--- name: pricing-power description: >- Anchor price against what competitors actually charge and meter on, size willingness to pay from what the problem costs today, then run CAC, LTV and payback across three scenarios. Use when: Setting a first price, changing a price, or picking a value metric. Also when growth is fine and margin is not. --- # What do we charge, and does the money work? **The job.** Tell me what to charge, what to charge for, and whether the unit economics survive a conservative case. **The method.** Madhavan Ramanujam's willingness-to-pay discipline — price before you finish building, segment by need, and treat how you charge as more consequential than how much — followed by the CAC and LTV arithmetic done in the open. **What it costs.** A disciplined run is about 12 billed calls, $2.40 at 20¢ per successful call. Stop at 20 ($4.00) — past that you are confirming, not learning. Failed calls are not charged, and reading this playbook is free. **Tools it uses.** `web_fetch`, `keyword_suggestions`, `keyword_volume`, `keyword_intent`, `keyword_forecast`, `company_jobs`, `app_reviews`, `social_reddit_posts`, `ads_creatives` Each one is `GET https://wutheringai.com/v1/?…&token=`. The live list, with every parameter, is at https://wutheringai.com/v1. **Inputs.** product (required) — The product being priced, in a sentence. segment — Buyer segment: b2c_sub, prosumer, b2b_smb, or b2b_mid. Sets funnel and churn defaults. price — Intended monthly price, if you have one. The run will try to break it. competitor — A competitor domain whose pricing page anchors the range. None were supplied on this request, so the placeholders below are yours to fill. **Deliver.** A price, a value metric, a packaging split into leaders, fillers and killers, and the LTV:CAC figure in three scenarios with the conservative one shown first. --- ## What is being priced **FINDING URLS.** Several tools take a URL and cannot search for one — `social_linkedin_posts`, `social_reddit_posts`, `social_reddit_comments`, `company_jobs`, `company_person`, `web_fetch`. When you need a page, find its URL with YOUR OWN web search first, using a site: filter. That costs nothing and is exact. `web_search` does the same job for a billed call and is the fallback when you have no search of your own. Never construct a URL from a company name: a wrong URL comes back as a dead page, which reads as an absence of evidence rather than as your mistake. Ramanujam's first rule is the one most teams break: the willingness-to-pay conversation belongs before the build, not after it, because it is the only input that tells you which features to build at all. His second is that **how you charge matters more than how much** — the value metric survives a decade of price changes. This run gathers the evidence for both, then does the arithmetic in the open. ## Gather first. Do not model on assumed numbers. ### 1. Anchors — what the market already charges `web_fetch` 3–5 competitor pricing pages as `format=markdown`; switch to `format=html` when the tiers sit in a table you need to read cell by cell. For each, extract five things: FLOOR the cheapest paid tier ANCHOR the tier they visually push CEILING the highest published price, and where "contact us" starts GATES what you must buy the next tier to get METRIC what they meter on — seats, usage, volume, outcomes The metric is the finding. It is that company's public statement of what they believe creates value, and it is the decision you are most likely to get wrong and least likely to be able to reverse. ### 2. What the problem is worth today - `company_jobs` on one or two listings for the role that does this work by hand, found by searching `site:linkedin.com/jobs/view ""`. A posted salary band is the cost of solving this problem with a person. Your price ceiling is a fraction of it, and the fraction is your argument. - `keyword_volume` on the commercial terms: the CPC column is what a competitor pays for one click, which is the floor of what they believe a customer is worth. ### 3. Leaders, fillers and killers Ramanujam's classification, sourced from what buyers volunteer rather than what a survey prompts: LEADERS the few capabilities people will pay more to get FILLERS nice, but nobody moves tier for them KILLERS present and people refuse to buy — often a pricing mechanic, not a feature: a seat minimum, an annual lock-in, an overage surprise - `app_reviews` and `social_reddit_posts` on the competitor: search their threads for the word "worth it", for "we switched because", and for the complaints about billing rather than about features. Killers hide in billing complaints. - `keyword_suggestions` on " pricing", " cost" and " alternative". The alternative terms with real volume are a measure of how many people the current price has already pushed away. - `keyword_intent` on that pool to separate people comparing prices from people researching the category. - `ads_creatives` on the competitor: a price stated in a long-running ad is a price that converts. ## The arithmetic — show your work, never do it in your head CAC = CPC / funnel_conversion LTV = price × gross_margin / monthly_churn months_to_repay = CAC / (price × gross_margin) reach_ceiling ≈ monthly_search_volume × 0.04 Use `keyword_forecast` with a realistic bid to get clicks and cost at volume rather than assuming the CPC scales. SEGMENT DEFAULTS, if you have no measured funnel or churn. State which you used: b2c_sub funnel 1.0% churn 6.5%/mo prosumer funnel 1.5% churn 5.0%/mo b2b_smb funnel 2.0% churn 3.5%/mo b2b_mid funnel 0.5% churn 1.5%/mo RUN THREE SCENARIOS. A base case on its own is marketing, not analysis. conservative CPC ×1.25 funnel ×0.60 churn ×1.40 base as measured optimistic CPC ×0.85 funnel ×1.40 churn ×0.70 **THE BAR: LTV:CAC at or above 3.0×, and the CONSERVATIVE case must clear it.** If only the optimistic case clears, the answer is no. Say it plainly, and show the conservative figure first so the reader meets the constraint before the hope. ## Then decide the shape, not only the number 1. **The value metric.** Name it, and name what happens to the customer's bill when they succeed with your product. If the bill does not rise when their value rises, you have chosen a metric that caps you. If it rises faster than their value, you have chosen one that churns them. 2. **The packaging.** Put the leaders behind the tier you want people to buy. Fillers go in the base tier where they raise perceived value at no cost. Remove the killers or price around them. 3. **The segments.** Different needs, different packages — not one ladder of the same product in three sizes. ## Close with five options, each carrying the number it moves A. **Test it** at this spend, watching this metric, for this long B. **Charge more** — specifically this much, against this anchor C. **Change the metric** — to this one, which changes the bill like this D. **Narrow the buyer** — to this segment, which changes funnel to this E. **Walk away** — because this number does not move **RULES THAT MAKE THE OUTPUT TRUSTWORTHY** - Cite the tool and the argument behind every number you state. - Distinguish measured (a tool returned it) from inferred (you reasoned to it). - State the strongest evidence AGAINST your conclusion before your conclusion. - Absence of a signal is not evidence of absence. Name which instrument was blind and why. - Coverage is public data and varies by query, country, and date. A thin result is a thin result, not an empty market. - If the data does not settle it, say INCONCLUSIVE and name the one call that would settle it. An unspent budget and an uncertain answer at the same time is a failed run; so is a confident answer the data did not support. ## Deliver The price, the metric, the packaging, and the LTV:CAC in all three scenarios with the conservative one first. Then the one assumption that, if wrong, flips the answer — and the cheapest way to test it.