CrewBoard for small cleaning companies in Kyiv: firms with 4 to 12 cleaners working in 2 to 5 crews. Customers book cleanings by phone and messenger; the office has to assign crews, keys and addresses, and move everything around when someone is ill.
In conversations with owners, Anton asks about the last month, not about his idea: who did the scheduling, how long it took, and what went wrong. A typical answer from a firm with four crews:
Time: 10 of 40 hours is a quarter of the dispatcher's week, so a quarter of the salary:
Mistakes: 2 × 1,500 = 3,000 UAH a month.
Total: about 8,000 UAH a month is what the current way of scheduling costs this firm. Anton checks the pattern with several owners; the numbers vary, but the order of magnitude holds.
Note what's not in the total: the owner's stress, cleaners waiting outside a locked flat. They matter, but they are hard to price, so leave them out of the calculation and use them in the sales conversation.
A customer won't pay 8,000 to save 8,000. They need to keep most of the gain, and the saving has to be obvious even if CrewBoard delivers only part of what it promises. A price of around a fifth of the workaround cost gives a value ratio of about five to one:
Anton sets 1,600 UAH a month for firms with up to five crews. Even if the tool only halves the dispatcher's scheduling time and prevents one mistake a month, the firm saves 2,500 + 1,500 = 4,000 UAH, still more than double the price.
Against the alternatives. Owners can keep the spreadsheet (free, but it costs the dispatcher's hours) or buy a generic CRM at about 400 UAH per user, 1,200 for three users, which tracks clients but doesn't assign crews or keys. CrewBoard costs more than the CRM and must say clearly why: it removes the scheduling work that the CRM leaves in place.
Against your own numbers. Anton needs about 60,000 UAH a month to cover his and his co-founder's living costs and the tools. After roughly 8% for taxes and payment fees, that's
At 800 UAH it would be 82 firms: twice the selling for the same result. The full method is in ramen profitability. Then check whether the market holds that many customers: bottom-up market sizing shows how.
Against real buyers. The only proof is money. Offer founding customers the product at this price, paid in advance, before you build: see how to pre-sell a product. Listen to the reactions:
The common SaaS pricing models differ mainly in that unit: one flat price, a price per user (seat), a price per unit of usage, or tiers by customer size. Price grows with value when it's tied to the thing that makes customers' value grow. For CrewBoard, that's the number of crews: a firm with ten crews saves more dispatcher time than a firm with two. So Anton adds a second plan, 2,800 UAH a month for up to 12 crews. Keep the first price list short: one or two plans that a customer understands in ten seconds.
Competitors are rarely the real alternative anyway. Price against what customers do today to cope, a spreadsheet, a person, a paid service, and what that costs them per month.
There is no fixed rule, but a price around 10–30% of the customer's monthly saving leaves them a clear gain. At the start, closer to a fifth gives room for the product to be imperfect.
No. A low price attracts customers who are least sure they need the product and doubles the number you have to win. Start from the value and adjust if real buyers show you are wrong.
Rarely, and with notice. Review the price once a year or when the product's value has clearly grown; keep existing customers on their price for a while after a rise.
The lesson A price from the cost of today shows two founders pricing a product for car repair shops from what the shops already pay for their workaround, with quizzes and a practice task checked by AI. It is part of the course From Idea to Profitable Product: Building Without Investors; the lesson Raising the price covers what to do a year later.
