Picking a number is uncomfortable in a way that surprises people. It feels like you're putting a value on your own work, publicly, where anyone can disagree with it.
There's no formula that produces the right answer. There are a few things that make the guess much better than a shrug.
Look at the scale your market already set
People don't judge your price in the abstract. They compare it to what they already pay for things that feel similar.
Someone considering a $9 a month note app is comparing it to Notion and Bear and the free thing on their phone. They arrive with a rough sense of what this kind of software costs, and your number lands somewhere on that mental scale.
Which means the useful first step is finding out what that scale is. Look at four or five things your person might compare you to, note what they charge, and see where you sit.
You don't have to match it. Being noticeably cheaper or noticeably more expensive is a real strategy. But you should know which one you're doing rather than discovering it later.
Cheap is not the safe option
The instinct when you're new and unsure is to price low. It feels humble and low-risk.
It usually isn't. Price signals quality before anyone's used anything, and a number well below the category makes people wonder what's missing. For business buyers especially, a very low price reads as "hobby project, might vanish next year."
There's a practical problem too. Low prices need enormous volume to add up, which puts you straight back into the hardest version of the distribution problem from lesson 1.1. Doubling your price is a lot easier than doubling your users.
And going up later annoys existing customers in a way that coming down never does. Starting slightly high leaves you room to run a discount, which everybody likes.
Round numbers, and the $9 thing
You'll notice prices cluster: $5, $9, $19, $29, $49.
Partly convention, partly that the ninety-nine cent trick has worn thin outside retail. $9 reads as a normal software price. $8.73 reads as though something odd is happening.
For a consumer app, somewhere between $3 and $15 a month is the usual band. For something aimed at businesses, $20 to $200 depending on how much money or time it saves them. Wide ranges, but they'll stop you landing somewhere strange.
Offer yearly
Most subscription apps offer monthly and yearly, with yearly working out around two months cheaper.
Worth doing for two reasons. You get the cash up front, which matters when you're small. And yearly subscribers churn far less, partly because they've committed and partly because they don't face the decision every month.
Something like $9 monthly or $79 yearly is a standard shape and people recognise it immediately.
Your first price is wrong
This is the bit that takes the pressure off.
Nobody's first price is right. It's a hypothesis, and the only way to test it is to put it in front of people and watch.
If everybody says yes immediately and nobody hesitates, you're too cheap. If nobody converts and the feedback is all about cost, you're too expensive, or the value isn't landing yet.
You can change it. New customers pay the new price, existing ones usually keep theirs, and this is completely normal practice. The number you pick now is a starting point, not a commitment.
A quick story. My app had a price. It was in the plan, it was on the pricing page, it looked reasonable next to the competitors I'd looked at.
No human being was ever asked to pay it.
So I had a number that was researched, defensible, and entirely untested. Which is the same as not having one, because a price only becomes real when somebody either pays it or doesn't. Everything before that is arithmetic.
If I were starting again I'd put a payment page in front of people embarrassingly early, before the product justified it, just to see what happened. The answer would have been useful either way and it would have cost me a week.
If you want help picking a number
Point four is the useful one long term. A price you can read the results of is worth more than a price you agonised over.
Next: How money reaches your bank →
Go deeper: Chapter 26, Pricing Strategy