Almost every first digital product is priced too low, and almost always for the same reason: the maker is pricing their own discomfort rather than the buyer's problem.
Here is a more useful way to arrive at a number.
Why cheap backfires
Price is the first thing a stranger learns about your product, and they read it as a claim about quality. At £7 you are telling someone this is thin. Many will believe you and scroll past. The ones who do buy at £7 are, on average, the most demanding customers you will ever have — a well-documented pattern, and a miserable one.
The arithmetic is worse. At £7 with a 20% platform and payment cost, you keep about £5.60. To make £2,000 in a month you need roughly 360 sales. At £47 you need 45. Those are completely different businesses, and only one of them is reachable from a standing start.
Price against the outcome, not the page count
Nobody buys forty pages. They buy the state they will be in afterwards.
So ask what the alternative costs them:
- A tenant handbook that stops six phone calls a month is worth more than the paper it is on.
- A quote template that prevents one instance of scope creep pays for itself several hundred times over.
- A workbook that saves someone a fortnight of going round in circles is not competing with other workbooks. It is competing with a fortnight.
This is why a one-page checklist can legitimately cost more than a fifty-page ebook. The checklist resolves the problem; the ebook describes it.
A method that gets you to a number
- Name the alternative. What would this person do if your product did not exist — pay someone, do it themselves, or carry on suffering? Price relative to that, not relative to other digital products.
- Find the ceiling. What is obviously too much? For most consumer digital products that is somewhere around £100; for business documents it is considerably higher.
- Find the floor. Below what number does it read as junk? Usually higher than you think — around £25–£30 for anything substantial.
- Sit in the top third of that band, then hold it for thirty days before changing anything.
Thirty days matters. Most people drop the price after four days of quiet and never learn whether the price was the problem. Usually it was not — usually nobody had seen it yet.
Consumer and business buyers are different animals
A consumer spending £47 is spending their own money and will think about it. A business spending £47 is comparing it to an hour of someone's time and will not think about it at all.
This is the single biggest lever available to a new seller. The same amount of work, aimed at a business buyer, supports a materially higher price and closes faster. It is why our corporate documents and business paperwork sit at the top of our own range while checklists sit at the bottom.
Use tiers to steer the choice
A single price forces a yes-or-no decision. Three options change the question from "shall I buy?" to "which one?"
The middle option is the one most people take, so build the middle one to be the one you actually want to sell, and let the top tier make it look sensible. This is not a trick — it works because it gives people a frame of reference they otherwise lack.
If you only have one product, the same effect comes from bundles. We run it as volume: five products take 10% off, ten take 15%.
"It's too expensive"
Almost always means one of three things, and only one of them is price:
- "I don't understand what I get." A description problem. Fix the page, not the price.
- "I don't believe it will work." A proof problem. Fix it with specifics, guarantees or real reviews.
- "I'm not the buyer." Not a problem at all. Some people are not your customer, and discounting to reach them wrecks the offer for everyone who is.
Discount only when the same objection comes from people who clearly are your buyer and clearly do understand the offer. That is rarer than it feels.
Raising prices later
Easier than people expect, if you do it plainly. Announce the date, say the new price, give existing customers a window at the old one. Do not apologise and do not over-explain — a paragraph is plenty.
What you must not do is quietly raise the price and hope nobody notices. People notice, and it costs more trust than the extra margin is worth.
Nothing here is a promise about what you will earn. Pricing is one variable among many, and the rest are yours.
Pricing calculators and cash-flow models, made to your business →