Hey Reader,

Do people balk at your pricing, citing it’s way out of budget? Or do they pay instantly before you change your mind and add another zero?

Personally, I’m in between. I’ve always been told my prices are too low, starting with the launch email sequence (the first product I ever sold).

These days, people tell me that The Council is priced way too low for what it offers. And they’re right — but I have a plan (see below).

Even so, some people cite budget constraints when I talk to them about joining The Council. That's ok, though, it's perfectly understandable and normal.

A rule of thumb says that, if less than 25% of your prospects don’t say your prices are too high, they’re too low. But that’s a rule of thumb, nothing more.

Whatever you want to buy, you’ll find prices all over the place. A copywriter charges $50 for a sales page, while another quotes you over $5000. A strategy session can be anywhere between $100 and $2000, even higher in some industries.

Naturally, you start asking the obvious question: what the hell is the right price?

At some point, most people default to one of three approaches.

• They look at competitors and try to position themselves slightly above or below.
• They pick a number that feels “reasonable” based on their own comfort level.
• Or they follow the increasingly popular advice to “do value pricing,” which sounds empowering until you realize it offers zero guidance on how to actually do that and that it’s BS. I’ve written about why value-based pricing sucks here.

All three approaches share the same problem: they rely on proxies instead of real signal and that’s why pricing ends up feeling like educated guesswork.

Let’s talk about a pricing model that takes context into account and, more importantly, what your potential buyers can pay.

Before that, a quick message from today’s partner, a perfect sidekick to this essay: a pricing calculator.

📣 Brought to you by 📣

​The Calculator Kit​

Stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions about your revenue, capacity, and pricing with the Calculator Kit.

If you’ve ever asked, “What should I charge?” or “How much do I actually need to make this month?...you'll love these calculators created by Maggie Patterson, who's mentored 100s of creatives and consultants.

Get a handle on your revenue, pricing, and capacity without spending days in a spreadsheet.

Want your name up here? Reserve your slot! (Sold out until June)​
​

You’re pricing in a fragmented market

The reason pricing feels so unstable in your world has less to do with you and more to do with the structure of the market.

You are not selling into a standardized environment where “value” is clear and comparable. You are selling into a space where:

• Buyers have wildly different levels of awareness
• ​Trust plays a huge role in decision-making
• Outcomes are not guaranteed and often vary
• Offers blur the line between product and service
• Positioning influences perceived value as much as the actual work

When those conditions exist, pricing stops being a simple economic decision and becomes a perception problem.

This is why two people can sell something structurally similar and land at completely different price points because they are operating in different perception zones.

That’s the part most pricing advice ignores: it assumes a stable baseline that simply doesn’t exist. There’s a pricing model that can help you make sense of it without having to guess your next price.

The Van Westendorp pricing model

The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is a research method developed by economist Peter Van Westendorp. It was designed to map how people perceive price, rather than asking them to state a single number they would pay.

Instead of asking “what would you pay for this,” which tends to produce polite and unreliable answers, the model uses four questions:

1. At what price would this feel too expensive to consider?
2. At what price would this feel expensive but still worth considering?
3. At what price would this feel like a bargain?
4. At what price would this feel so cheap that you’d question its quality?

Each question captures a different psychological boundary. When you collect enough responses and plot them, you start to see ranges emerge. Those ranges show you where price aligns with perceived value and where it starts to create friction.

Here’s a graphical representation of the Van Westerndorp pricing model.

​
​

​Image source​

Complicated, I know, but bear with me.

What this model reveals

If you apply this model, the first finding will be that your audience does not agree on what your offer should cost.

That may sound obvious, yet most people operate as if there is a shared expectation.

Let’s say you run this for a strategy session. You might find that a portion of your audience sees anything above $200 as excessive. Another group starts taking you seriously only above $500. A smaller segment associates higher prices with higher confidence and is comfortable in the $1,000+ range.

You could say that this is contradictory and that it adds yet another layer of confusion.

But if you think bout it, they simply are different segments interpreting the same offer through different lenses — everyone has their own perception of “bang for your buck”, which is influenced by a plethora of cultural factors and biases.

There’s no point in trying to change that perception. Yes, it can be done, but it’s a lengthy process with minimal gains for business owners.

What you can do is look at it as a map of how those interpretations are distributed.

And once you have that map, the question shifts.

“What should I charge?” → “Which segment am I choosing to serve with this offer?”

Let’s piggyback on the example above: a strategy session that you can price anywhere between $200 and $1000.

