Three anchors: cost, alternative, value

A price you can defend stands on three anchors, not on one number borrowed from somewhere.

1. Cost floor: what one more sale costs you. Below it, every extra sale loses money.
2. Next-best alternative: what the buyer would actually do without you, and what that costs them.
3. Value of the difference: what your differences from that alternative are worth to the buyer, in money, pluses and minuses.

The floor sets how low you can go; the alternative plus the difference sets how high the buyer will follow. Familiar shortcuts each hold one piece at best: a markup on full cost ignores the buyer, last year's price ignores everything that changed, and a competitor average ignores what this buyer would choose.

At Klasna, Nazar's first idea for NMT Sprint was "a bit under the learning centre's 8,000". That is one input, and it's a group course, not the one-to-one tutor most parents compare with.

The cost floor is the lowest price at which one more sale doesn't lose money. So it holds only the costs that come with each extra sale and disappear if that sale doesn't happen.

For one NMT Sprint, Hanna lists: the tutor's payout for each of the 16 lessons, video minutes, AI scoring of each mock exam billed per use, and the payment fee on what the family pays. Sell one more sprint and all of them grow; sell one fewer and they shrink.

The season's advertising campaign and the coordinator's salary are real costs too, but they stay the same whether 40 or 41 families buy. They answer a different question: will the launch pay off at all, how many sprints must sell to cover them. Put them into the floor and you push it up, then turn away families who would still have earned you money.

The next-best alternative is what this buyer would actually do if your offer didn't exist. It is not the cheapest option on the market, and not the rival you watch most.

For NMT Sprint, free exam videos cost nothing, but parents who want a person to work with their child every week won't switch to videos. Most of them would hire a private maths tutor. So the sprint is compared with the tutor's price for the same spring, not with zero.

Different buyers can have different alternatives. A family that really would study from free videos has a very low ceiling, and that's fine: they are probably not the sprint's buyers. Price for the alternative your target buyers name most often, and keep the others in mind as separate groups.

Because the next-best alternative is about what buyers would do, it has to come from buyers. The quickest honest source is people who recently made the same choice.

Klasna asked parents of last spring's exam-takers one plain question: what would you have done without us? Their answers, read later in this module's case, show which alternative most of them would have picked and what it cost. That beats three tempting shortcuts:

• a list of every product online, which shows what exists, not what gets chosen;
• the rival the team knows best, which may be a different kind of offer;
• the team's best guess, which describes the team.

A handful of real answers is enough to start. If there's no time for even that, write the alternative down as an assumption and check it before the price is final.

The third anchor turns your differences from the alternative into money. List what you give that the alternative doesn't (pluses) and what you lack (minuses), and put a value on each.

Against a private tutor, NMT Sprint adds full mock exams, scored and reviewed. Parents already buy mocks separately, so this plus has a market price. A minus: lessons are online only, and some parents prefer a tutor at the kitchen table. That difference is negative, so it's subtracted.

Where a difference has no market price, estimate it from parent interviews and label it an assumption. Then:

ceiling = alternative's price + net value of the difference

Each fact about the offer feeds one anchor: costs per sale build the floor, what families would do instead gives the starting price, and pluses and minuses move it up or down.

Floor and ceiling together give the price corridor: the range where a price makes sense for both sides. Below the floor you lose money on each sale; above the ceiling the buyer is better off with the alternative.

Worked example with round numbers: floor 6,000, alternative 9,000, net value of the difference +1,000.

• Ceiling = 9,000 + 1,000 = 10,000, so the corridor is 6,000–10,000.
• 5,500 is below the floor: every sale loses 500.
• 10,500 is above the ceiling: the alternative is the better deal.
• 8,000 and 9,500 are inside. At 9,500 the buyer keeps 10,000 − 9,500 = 500 of value; at 8,000 they keep 2,000.

The corridor doesn't pick the price for you. It rules out prices that can't work and shows how much value each remaining price leaves with the buyer.

Inside the corridor, the price decides how the value is split between you and the buyer. The ceiling is the point where the buyer is indifferent: your offer and the alternative are worth the same to them.

That's why pricing right at the ceiling rarely works. Switching takes effort and carries risk; at the ceiling nothing makes up for it, so any doubt (a new tutor, an unfamiliar format) tips the family back to what they know. Leave part of the value with them and switching feels like a good deal.

How much to leave depends on your price stance: closer to the ceiling for a strong, well-known offer; further below for something new that must win trust. The next module covers choosing a stance. For now the rule is simple: a price where both sides gain beats a price that takes everything.

Sometimes the floor comes out above the ceiling. Then the corridor is empty: any price either loses money on every sale or asks more than the buyer's alternative is worth. A clever number can't fix that.

What can: lower the cost per sale (a cheaper format, fewer paid extras), add a difference buyers will pay for, or choose not to launch at that cost. Hanna's line for NMT Sprint is blunt: if the floor is above the ceiling, we don't launch it as designed.

How it fits together: the floor comes from costs per sale, the ceiling from the real alternative plus the value of the difference, and the price sits between them, leaving the buyer part of the value. The next lesson puts the floor into numbers, per Klasna lesson and per Club member.