Decide your actual pricing before you guess at a number
Most early pricing is a guess anchored on a competitor's number, not a decision grounded in your actual value or costs.
- Use it for
- Founders setting a price for the first time, or reconsidering one that was never really decided deliberately.
Early-stage pricing often gets set by copying a competitor's number or picking something that "feels right," without grounding it in the value actually delivered or what customers have indicated they'd pay. This prompt forces the grounding step — value delivered, competitor context, and cost structure — before landing on a number, so the price is a decision rather than an anchor copied from elsewhere.
When not to use this
If you already have real pricing signal from paying customers at different price points, use that data directly — it beats this first-principles exercise.
Did this work?
You have a starting price grounded in the actual value delivered, with a specific reason you'd revisit it, not a number copied from a competitor.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.