• If you price it closer to the lower end of the spectrum, you will increase accessibility and volume.
• If you price it closer to the higher end of the spectrum, you will lower accessibility and volume AND increase expectations.

There’s no right or wrong, of course. The answer depends on the type of business you want to run and the type of client you want to serve.

How to use the Van Westendorp pricing model without turning into a researcher

First off, you don’t need a massive dataset to get a useful signal. A small, well-targeted sample can already show you patterns.

Here’s a practical way to approach it:

• Pick one offer that you want to clarify.
• Send those four questions to your email list or a segment of your audience. You can use Google Forms, Tally, or any form you want for this.
• Do NOT give people ranges. Use text fields where they can input a single numerical value. Yes, the answers will be all over the place. Yes, that’s OK.
• Keep responses anonymous so people feel comfortable answering honestly.
• Aim for a few dozen responses to start seeing directional patterns.
• Download the spreadsheet with the answers.
• Plug it into your favorite AI chatbot and ask it to plot the answers following the Van Westendorp model. You can copy-paste this newsletter as a prompt.

PSA: I ran this exercise with a client recently. If you don’t have a mathematics background, AI is magical at this sort of thing. For most of us, the maths is far too complicated to tackle on our own.

The profitability sweet spot

When you plot Van Westendorp, you typically get four curves:

• Too cheap (quality suspicion starts here)
• Cheap/good value
• Expensive, yet acceptable
• Too expensive (rejection starts here)

Where these curves intersect, you get four key zones:

1. Point of marginal cheapness (PMC) → below this, people distrust the price
2. Point of marginal expensiveness (PME) → above this, people start dropping off
3. Optimal price point (OPP) → where “too cheap” and “too expensive” intersect
4. Indifference price point (IPP) → where “cheap” and “expensive” intersect, meaning the market is evenly split between seeing the price as cheap or expensive.

Now, here’s the part most people misunderstand: the OPP is not the most profitable price. It’s the most psychologically balanced price and those are very different things. The most profitable price is:

• Slightly above the “good value” zone
• Before the steep drop in the “too expensive” curve

Why? Because with this position:

• You still capture enough demand
• You increase revenue per client
• You improve client quality (this matters more than people admit)
• You reduce the delivery load

Caveat: for this approach to work, your positioning needs to be on point.

✋ Limitations

The most profitable price isn’t always the ideal. I told you how I fell into this trap here → I priced on value and on what I thought would resonate with people.

If I had run a Van Westendorp analysis, I would have likely learned that people weren’t quite there yet. This model works at every business stage but it shouldn’t be the one guiding light.

When your results are in, consider other things besides the most profitable price:

• Price it lower if you want volume (i.e. if you want to fill a cohort program faster).
• Price it lower if you want to test a product quickly and you need early adopters.
• Price it higher if premium positioning is important to you.
• Price it higher when you have very limited seats in a program with a track record of success.

Like any model, the Van Westendorp pricing model informs your options. Strategy determines your direction.

If pricing has felt inconsistent or difficult to justify, it’s rarely because you are missing a magic number and usually because you are trying to solve for price without fully seeing the landscape you are operating in.

The Van Westendorp model gives you a way to make that landscape visible.

Remember that pricing is a function of strategy, so never think about it independently because it never exists in a void.

If you want help applying this

This is the kind of work that sits at the core of a strategy session.

We look at your offers, your audience, your positioning, and the role pricing plays across your business. Then we make deliberate choices about where you sit and why, instead of adjusting numbers in isolation.

If that’s something you want to get clarity on, you can book a strategy session with me.

The Council Bulletin

Many Council members have questions or challenges around outreach, on LinkedIn or in general. So I’m putting together a mini-sprint in April to help them tackle those challenges.

We’ll have guest speakers and peer-to-peer sessions so we can build less frustrating and time-consuming outreach systems, from warm DMs to Sales Navigator mastery.

If outreach is something you need help with, this is a great time to join us.

(Also, peep the brand-new landing page, and the video sneak peek of The Council.)

​
​🎙️ My events, interviews, and more

Hype marketing and “$10k in 3 days” is schmexy but you know what pays the bills? Unsexy marketing. Join my friend Giada Nizzoli and me for a free live event where we cut through the BS and tell you what’s actually working in marketing right now. ​Sign up here!​​

​
​

That's it from me today! See you next week in your inbox. Here to make you think, Adriana

​

Share this essay

🔗https://www.adrianatica.com/not-sure-how-to-price-your-offers-read-this-saf-174/​

Quick share links

​​​