RealCostLabs

I kept getting surprised by SaaS bills, so I spent a few months doing the boring thing: rebuilding the pricing of every marketing tool I use from its own published rate card, then pricing it at usage levels a real business actually hits.

Method, briefly. For each tool I took the plan the vendor's own docs and sales pages push you toward for a normal use case, then added the things the pricing page doesn't put in the headline number: contact overages, per-seat charges, mandatory onboarding fees, and the annual-vs-monthly gap. Nothing modelled, nothing estimated. Just the vendor's own published numbers applied to a stated scenario.

Three things that surprised me:

1. The average tool costs 3.9x its advertised entry price. Not 3.9x the cheapest plan in some enterprise scenario. 3.9x for the plan you realistically end up on.

2. One CRM advertises $9/user/month. Every serious recommendation of it starts at $99. The $9 tier is missing the pipeline features that are the reason you would buy a CRM in the first place.

3. Email pricing is where the gap gets absurd. One well-known tool leads with $13/month. At 25,000 contacts with the features most people assume are included, the same tool is $310/month. That is a 24x gap between the number on the page and the number on the invoice.

The pattern is consistent enough that I stopped treating it as vendors being sneaky and started treating it as a structural thing: entry tiers are priced as lead magnets, and the real product starts two tiers up.

What I am curious about from this crowd: for those of you who charge, how did you decide where to put your own entry tier? Did you deliberately price it below what most customers would actually need, or did you try to make tier one genuinely usable and take the hit on conversion?

Happy to answer anything about the methodology, or to run the numbers on a tool you are evaluating.