suede-pricing — Claude Code skill: pricing and packaging

---
name: suede-pricing
description: "Suede AI pricing and packaging: chooses the value metric (seats, usage, credits, outcomes), structures tiers, compares free trial, freemium, and reverse trial, plans willingness to pay research and price increases with grandfathering, and tears down a pricing page for buyer clarity and for search and AI-assistant readability (text prices, matching schema, quotable FAQ). Returns a Pricing Decision Brief or a scored teardown. Use when deciding what to charge, restructuring tiers, pricing AI features with variable compute cost, raising prices, or fixing a pricing page that buyers or AI answers misread. NOT FOR: in-product upgrade screens (use suede-paywalls), offer bonuses and guarantees (use suede-offers), or executing billing changes."
metadata:
  version: 2.1.0
---

# Suede Pricing & Packaging

Suede AI Pricing turns verified product economics, buyer evidence, and commercial
constraints into testable prices, value metrics, tiers, and migration plans.
It produces a decision brief and measurement plan while keeping billing changes
behind explicit approval.

## Before Starting

**Check for product marketing context first:**
If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

### 1. Business Context
- What type of product? (SaaS, marketplace, e-commerce, service)
- What's your current pricing (if any)?
- What's your target market? (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
- What's your go-to-market motion? (self-serve, sales-led, hybrid)

### 2. Value & Competition
- What's the primary value you deliver?
- What alternatives do customers consider?
- How do competitors price?

### 3. Current Performance
- What's your current conversion rate?
- What's your ARPU and churn rate?
- Any feedback on pricing from customers/prospects?

### 4. Goals
- Optimizing for growth, revenue, or profitability?
- Moving upmarket or expanding downmarket?

---

## Pricing Fundamentals

Three axes, decided in this order: **packaging** (what's included per tier),
**pricing metric** (what you charge for), **price point** (how much).

Price sits between the next best alternative (the floor) and the customer's
perceived value (the ceiling). Cost to serve is a baseline, never the basis.

---

## Value Metrics

### What is a Value Metric?

The value metric is what you charge for: it should scale with the value customers receive.

**Good value metrics:**
- Align price with value delivered
- Are easy to understand
- Scale as customer grows
- Are hard to game

### Common Value Metrics

| Metric | Best For | Example |
|--------|----------|---------|
| Per user/seat | Collaboration tools | Slack, Notion |
| Per usage | Variable consumption | AWS, Twilio |
| Per feature | Modular products | HubSpot add-ons |
| Per contact/record | CRM, email tools | Mailchimp |
| Per transaction | Payments, marketplaces | Stripe |
| Flat fee | Simple products | Basecamp |

### Choosing Your Value Metric

Ask: "As a customer uses more of [metric], do they get more value?"
- If yes → good value metric
- If no → price doesn't align with value

### Pricing AI features

When a feature's cost to serve scales with model usage, flat per-seat pricing can turn heavy users unprofitable. Common structures:
- **Hybrid:** a seat or platform fee with included usage, plus credits or overage beyond it.
- **Credits:** one currency across AI actions, priced so the most expensive action still clears margin. Publish what a credit buys in plain words.
- **Outcome-based:** charge per resolved ticket, qualified lead, or completed task, when the outcome is countable and attributable.

For each, model margin at the 90th-percentile user, state included limits on the pricing page, and give buyers a usage view before the bill surprises them.

### Defaults to Beat

These are the answers a model reaches for unprompted. Each is allowed, but only
once you state why it beats the alternative for this product: never by default:
**$9/$29/$99** (or any flat 3x ladder); **Starter/Pro/Enterprise** names that
carry no product meaning; **exactly three tiers** when the buyer set is two or
four; **20% off annual** as the reflex discount; **"Contact us"** on the top
tier, which hides price from buyers and from the agents that now shortlist tools
(see Pricing Page Teardown); **per-seat** when usage, records, or transactions
track value better.

---

## Tier Structure Overview

### Good-Better-Best Framework

**Good tier (Entry):** Core features, limited usage, low price
**Better tier (Recommended):** Full features, reasonable limits, anchor price
**Best tier (Premium):** Everything, advanced features, 2-3x Better price

### Tier Differentiation

- **Feature gating**: Basic vs. advanced features
- **Usage limits**: Same features, different limits
- **Support level**: Email → Priority → Dedicated
- **Access**: API, SSO, custom branding

**For detailed tier structures and persona-based packaging**: See [references/tier-structure.md](references/tier-structure.md)

---

## Pricing Research

### Van Westendorp Method

Four questions that identify acceptable price range:
1. Too expensive (wouldn't consider)
2. Too cheap (question quality)
3. Expensive but might consider
4. A bargain

Analyze intersections to find optimal pricing zone.

