Asher's Blog

When we first launched Eazipay, our pricing was very low. We were building the product, learning what customers valued and trying to reduce the resistance to adopting something new, so we did not put enough thought into what the price communicated or whether it could support the kind of company we wanted to build. We later increased the price, adjusted it again and have continued to refine it as the product, customer base and market have evolved.

That experience taught me that pricing is rarely a decision a founder makes once. The first price is often a hypothesis based on incomplete information, and the company earns the right to improve that hypothesis as it learns more about its customers, costs, value and ambitions.

Founders frequently ask how much they should charge, but that question comes too early. Before choosing the number, the more important question is: what are you optimising for?

The same product can be priced differently depending on whether the company is trying to acquire its first hundred customers, protect gross margins, establish a premium position, generate predictable recurring revenue, expand inside large organisations or demonstrate an attractive revenue pattern before a financing round. None of these objectives is automatically correct in every season. The danger is choosing a price without knowing which objective it is supposed to serve.

Pricing is not simply a number attached to a product. It is a strategy expressed as a number.

Your first price is an experiment

Early founders sometimes treat pricing as though there is a correct answer hidden somewhere in the market, and that choosing the wrong figure will permanently damage the business. In reality, an early-stage company rarely has enough information to discover a perfect price. It does not yet know exactly which customers will use the product most, which features will matter, how expensive those customers will be to serve or how much value the product will create over time.

The first price should therefore be treated as an informed experiment. It should be high enough to test whether the problem is valuable, simple enough for customers to understand and structured in a way that allows the company to observe how usage and willingness to pay develop.

Starting too low can make acquisition easier, but it can also produce misleading demand. People may accept a product because it is inexpensive without valuing it enough to use it deeply, recommend it or remain when the price rises. Low prices can also attract customers whose support requirements are greater than the revenue they produce, leaving the company with impressive signup numbers and an unhealthy business.

Starting too high creates a different risk. The company may interpret weak conversion as evidence that the product is not wanted when the actual problem is that the price demands more proof than the young company can yet provide. Customers are not evaluating only the functionality; they are also evaluating the company’s credibility, reliability and likelihood of remaining in business.

The founder’s task is not to guess perfectly. It is to choose a reasonable starting point, observe what happens and change the price before a weak assumption becomes part of the company’s identity.

Decide what the price is meant to accomplish

A pricing strategy begins with an explicit objective. A company may optimise for customer acquisition by reducing the initial commitment, offering a free trial or pricing the entry plan aggressively. This can be sensible when adoption creates learning, referrals or network effects that are more valuable than immediate revenue. However, the company should know how and when those users are expected to become economically valuable.

Another company may optimise for predictable revenue. Subscription pricing, annual commitments and minimum platform fees can make cash flow and revenue easier to forecast. Predictability is particularly useful when the company is hiring, planning infrastructure or preparing for an institutional financing round. Investors generally want to understand not only how much revenue exists today, but how repeatable and durable that revenue appears to be.

A company may instead optimise for margin protection. This matters when serving each additional customer creates a direct cost through payments, verification, messaging, cloud infrastructure, customer support or artificial-intelligence usage. If revenue does not rise with the cost of serving the account, growth can make the company weaker.

Pricing can also optimise for market position. A premium price may signal that the product is built for customers who value reliability, specialised service or lower risk. A lower price may communicate accessibility and support a mass-market strategy. Neither position is inherently better, but combining premium promises with bargain pricing can confuse customers and starve the company of the resources needed to deliver the promised standard.

Other objectives include improving cash flow, encouraging annual payment, increasing usage of an underused feature, moving customers towards a more efficient service channel, expanding from one department into an entire organisation, reducing abuse or allocating risk to the customer who creates it. The useful question is always the same: what behaviour and business outcome is this pricing structure designed to produce?

Cost tells you the floor, not the complete answer

Some products make the cost side of pricing easier to see. With an AI feature, for instance, a company can calculate the approximate model or token cost created by a customer’s usage. With payments, it can identify transaction charges. With identity verification, it can see what each check costs. These figures allow the business to estimate a minimum economically sustainable price.

Even then, the visible unit cost is not the entire cost. An AI product also pays for engineering, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, data storage, security, customer support and the failed or repeated requests that do not always appear in the successful usage figure. A payments product may bear reconciliation expenses, fraud losses, compliance costs and the working capital needed to resolve an incident. Pricing directly above the obvious supplier charge can therefore create an illusion of margin.

Cost establishes a floor below which the business cannot operate sustainably, but customer value influences how far above that floor the company can charge. If a product costs ₦1,000 to deliver but saves the customer ₦100,000, pricing it at ₦1,100 may be economically safe while still giving away nearly all the value created. On the other hand, charging close to the full theoretical value may be impossible if competitors provide credible alternatives or if the customer does not yet trust the promised outcome.

Good pricing sits between the company’s complete cost of delivery and the customer’s credible perception of value, while taking alternatives, positioning and willingness to pay into account.

Choose the right thing to charge for

The pricing question is not only how much to charge but what the company should charge for. This is the pricing metric, and choosing it well can be more important than the initial amount.

A payroll company might charge per employee, per payroll run, per company, per transaction or through a combination of a platform fee and usage. An AI company might charge per user, token, task, workflow completed or business outcome. The best metric normally grows as the customer receives more value and remains understandable enough that the customer can predict the bill.

