How do I know what to charge?

I'd rather do two things: research the market, and talk to your potential users.

Have at least 10 real conversations where you sit down with a potential customer. They know this is not a sales call, this is a research call. Ask them: will your business die if you don't have this, or is it just nice to have? Everyone's just cutting the budgets out of the nonessential tools. You need to be the essential tool for them. What would make them switch, and how much are they ready to pay?

These are all the questions you should ask the direct industry you want to sell to.

You still should, more or less, be close to the prices on a big marketplace. Even if you bring the customer to your website through ads, from personal experience they sometimes still look there. You don't want to acquire that customer and then they buy from someone else.

In my experience, completely different industry, I price on the higher end of marketplace competitors. I'm not cheaper, but it's still really competitive. Say a new product costs $100. You can be 110 if you're really screaming that differentiating factor. At 300, the customer says, OK, what's the real differentiator?

It's worthwhile seeing the specific price range on that marketplace.

I think a SaaS company can probably afford more. With an agency, maybe you could do different deals.

For an individual trying it for one account, the entry would probably have to be below $100. It's not that expensive, so someone tries it out. When you scale and add accounts, it becomes more expensive.

Some agencies only manage clients spending more than $100,000 or $1,000,000. Then you can definitely have a higher tier, because it kind of depends how much the agency is earning per client. If someone has 10 accounts spending so much, paying $1,000 or even more is nothing compared to the revenue they're getting from the client.

Another platform takes 15% from your customers. That's a lot of money at the end of the month. If you do the math on the amount of money they're saving, your price sounds to me like it's too small.

The monthly fee, personally I would prorate it depending on the type of customer it is. You can't just do one price for everybody.

With a fixed price, you don't need to explain that you're using AI to make you very efficient.

If your warm pool is in your country, start considering Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, the US. It's much easier to sell a €10,000 project, because €10,000 is one month's salary for a senior engineer. 10K is nothing when you see a client's yearly expenses. For them it is for free.

Even six years ago, my software agency was charging German clients like €20,000 to €25,000 for projects the size of yours. They have money, and the value they get from a product is much higher than those 20,000 that they paid us.

You either create what feels and seems like a premium product, or you set a lower barrier-to-entry price and try to gain users.

You could do introductory pricing: just start low and then ratchet up over time. No one's going to come back a month or two later and be like, oh, I see it's higher.

Very quickly you could see you've got 100 users and 50% of them are premium. That's a pretty great conversion, so maybe you keep that pricing. Or almost everyone's buying, and you think you can start raising the prices. Regardless of the outcome, you can always raise it.

It depends, obviously, on the person and the company.

My own company was free for six months in the beginning, until we had 650 reviews, I think. It was just a marketplace where mentors could set rates, and then we allowed them to go free. No one was booking them, because there was a price on their profile and no social proof. Huge uptick in engagement, and then we used that social proof to justify putting a paywall in front later.

We started at like $99 per year. Really, really cheap. Then it was $120 a year, then $200 a year, and now it's $85 a month, I think.

At the beginning you want sign-ups and people that use it, and you will have costs for it. The money comes later, with them using it over the years.

Your pricing goes together with how much investment you have to test and burn. You can do a cost-plus calculation: how much does it cost, and you want a small margin.

I think the first thing is getting paying customers, and you might make a loss with them. You can say this is the pilot price, and after six months it goes to the regular price. The regular price you have to define by what is OK in the market.

If you sell the subscription inside the app, you'd pay the app store 15% under its small business program. On top of it come the regional taxes, which in total cut off around 30% of what people pay you. Out of the rest come all your expenses, so you can easily cut off half right away.

Statistically, there's a very, very small chance you'll cover your expenses within one purchase. You need recurrent payments over 6 to 12 months to cover all your expenses.

I'd also challenge a quarterly fee on its own. I'd suggest you go for something more industry standard, like offering monthly, quarterly, yearly.

I talk with a lot of founders. So few of them actually worry about pricing. They'll spend maybe an hour and a half and say, let's just charge $99 a month. They're so stoked people will pull out their credit card that they never go back and re-evaluate. Is this pricing working for the rest of the business?

It doesn't sound like you have many copy and paste competitors to compare against. I'd encourage you to look more at the fundamentals of unit economics. The cost of acquiring each customer, then the LTV, gives you an idea of how much you can afford to spend on acquiring each additional customer.