### MaxDiff Analysis

Identifies which features customers value most:
- Show sets of features
- Ask: Most important? Least important?
- Results inform tier packaging

**For detailed research methods**: See [references/research-methods.md](references/research-methods.md)

---

## When to Raise Prices

### Signs It's Time

**Market signals:**
- Competitors have raised prices
- Prospects don't flinch at price
- "It's so cheap!" feedback

**Business signals:**
- Conversion well above your own trailing baseline with no price objections in sales notes
- Churn low and stable, with price rarely named as a cancel reason
- Strong unit economics (payback and gross margin, from your own data)

**Product signals:**
- Significant value added since last pricing
- Product more mature/stable

### Price Increase Strategies

1. **Grandfather existing**: New price for new customers only
2. **Delayed increase**: Announce 3-6 months out
3. **Tied to value**: Raise price but add features
4. **Plan restructure**: Change plans entirely

**Legal notice floor for existing subscribers:** an increase on an auto-renewing plan needs clear advance notice with cancellation instructions. California's amended Automatic Renewal Law (in force July 1, 2025) requires that notice 7 to 30 days before the new price applies; contracts and other jurisdictions may require more. Current rules live in `suede-paywalls`.

---

## Pricing Page Best Practices

### Above the Fold
- Clear tier comparison table
- Recommended tier highlighted
- Monthly/annual toggle
- Primary CTA for each tier

### Common Elements
- An on-page FAQ that answers cost, limits, trials, and cancellation in plain text (buyers and AI assistants both read it)
- The annual saving stated in dollars and percent, whatever discount you chose
- A guarantee or trial terms near the CTA
- Renewal terms beside any auto-renewing plan: price, billing interval, and how to cancel

### Price transparency rules
- Show the total mandatory price. In the UK, the DMCC Act has banned drip pricing of mandatory fees since April 6, 2025 ([CMA207 guidance](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unfair-commercial-practices-cma207)).
- Auto-renewing plans need clear disclosure and consent before billing under US ROSCA and state auto-renewal laws; `suede-paywalls` holds the current US, UK, and EU subscription rules.

### Pricing Psychology
Treat each as a test, using the evidence tiers in the `suede-offers` behavioral-models catalog:
- **Anchoring (Robust):** show the higher-priced option or the cost of the alternative first, honestly.
- **Good-better-best relativity (Context-dependent):** design the middle tier as the target and check real tier-selection data.
- **Decoy tier (Contested):** a third tier can clarify the comparison; do not count on it to move choice.
- **Charm vs. round endings (Context-dependent):** weak for B2B subscriptions; test rather than assume.

---

## Pricing Page Teardown

When someone wants to audit an existing pricing *page* for **clarity, transparency, and AI-readability** (not the pricing strategy itself, and not conversion-rate optimization, that's `suede-site-alchemy`), run a **teardown** that scores it across two axes and returns prioritized fixes:

- **Human buyer experience**: value-prop clarity, plan differentiation, cognitive load, trust signals, pricing psychology, and price transparency.
- **AI-agent readiness**, whether the LLMs and agents that increasingly shortlist and compare tools can actually read and quote your pricing: machine-readable prices (not locked in an image or behind "Contact us"), extractable FAQ/objection coverage, per-tier depth stated in text, and structured data. Buyers now ask ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude "what's the best X and what does it cost?" *before* visiting, a pricing page an agent can't parse loses deals you never see.

**Fast check, the "paste test":** give the pricing URL to a browsing-capable AI (Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, Claude with web), or paste the rendered page text, and ask "what are the plans and prices?" A clean miss means agents fetching your page will struggle too (a heuristic, not proof every agent fails).

The AI-readiness fixes are usually high-impact, low-effort (put prices in text, add JSON-LD that matches them). Hand implementation to **suede-seo-audit** (structured data and supported-schema checks), **suede-ai-seo** (extractability and AI-bot access), and **suede-competitors** for "vs" and alternatives pages that cite the same prices.

**For the full 10-dimension rubric, scoring, structured-data facts, and report template:** See [references/pricing-page-teardown.md](references/pricing-page-teardown.md).

---

## Output: Pricing Decision Brief

Every pricing or packaging engagement that is not a teardown returns this exact
structure. Use these headings verbatim; leave a heading in with "not decided,
[what's missing]" rather than dropping it.

```markdown
# Pricing Decision Brief: [product]

## Value metric
[What you charge for, and the one sentence proving usage of it tracks value.]

## Tier map
| Tier | Who it's for | Included | Limits | Price |
|------|--------------|----------|--------|-------|

## Price points + rationale
[Each number, and what it is anchored to: alternative, perceived value, or research.]

## Assumptions
[Every number taken on faith, flagged as assumption not measurement.]

## Validation plan
[What test or research confirms each assumption, and the metric that reads out.]

## Migration + grandfathering
[Existing customers: who moves, when, on what notice, and who is held.]

## What I did NOT decide
[Anything left to the user: committed price, published copy, billing changes.]
```

---

## Boundaries

- Do not create or change billing products, prices, subscriptions, or customer
  migrations without verified live state, a maximum-cost check, and explicit
  approval.
- Do not present willingness-to-pay, conversion, churn, or revenue impact as
  measured unless current research or product data supports it.
- Do not publish pricing copy, choose grandfathering policy, or commit the
  business to a price; return a recommendation, assumptions, and validation
  plan for the user to decide.

## Routing

- Use `suede-paywalls` for in-product upgrade and paywall experiences.
- Use `suede-offers` for bonuses, guarantees, and offer framing.
- Use `suede-ab-testing` to validate pricing-page or packaging hypotheses.
- Use `suede-revops` for approved deal-desk and pipeline implementation.