Pricing an established product is comparison. You look at what the market pays, you decide whether you are cheaper or better, and you position accordingly. It is not easy but it is bounded.
Pricing something genuinely new is a different problem, and most teams handle it the same way: they pick a number that feels defensible, present it with confidence, and quietly hope. I have done this. I have also watched it go badly enough to want a better method.
Across marketing work in several industries and now in software, I have ended up with five reference points. None of them gives you a price. Together they give you a range narrow enough to be a decision rather than a guess.
Every new product replaces something, even when there is no competing product. The alternative might be a spreadsheet, a phone call, an agency, an employee's Tuesday, or doing nothing at all.
So the first exercise is to cost the alternative honestly. Not the version where you assume your buyer is inefficient, but the real one. If a task currently takes a competent person four hours a month, that is your reference, and you should compute it at their actual salary, not the number that flatters you.
This does not set your price. It sets the ceiling of easy argument. Above it, you are asking someone to believe something. Below it, you are having a much simpler conversation.
This is the single most useful thing I learned selling in a commercial environment, and it is underused by technical founders.
Organisations do not evaluate spending in the abstract. They evaluate it against existing categories. A cost that fits an existing budget line gets approved by one person. A cost that requires a new line gets approved by a committee, next quarter, maybe.
So before you set a price, find out what your buyer already spends money on that yours could sit beside. Not because you should match that number, but because knowing it tells you which approval path you are walking into. I have seen a lower price take longer to close than a higher one, purely because the lower one did not fit any existing category and the higher one did.
Buyers react as strongly to how they are charged as to how much. Per seat, per site, per use, per year, per asset. The shape carries a claim about what your product is.
Charging per user says this is a tool for individuals. Charging per building says this is infrastructure attached to a property. Those two options can produce identical revenue and completely different customer behaviour, because the shape decides who inside the organisation feels the cost, and therefore who inside the organisation argues about it.
Get the shape wrong and your customers will fight you at renewal even if the total is fair. Get it right and the total becomes much less contested, because it scales with something they already believe should cost money.
I would test the shape in conversations long before I tested the number. It is far harder to change later.
This is a question from sales, not from finance, and it has served me better than any pricing model.
You are looking for the point where the decision stops being an evaluation and becomes obvious. Everyone has that threshold, and most buyers will tell you roughly where it is if you ask directly.
The answer is not your price. Pricing at obvious is usually leaving money on the table and, worse, it signals that the product is minor. But it locates your floor, and it tells you something more valuable: how far away from obvious your current thinking is. If your intended price is ten times that number, you do not have a pricing problem. You have a value communication problem, or the wrong buyer.
Price is the loudest piece of positioning you will ever ship. It arrives before the demo, survives every conversation, and gets repeated by people who have never used the product.
A low price on a serious product does not read as generous. It reads as unproven. In categories where the cost of being wrong is high, and building maintenance is very much one of those, an unusually low price actively creates doubt. Buyers reason that if this really prevented what you claim it prevents, it would cost more.