What to Do When Your SaaS Pricing Isn't Working

The average SaaS company spends 8 hours total on pricing decisions across its entire business lifespan - less time than a single enterprise sales call. 11-17% of SaaS revenue is lost as a result of wrong pricing. That's not a rounding error: for a $1M ARR business, that's $110,000-$170,000 in revenue already earned and left on the table. A 1% improvement in pricing yields 12.7% more profit - making it the single highest-leverage number in your business.

Why this happens

Pricing decisions at early-stage SaaS are almost always made by gut feel, competitive anchoring, or a single customer conversation that happened to be memorable. None of these methods surface the actual shape of your buyers' willingness to pay - they just produce a number that feels defensible in the moment.

The result is a price that's either too high (killing conversion before you get a chance to show value), too low (killing perceived value and making you invisible in competitive evaluations), or structured wrong (the right price in the wrong model, so buyers can't connect what they pay to what they get). All three feel like the same problem from inside the business: "our pricing isn't working." Each has a different fix.

What to check first

Before changing your price, diagnose which direction you're broken.

1. Do prospects go quiet after seeing the pricing page?
Traffic hits your pricing page, bounce rate is high, and deals that were progressing stop progressing. That's a too-high signal - the price created a friction point that the value proposition wasn't strong enough to overcome before the buyer saw the number.

2. Are you winning on discounts?
If more than 20% of your deals involve a discount to close, you're effectively already pricing at the discounted rate - you've just built in friction and a negotiation overhead on top of it. That's a structural pricing problem.

3. Do customers say it's great but can't justify the cost to their boss?
This is a value communication problem more than a price problem, but it manifests at the pricing stage. The buyer is sold, but your price isn't packaged in a way that makes the internal business case obvious. The fix is often ROI framing and pricing page structure, not the number itself.

4. Are you getting churned at renewal, not at trial?
Churn at trial means the product didn't deliver on the signup promise. Churn at renewal means the customer got value, but the price-to-value ratio didn't hold up over a full billing cycle. That's often a too-low problem: you priced at a point that attracted buyers who weren't the right segment for long-term retention.

How to fix it

Diagnose by direction, then apply the right fix.

Too high (friction pre-signup): The issue is almost never the number in isolation - it's the ratio between your price and the clarity of your value proposition at the point the buyer sees the price. Before cutting the price, test whether better value framing on your pricing page moves the conversion rate. If it does, you have a communication problem. If it doesn't, you have a price level problem.

Too low (churn post-signup): Counterintuitively, raising prices often reduces churn - it attracts buyers who take the product more seriously and have a stronger business case for using it. Start by identifying your highest-retention cohort and checking what they paid. That's usually your floor, not your ceiling.

Wrong structure (right price, wrong model): If your pricing model doesn't map to how buyers think about value - per seat when they think per project, or flat-rate when they think usage-based - no amount of number adjustment will fix the conversion. Change the model first, then optimize the number.

In all three cases, the fix starts with data, not intuition. Change one variable at a time and measure the effect before moving to the next.

Remove the guesswork

Running through pricing diagnostics manually - customer interviews, cohort analysis, competitive checks - takes weeks and produces directional signal at best. RightPrice runs 100+ synthetic buyer interactions against your current pricing, returning a confidence score, an optimal price range, and a trial strategy recommendation. You get the shape of your buyers' willingness to pay - and where your current price sits relative to it - without burning runway on guess-and-check pricing iterations.

Validate your pricing with RightPrice