Growth Unhinged - Pricing Archive
by Kyle Poyar · Growth Unhinged
Kyle Poyar's pricing essay archive, running from 2023 to the present. Posts dissect packaging changes at named SaaS companies, seat-versus-usage and AI-credit models, price-increase mechanics, and annual monetization benchmark surveys covering several hundred B2B software firms.
More resources on Pricing Strategy
Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice (Thaler, 1985)
The 1985 Marketing Science paper introducing transaction utility, acquisition utility and reference prices - the framework underlying most later work on pricing psychology. Explains why an identical price reads as a bargain or an insult depending on context and framing.
The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably (7th Edition)
The standard reference text on value-based pricing. Builds a value cascade spanning economic value estimation, segmented price structures, price communication, pricing policy, competitive response and financial analysis, with behavioural-economics material integrated throughout the seventh edition. The end state of this topic - the book a reader keeps after the others have been absorbed, and the only source here that treats price structure, policy and competitive dynamics as a complete system.
Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price
Two Simon-Kucher partners argue willingness-to-pay research belongs before product development rather than after launch. Presents a nine-rule process covering segmentation, packaging, choice of pricing model, price setting and behavioural pricing tactics, drawn from cases including Porsche and Uber. The bridge between pricing theory and product work, and the single book most often named when founders ask where to start on monetization.
Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything
Hermann Simon, founder of Simon-Kucher, recounts five decades of pricing consulting across consumer goods, industrials and services. Covers price-volume tradeoffs, value perception, price wars, luxury and discount positioning, and why most firms charge less than customers would willingly pay. It builds pricing intuition through real engagements rather than frameworks, so a reader arrives at Nagle or the MIT course already knowing why price is a strategic variable. Written by the practitioner who effectively created the pricing-consulting profession, which puts it well past the pop-business tier.