Back in 2022, I was staring at my Vexpower dashboard, watching potential customers abandon their carts. Our internal surveys revealed the painful truth: 25% of people loved the product but most of them mentioned the price was too high. I asked for advice and some mentors confidently told me to charge more, while others said we should go freemium and build up from there.

Like most founders, I had no idea there was a scientific way to set prices. I thought you just picked a number that "felt right" based on competitors and hoped for the best. Price too high? Lower it. Too low? Raise it. Rinse and repeat until something sticks.

We surveyed our existing users. You ask a series of questions to triangulate at what price the maximum price most users would be ok with. The results? Our optimal price was $27—less than half what we were charging. We landed at $35, and revenue actually went UP despite the lower price.

The optimum price is where an equal number of people think it is cheap vs expensive.

That experience haunted me. How many founders are out there right now, charging 2x too much or 50% too little, simply because they don't know pricing research exists—or can't afford it even if they do? Getting the pricing right was transformative for us at Vexpower – our growth had been stalled out for months post-launch and we finally started growing, eventually reaching $2k MRR by the end of the year.

Before I Knew About Van Westendorp:

• Price: $69/month (random guess)

• Conversion: 2.1%

• Churn: 8% monthly

• Revenue: Struggling

After Van Westendorp Analysis:

• Price: $39/month

• Conversion: 3.8%

• Churn: 5% monthly

• Revenue: Up 40%

The problem is that most businesses don’t do any market research before setting their price. Either they’re lucky enough to get it right the first time, they are smart enough to react quickly to customer feedback, or they go out of business. Hiring a market research firm to find the optimum pricing is just completely out of the question, if you’re not already a large enterprise. 

Today at Rally, we fixed that. Van Westendorp analysis now costs $50 instead of $5,000, and you don't even need existing customers to run it. Let me show you why this changes everything.

The Hidden Cost of Guessing Your Price

Let's be honest about how most of us price our products:

• The Competitor Copy: "TechCrunch says my competitor charges $29, so I'll charge $27"

• The Round Number: "Let's do $50/month, it sounds professional"

• The Undervalue: "I'll start at $10 and raise it later" (you won't)

• The Overconfident: "$199/month because we're premium" (but are you?)

I didn't know any better. I just picked $69 because it seemed like a premium on the average cost of a Udemy course, and I wanted to position us as a  "serious" marketing course. No science. No research. Just vibes. 

Here's what guessing wrong actually costs:

Pricing Too High:

• Lose 30-50% of potential customers

• Blame your marketing when it's actually your price

• Burn through runway fixing the wrong problem

Pricing Too Low:

• Leave 40-70% of revenue on the table

• Attract price-sensitive customers who churn

• Can't afford to improve the product

The average indie hacker changes their pricing 3-4 times in the first year. Each change confuses existing customers, requires migration strategies, and costs weeks of dev time. The real cost of guessing isn't the price—it's everything else.

What Van Westendorp Analysis Actually Is (And Why You Need It)

Developed in the 1970s by Dutch economist Peter Van Westendorp, this method is stupidly simple but incredibly powerful. You ask four questions:

1. At what price would this be so cheap you'd question the quality?

2. At what price would this be a bargain?

3. At what price would this be getting expensive but you'd still consider it?

4. At what price would this be too expensive?

Plot the responses, find the intersections, and boom—you have:

• Optimal Price Point: Where resistance is lowest

• Acceptable Range: The safe pricing zone

• Price Ceiling: The "don't go above this" number

• Price Floor: The "don't go below this" number

It is particularly useful when: You want to assess what price ranges the market considers fair for your product. Perfect for indie products where you have no idea what people will actually pay, and you just want to get back to coding new features.

The Catch-22 of Traditional Pricing Research

Here's the problem I discovered: Van Westendorp analysis is amazing, but traditionally you need respondents. Real people that are willing to respond to your survey. Lots of them.

If you have existing customers: Great! Survey them. That's what I did with Vexpower—my existing users told me I was overcharging by 2x. Though to be fair I could never be sure if the right kind of people responded. I had CEOs on my email list and none of them responded… it’s hard to know if I was getting the real price or just the price that people who have the spare time to respond to a survey were willing to pay.

If you're pre-launch or studying competitors: You're screwed. You need to:

• Find 100-200 people who use similar products

• Bribe them with Amazon gift cards to take your survey

• Wait weeks for results

• Spend $2,000-5,000 minimum to recruit them (those Amazon gift cards add up)

Want to understand what users of more than one competitor would pay? Add another $5,000. Want to test different market segments? Keep adding zeros. If you’re a big brand and you outsource this to a market research agency, you can expect something like $50k+.

For a bootstrapped founder, this is impossible. So we don't do it. We guess. And we guess wrong. That’s one of the reasons why 9/10 products fail. 

Enter AskRally: Your $50 Pricing Consultant

Six months ago, I started experimenting with AI-powered pricing research. What if we could simulate how real customers think about price without recruiting actual humans?

The first attempts were hilarious. AI personas said they'd pay $500/month for a meditation app. But each iteration got better, and today we're achieving something actually useful.

 

You can run the Van Westendorp pricing questions yourself in AskRally today, but to make things easier we’re building a separate app that only focuses on pricing. You’ll be able to buy a single study for $50 one time fee (instead of signing up monthly). If you’re interested in testing it out, DM me.

The Breakthrough: Real Results That Actually Work

We’re really strict when it comes to measuring accuracy –– we play on hard mode. When a real person says "$20-30 is a bargain," our AI has to predict that exact range to count as correct. Not "somewhere cheap" but the exact price bracket. It's like guessing someone's exact birthday, not just their birth month.

