Research what customers are willing to pay

Survey the people who would actually pay, grouped so you can see how their answers differ. A founder who loves your product but would never buy it gives you an encouraging number that won't hold up at checkout.

Kite proposes the groups to survey based on your customer research. For a product that's already selling, that usually means paying customers, people on a free trial, and customers who left recently, because each group knows something different about your price. For a new product, it means the people on your waitlist, customers of your existing products, or prospects who match your ideal customer profile. Kite can find those prospects with its built-in company and contact search and include them in the send.

Kite also decides how to split the results before anyone answers. If your customers range from solo consultants to 50-person agencies, a single average hides the fact that the two groups would pay very different prices. So the survey asks a question or two that sort people into groups, such as company size or the plan they're on, and Kite reports each group separately.

Related use cases

• Write a customer interview guide: Talk to a handful of customers first to learn the words they use and the value they care about before you survey a larger group.

The prices in a survey should come from the market you actually compete in. Kite sets them from your competitors' pricing, your current price, and what buyers say about price in public reviews, so the survey tests a realistic range instead of numbers pulled from the air.

Kite reads each competitor's pricing page, including pages that only load their prices in the browser, and records what each plan costs and what it includes. It also reads archived versions of those pages to see how competitors' prices have changed. Public reviews add the buyer's side. Complaints that a competitor "got too expensive after the last price increase" tell you where buyers start to push back.

That research decides the description and the price points the survey uses. Say you sell scheduling software for dog groomers at $29 a month because your best-known competitor charges $29. Kite finds that two other competitors charge $49 and $79, and that reviews of the $79 product praise its reminder texts, which your product also has. Your survey should test prices well above $29, because the market has already shown that some groomers pay more for the features you offer.

Related use cases

• Compare your pricing with your competitors': See what each competitor charges a customer like yours and how your pricing page compares with theirs.

A pricing survey should describe what the buyer gets, ask a short set of structured price questions, and collect enough about each person to sort the answers into groups. Kite writes the survey in that order, because a price question asked without context gets a guess.

The description comes first. It names what's included in plain words, the way a pricing page would, so every person prices the same thing. Then come the four price questions from the Van Westendorp method, a standard technique for finding an acceptable price range:

• At what price would this be so expensive that you wouldn't consider buying it?
• At what price would it start to feel expensive, but you'd still consider it?
• At what price would it feel like a good deal?
• At what price would it be so cheap that you'd doubt its quality?

When you want to test specific prices instead of an open range, Kite can use a second method. The survey shows one price and asks how likely the person is to buy at it, then shows a higher or lower price depending on the answer. This version needs survey logic that changes the next question based on the last answer, so Kite builds it in Typeform.

Kite finishes the survey with a few context questions. It asks about the person's role and company size, what they use today to solve the problem, and what they pay for it. It also asks which two or three features they'd miss most. Those answers explain the prices. A groomer who pays a receptionist to make reminder calls will value reminder texts very differently from one who doesn't send reminders at all.

Kite builds the survey in the form tool you use and sends it from your team's email once you approve it. You see the questions, the description, and the email before anyone receives them.

In Typeform, Kite creates the form with its questions, branching logic, and your brand's colors and fonts. In Google Forms, Kite creates the form and adds the price questions as short-answer questions, which suits the four open price questions. Either way, Kite shares the link so you can take the survey yourself before it goes out.

Kite writes the invitation email in your brand's voice. It explains why you're asking, how long the survey takes, and what you'll do with the answers. It sends the email from your team's Kite address or a connected email product and reports which messages were delivered. A few days later, Kite checks how many answers have come in, and if the count is low, it drafts a reminder for you to approve.

Kite reads every response and turns the four price questions into an acceptable price range for each group of buyers. It then recommends a price inside that range and shows the evidence behind it.

The calculation works by counting, at every price, what share of people called it too cheap, a good deal, expensive, or too expensive. Plotting those shares shows where the lines cross. The crossings mark the lowest price before buyers start doubting the quality, the highest price before most buyers drop out, and the point where the fewest people object in either direction. Kite builds those charts for each group, so you can see at a glance that solo groomers top out near $45 while salons with five or more staff accept up to $90.

Kite reads the rest of the survey alongside the numbers. It checks whether people who pay for an alternative today give higher prices than people who don't, and which features the highest-paying group would miss most. It compares the range with your competitors' prices to see where your recommended price would sit in the market. It also flags thin results. If only twelve salons answered, Kite says so, and it treats their range as a rough signal rather than a firm answer.

Survey answers describe what people say they would pay, which usually runs higher than what they actually pay. Kite allows for that in the recommendation. It favors a price in the lower part of the acceptable range and marks the price as one to test with real buyers. If you want to share the results with a cofounder, Kite can publish them as a report with the charts, the tables, and its reasoning.

Related use cases

• Choose a pricing model: Decide whether to charge per seat, per use, or per outcome before you set the price point.

A survey tells you where to start, and real signups tell you whether the price works. Once you choose a price, Kite updates what buyers see and measures how they respond.

Kite rewrites your pricing page around the new price and the groups the survey identified, with plan descriptions that name the kind of customer each plan is for. On a website Kite hosts, it can test two prices against each other. It splits visitors between the two versions of the pricing page, watches signups for each, and asks you before it makes the winner permanent. If your site runs on Webflow, Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, or self-hosted Payload, Kite updates the page through your connected account and compares signups before and after the change through your analytics.

Kite records the price you chose, the survey results, and the reasoning in your team's knowledge base. When you review your pricing next, Kite starts from that record and compares the results with what you expected.

Related use cases

• Build a clear pricing page: Make each plan, its price, and the path to sales clear to buyers.
• Review your pricing on a regular schedule: Run a pricing review each quarter or year that ends in a recorded decision.