Design the pricing page first and you find out what you are actually selling. We started doing it as a provocation. It is now the second thing we make on every product engagement.
The page forces the question
A pricing page cannot be vague. It has to name the tiers, say what separates them, and put a number against each. Every one of those is a product decision wearing a marketing hat.
When Studio Kanna's three tiers went onto a page in week one, the middle tier had nothing in it. Not because we had not written the copy — because the product genuinely had no feature that justified the step up. That is a scoping problem you want in week one, not week five.
If you cannot fill the middle tier, you do not have three products. You have one, and an aspiration.
What it catches
Three failures show up on a pricing page before they show up anywhere else.
- Undifferentiated tiers. The features that separate them are the features you have not built yet.
- A value metric nobody can count. If the customer cannot predict their own bill, they will not buy the plan.
- A free tier that eats the paid one. Easy to see on a page, nearly invisible in a backlog.
How we run it
The pricing page is a real artefact, not a placeholder: real numbers, real limits, designed to the same standard as anything we ship. It goes in front of five people who resemble buyers, and the question is not "do you like it" but "which one would you buy, and what would make you pick the one above".
Half the time the answer changes the product roadmap. That is the point. The page is cheap; the six weeks of building the wrong middle tier is not.