Even with this strict scoring, here's what we achieved:

Starting Point: 30% accuracy (educated guessing) After Optimization: 43% accuracy (actually useful)

That's nearly half the time our AI nails the exact price a human would choose. And this is just the beginning—as AI models improve monthly and we refine our approach, these numbers will only go up.

Why 43% Accuracy Is Workable

Let me put this in perspective. If you're launching a product today, you have three options:

1. Guess: 0% systematic accuracy, 100% vibes

2. Professional Research: (mostly) accurate but it costs $5,000+

3. Rally AI: 43% accuracy for $50 (and you can do it before building your audience)

Here's the key insight: you don't need perfect accuracy to make better decisions. You need to know if you're in the right ballpark.

Think of it like weather forecasting. A forecast that's 43% perfectly accurate (exact temperature) but always gets you within 10 degrees is incredibly useful. That's what we provide—directional accuracy that prevents catastrophic pricing mistakes. You can always go back and validate the pricing after you launch, and have the money to run a full study.

Real Numbers from Our Testing

We recreated my original Vexpower pricing study using AI. Here's what traditional research found versus what our AI discovered:

Professional Research Said:

• Optimal price: around $35

• Customer comfort zone: $30-$45

Our AIs Said:

• Optimal price: around $20-$30

• Customer comfort zone: $25-$40

Are the exact numbers different? Yes. Is the business decision the same? Absolutely. Both tell you to cut your price in half.

That's the magic—even at 43% exact-match accuracy, AskRally gets the big picture right.

Comparing Your Options

Let's talk money, because that's what matters:

Traditional Pricing Study:

• Find 200 people: $3,000

• Survey platform: $500

• Analysis: $1,500

• Total: $5,000 minimum

• Wait time: 3-4 weeks

Rally AI Study:

• Generate unlimited personas: included

• Run analysis: instant

• Total: $50 flat

• Wait time: 10 minutes

That's not 50% cheaper or 90% cheaper. That's 99.9% cheaper. One one-hundredth of the cost.

Even if our AI was only 20% accurate, at this price point it would be worth trying. At 43% and improving? It's a no-brainer.

How to Use This Today (The Simple Version)

Step 1: Tell Us Your Audience

Be specific. "Marketing managers at SaaS companies" beats "marketers." The more specific you are, the better our AI performs.

Step 2: We Generate 100 Virtual Customers

These aren't random bots. They're AI personas built to match your exact target market, with realistic backgrounds and decision-making patterns.

Step 3: Run the Van Westendorp Questions

The AI asks each persona the four pricing questions. Takes about 4 minutes total.

Step 4: Apply Our Reality Check

Our AI tends to underprice a bit, so it might make sense to adjust it slightly upwards:

• If AI says optimal price is $20, reality is probably $28-30

• If AI says "too expensive" is $100, reality is probably $40-50

These corrections come from comparing thousands of AI predictions to real human responses from real Van Westendorp studies that we optimized against, and compared the synthetic results vs real life.

Step 5: Make an Informed Decision

You now know:

• If you're overpriced or underpriced

• Your approximate optimal price range

• Where customers see value

• Your pricing ceiling and floor

Perfect? No. Better than guessing? Absolutely.

Making Research Your Secret Weapon

Test Your Messaging

Does describing your product a different way actually change how much you can charge? What features and benefits move the needle for your potential customers?

Test Your Competitors

Want to know if that competitor charging $199 is genius or delusional? Run their product through our system. Now you understand the whole market landscape.

Segment Discovery

Test 10 different customer segments for $500 total. Find the one with 3x price tolerance. Traditional research would cost $50,000 for the same insight.

Geographic Expansion

Wondering if European customers will pay more than Americans? Test it in minutes, not months.

Continuous Optimization

Markets change. Run monthly checks for less than your Spotify subscription. Spot pricing opportunities before competitors do.

Where This Is Headed (And Why You Should Start Now)

AI models get smarter every few months. Our optimization gets better with every study we run. What's 43% accurate today will be 60% by year-end and approaching human-level by 2026. 

But here's the thing—you don't need to wait. Even today's accuracy will:

• Prevent you from pricing 2x too high (my mistake)

• Stop you from leaving 50% revenue on the table (most founders' mistake)

• Give you confidence in your pricing decision

• Cost less than your morning coffee

The founders using AI pricing research today are early adopters. They're getting an unfair advantage while others debate whether it's "ready."

Your Next Steps (Takes 10 Minutes)

1. Accept reality: Your price is probably wrong

2. Spend $50: Run your first AI pricing study (coming soon…)

3. Compare to competitors: Run their products too (another $50)

4. Make a decision: You now have data, not just opinions

The ROI is ridiculous. If our AI prevents just one pricing mistake, it pays for itself 1,000x over.

The Bottom Line

Perfect pricing research costs $5,000 and takes a month. Good-enough pricing research costs $5 and takes 10 minutes.

In a world where most founders just copy competitors or pick round numbers, having 43% accurate market data makes you the one-eyed person in the land of the blind.

We’re actively working on this use case and every month brings new AI improvements and optimization breakthroughs. Don’t wait for perfection. Every day with wrong pricing costs you customers and revenue.

The future of market research isn't coming—it's here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Join the founders who've stopped guessing and started knowing. For less than a sandwich, find out if you're leaving money on the table or pricing yourself out of the market.

Because the only thing worse than imperfect data is no data at all.