Posted by You have built something worth selling, and now you are staring at an empty price box, hoping a number turns up that feels right. It happens to almost everyone who has ever launched something online, whatever they are selling.
Too low, and you worry you are giving the work away. Too high, and you worry nobody clicks buy. So most people do what everyone tells them to do: look at what a competitor charges, land somewhere close to it, and hope.
That is not a plan. It is a guess wearing a business suit.
If you want to price your product with something more solid behind it than a hunch, there is a simple way to work the number out. It does not need picking out of the air.
The Guess Nobody Questions
Most sellers price by feeling. They build something they believe in, choose a number that seems about right, and move on to the next task. That is human nature, but it is not a strategy.
That guess is expensive either way. Too low, and you attract the customers who question every guarantee. Too high, without reasons behind it, and refunds start climbing along with your doubts.
Neither mistake shouts about itself straight away. Both sit there quietly, the same way a shelf that is not quite full still loses you sales, even though nobody complains about it directly.
There is a better way to price your product, one factor at a time.
Five Factors Worth Working Through
Nick James, whose products I have promoted since 2007, teaches a five-factor approach he calls the P.R.I.C.E. formula: Product, Results, Income, Competitors, Extras. Work through each one against your own offer, and the number stops being a guess.
Product covers what you are actually selling and how. A money-making topic tends to support a higher price than a hobby one. A course delivered live, with your own time attached, sits higher than a plain PDF. Something a reader could work through in an evening on their own is priced lower, simply because it asks less of you to deliver. And where you sell matters too: a big marketplace can discount your work without asking you. Your own site keeps that decision in your hands.
Results is the gap between where your reader starts and where they end up after using what you taught them. The bigger that gap, and the faster it closes, the more the product is worth. A product that takes someone from nothing to their first sale is worth more than one that only polishes a skill they already had. Real evidence, not clever wording, is what carries a price here.
Working Backward From The Number You Want
The Income factor is the one most people skip, and the one I found most useful once I actually did the sum. Decide what you want the product to earn this year, then work backward.
Say the goal is $100,000. At $17 a sale, that needs close to 5,900 sales. At $197, it needs about 500. At $997, just over 100 sales gets you there.
Five hundred sales of a $197 product reaches the same place as thousands of sales of a cheap one.
The same math works in reverse too. If your product is priced at $47, reaching $100,000 means selling around 2,100 copies in a year, which is roughly six sales a day. Written out like that, the number stops being an abstraction and turns into a target you can actually plan a launch around.
That single comparison is often the moment somebody stops underpricing their own work.
None of this means high is always right. A low-priced product still has its place. It just means you choose the number on purpose, with the year’s target already in view.
What The Market And The Extras Add
Competitors tells you what your buyer already expects to pay before they reach your page. A crowded, general topic pushes you toward competing on price. A narrow, specific solution lets you compete on value instead, which is a far more comfortable place to sell from. Look at what three or four similar products charge before you settle on your own number, not to copy one of them, but to see where the floor and the ceiling already sit.
Extras covers everything that gives your offer an edge over the one sitting next to it. Advanced material tends to earn more than beginner content. Information a reader cannot easily find elsewhere supports a stronger price. So does your own track record, built one satisfied buyer at a time. A bonus that solves the next problem your buyer will hit does more for the price than a random extra bolted on to look generous.
Nick James tells a story about standing in a room before a one-day workshop. He watched the organiser take something like $100,000 from fifty attendees, before anyone had said a word. What stuck with him was not the number itself, but how clearly that price had been reasoned out beforehand, rather than guessed at on the day.
That is the point of the whole exercise: to price your product with reasons behind it, in a way a borrowed number never quite manages.
Putting This Against Your Own Price
I spent a career setting prices before I ever touched a computer, first in a supermarket chain, later running businesses that traded in dozens of countries. The lesson was always the same: a number without reasons behind it does not survive contact with a real customer for long.
That habit did not disappear when I moved from shop floors to a computer screen. If anything, it matters more here, because nobody stands over your shoulder to catch a bad price before it goes live.
Take whatever you are selling now, finished or half built, and write a line under each of the five letters. Product. Results. Income. Competitors. Extras. Some of them will push your price up. Others will pull it down. That tension is normal, and it tells you something true about the offer before you ever publish it.
I have covered a few other pricing and marketing questions in recent articles, and the pattern holds every time. Work the number out before you build, not after you have already published and started wondering why nobody is buying.
Where The Price Sits Is Only Half The Job
Getting the number right solves one problem. Getting a reader to believe in it is a separate one, and it comes down to how the offer is written, not just what it costs. Plenty of fairly priced products sit unsold simply because nobody ever explained why the price made sense.
If you want help with that half of it, One Letter From Retirement is Nick James’s course on writing the kind of offer that carries a price. It shows you how to do that without needing to apologise for the number.
Set your price with the five factors in front of you, one at a time, rather than a figure you are quietly hoping nobody questions.
Jim