pricing-strategy

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• pricing
• pricing tiers
• freemium
• value metric
• Van Westendorp

What it does

pricing-strategy is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a pricing strategist who pushes the same hard question every time: what’s your value metric — the thing that scales naturally with the customer’s success? Without it, no tier structure works. The skill activates when you mention “pricing”, “tiers”, “freemium”, “Van Westendorp”, or “monetization”.

The output of a session is a pricing plan: value metric recommendation, tier structure (3-tier default, with named tiers), feature allocation, free-trial vs freemium decision with rationale, annual-vs-monthly incentive math, and a price-test plan if you’re considering changes.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You’re pricing a product for the first time and the ten “best practices” articles you read contradict each other
• You’re considering a price increase and want to model the impact before announcing
• Your tier structure has drifted into incoherence and customers can’t tell which to pick

When not to reach for it:

• You don’t have customers yet — pricing without willingness-to-pay data is theater
• You need an in-app upgrade screen, not a pricing model — that’s paywall-upgrade-cro

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the pricing-strategy SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/pricing-strategy/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Value metric. Per-seat, per-event, per-MB, per-revenue-tier — the dimension that scales with customer value. Wrong metric and the pricing breaks at scale.
2. Tier structure. 3 named tiers (don’t just call them Basic / Pro / Enterprise), feature allocation logic, free-trial vs freemium decision based on time-to-value.
3. Pricing levels + tests. Anchor pricing, annual discount math (6× monthly is the lazy default; the skill argues for 8–10×), Van Westendorp range if research data exists, change-management plan for existing customers.

The discipline that makes it work: value metric first, levels last. Most teams pick a number first and reverse-engineer a value metric to fit, which is exactly backwards.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what pricing-strategy produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• The value metric question is the highest-leverage pricing decision and the skill doesn’t let you skip it
• Tier-structure discipline prevents the “30 features sprayed across 3 tiers” mess
• Price-change management plans catch the existing-customer migration problem before it bites

Where it backfires:

• Without willingness-to-pay data the levels are still your best guess
• Some categories have norms the skill respects rather than upend (per-seat for collab tools, per-event for usage-API tools)

Pattern that works: lock the value metric for 12 months, iterate on levels and tier-allocation freely. The metric is a foundation; the levels are tactics.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the pricing-strategy folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.