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Playbook··6 min read

Pricing a digital product when you have no idea

A short, practical way to land on a number — without the spreadsheet or the guesswork spiral.

A calculator and marketing notes on a desk

Pricing paralysis is nearly always a confidence problem wearing a maths costume. You are not trying to find the objectively correct number. You are trying to find a number that a real person will pay today, so you can start learning from actual sales.

Three anchors

Rather than agonising, pick from three anchors and move on:

  • The impulse price. Low enough that nobody has to think. Good for a first product and for building an audience that has bought from you once.
  • The considered price. Two or three times the impulse price. The buyer weighs it up — so the page has to do real work.
  • The outcome price. Priced against what it saves or earns them, not against what it cost you to make. This is where most creators undercharge.

Then change it

Ship at a price, watch the conversion rate, and change it. Ten sales tell you more than a week of deliberation, and a price is one of the easiest things in your business to edit.

Read Conversion, Not the Cheer of a Single Sale

Changing the price is the easy part; reading the result is where people fool themselves. One good sale the day after a price rise feels like proof, and it's noise. What you're actually watching is revenue per visitor — the price multiplied by the share of people who buy — over a run of sales large enough to mean something.

Give a price a fair trial before you judge it. Ten to twenty sales, or a week of steady traffic, is roughly the floor; less than that and you're reading tea leaves. Change one thing at a time, too. Move the price and rewrite the page in the same week and you'll never know which one shifted the numbers.

  • Track sales ÷ visitors, not just the total — a higher price that converts a little less can still earn more.
  • Wait for a real sample: ten to twenty sales before you draw any conclusion.
  • Change one variable at a time — price, or headline, or image, never all three at once.
  • Keep a note of each price and its numbers so you can walk it back if the new one does worse.

Give the Price Something to Stand Next To

A number in isolation is hard to judge; the same number beside a bigger one looks fair. This is why a second, pricier option earns its place even if barely anyone buys it. A £29 template pack feels dear on its own and reasonable sitting under a £79 'pack plus a walkthrough call'. The expensive tier's real job is to make the one you actually want to sell look sensible.

A bundle does the same work from the other direction. Sell the checklist for £9, or the checklist, the templates and the swipe file together for £19, and most people take the middle path you built for them. You're not tricking anyone — you're giving the buyer a frame, because 'is £9 fair?' is a much harder question than 'is the bundle better value than the single?'.

Keep it to two or three options. A wall of tiers reintroduces the very paralysis you're trying to spare the buyer, and the person who can't decide usually decides to leave.

Cheap Is a Claim, Not a Kindness

Underpricing feels generous and often reads as doubt. A course priced at £3 doesn't say 'accessible', it says 'probably thin', and the buyer who'd have happily paid £40 for something that solves their problem now wonders what's wrong with it. Price is one of the first quality signals a stranger has, and a very low one can repel the exact people you want.

If your instinct to go low is really about lowering the buyer's risk, solve that directly instead. A clear refund line, a free sample chapter, or a short preview does the reassuring without dragging your price — and your perceived value — through the floor. Let people test the thing; don't apologise for it with the number.

Run all of this from one link.

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