Charging per employee can make sense when each additional employee increases both the value delivered and the work required. Charging only per company may favour large employers while making small customers relatively expensive. Charging per transaction may align with usage, but it can also make customers reluctant to use a feature the company wants them to adopt.

This is why pricing shapes behaviour. If the customer is charged for every action, the customer will minimise actions. If collaboration is included but advanced controls require an upgrade, the company encourages broad adoption before monetising complexity. If annual payment receives a discount, the business exchanges some theoretical revenue for earlier cash and stronger commitment.

The metric should not punish the customer for experiencing the product’s core value. It should allow the company to participate reasonably as that value increases.

Packaging is part of pricing

Founders sometimes focus on the amount while ignoring packaging. Yet customers rarely buy an isolated price; they buy a combination of features, limits, service and commitments.

Different packages allow the company to serve customers with different needs without pretending that everyone should pay the same amount. A small business may need a simple payroll product with standard support, while a large employer may require integrations, approval controls, implementation assistance, dedicated support, enhanced security and contractual service levels. Charging both organisations the same price would either exclude the small business or undercharge the enterprise.

Packages should reflect meaningful differences in value and cost, not arbitrary restrictions designed to frustrate customers into upgrading. If every useful feature is hidden in the highest plan, the entry product becomes a misleading advertisement rather than a genuine solution. The customer should be able to understand who each plan is for and why the price rises.

Discounts are also part of packaging and should have a clear purpose. A discount may reward annual commitment, support a new market entry, encourage early adoption or recognise volume. It should not become the automatic response whenever a salesperson encounters resistance. Uncontrolled discounts make revenue difficult to understand, teach customers that the listed price is fictional and create unfair differences between similar accounts.

If a discount is temporary, its expiry should be clear from the beginning. Otherwise, a customer experiences the eventual return to standard pricing as an unexpected increase rather than the conclusion of a known offer.

Raising prices requires evidence and communication

As a product improves, costs change and the company learns more about its value, the original price may no longer make sense. Raising prices is not automatically greedy. A company that refuses to adjust an unsustainable price may eventually reduce service quality, stop investing in the product or disappear entirely, none of which benefits customers.

However, a price increase should be supported by a coherent explanation. What has become better? What value has been added? Which costs have changed? Is the customer being moved into a different package, or is the same product simply becoming more expensive? The company does not need to expose every internal calculation, but it should communicate respectfully and give customers enough time to plan.

Existing customers may be grandfathered temporarily, migrated gradually or offered a transition period. The right approach depends on the size of the increase, contractual commitments and the relationship the company wants to preserve. Permanently protecting every old price can create operational complexity and leave loyal customers on plans that no longer support the service they receive. Moving everyone immediately may produce unnecessary distrust. The company needs judgement rather than a universal rule.

The response to an increase is also useful research. Customers who complain but remain may still consider the product valuable. Customers who downgrade reveal which features they truly need. Customers who leave may have been poorly matched to the product, or they may be telling the company that its perception of value is ahead of reality.

Revenue quality matters more than a temporarily attractive story

Pricing decisions made before a fundraising round deserve particular caution. It is reasonable to want a clear revenue pattern that investors can understand, but the company should not manipulate pricing merely to create a short-lived chart. Deep discounts may accelerate customer numbers while weakening margins, and large prepaid contracts can make one period look exceptional without proving that revenue will recur.

The better story is one in which pricing demonstrates a repeatable relationship between value, customer behaviour and revenue. Investors should be able to understand why customers choose a plan, why they expand, what it costs to serve them and whether the resulting margin improves as the company grows.

Revenue is most useful when it teaches the company something durable. A pricing model that produces cash while hiding unprofitable usage, high support costs or weak retention is postponing the truth. The deadline eventually arrives when operating performance must support the story.

Pricing should become a continuing management discipline

A business should review pricing regularly, but it should not change prices randomly. The team should monitor acquisition, conversion, usage, retention, expansion, support burden, gross margin and the reasons customers select or reject each package. Sales and customer-success teams should record pricing objections carefully rather than summarising every lost deal as “too expensive.” Sometimes the customer lacks budget, but sometimes the company has not demonstrated value, the package is confusing or the wrong buyer is being approached.

Founders should also speak directly with customers at different levels of usage. The customer who uses one feature lightly, the customer whose organisation depends on the platform and the customer who recently left will each reveal something different about willingness to pay.

The company can then adjust deliberately. It may change the amount, introduce a minimum fee, create a premium plan, replace an unsuitable metric, separate an expensive service or simplify packages that customers do not understand. Each change should have a hypothesis and a way to evaluate whether the desired outcome occurred.

The price reveals the business you are building

Pricing forces founders to decide who the product is for, what value it creates and which kind of growth the company wants. A very low price may support rapid adoption, but it may also prevent the company from providing excellent service. A high price may support quality and focus, but it creates a greater burden of proof. Usage pricing may align revenue with consumption, while subscription pricing may offer predictability. Every choice creates advantages and constraints.

There is therefore no universally correct price. There is only a price that fits the product, customer, cost structure and objective of the business at a particular stage.

We priced Eazipay too low at the beginning, but the experience became part of our education. As we understood our customers, strengthened the product and saw the responsibility involved in serving them, we adjusted. I expect that thoughtful companies will continue to do the same because the value they provide and the markets in which they operate will not remain static.

When you are unsure what to charge, do not begin by searching for a magical number. Begin by deciding what you are optimising for, identify the full cost of delivering the product, understand the value the customer receives and choose a metric that allows both sides to succeed as usage grows.

The number comes last, and the strategy comes first.