Experiment · Pricing economics
The revenue mountain
Every price you could charge earns a different amount. Plotted together, they make a surface with a peak. This is that surface, and this is how much of it a gut-feel price gives away.
Drag the surface to spin it. The bright green curve is the market you set with the sliders, the white dot on it is the best price, and the pulsing dot is yours.
Left to right: price, €20 to €180. Front to back: how much buyers disagree on what it is worth. Height: revenue.
Revenue at your price
€0
Revenue at the peak
€0
Left on the table
0%
of what the peak would earn
What you are looking at
Ten thousand imaginary buyers, each with a private ceiling: the most they would pay before walking away. The ceilings sit on a bell curve around €100. Price low and almost everyone buys, but each one pays you little. Price high and each sale is worth more, but the crowd thins. Multiply price by buyers at every point in between and you get this surface. Somewhere on it is a peak, and your price either sits on it or it does not.
The second slider changes how much the buyers agree with each other. When they broadly agree on what the thing is worth, the mountain is tall and sharp, and the far side of the peak is a cliff. When they disagree, it flattens into a long hill and the peak drifts. Watch the white ridge line while you move it: the best price moves with the market. Nothing about the product changed.
The slider starts where most founders start
€40 looks like a winning price. At €40, roughly 9,800 of the 10,000 buy. Sales feel easy, nobody complains about the price, the chart goes up. It is also about a third less revenue than the same product earns at its peak. Get there and you lose more than two thousand of those buyers and make more money. Losing buyers and losing money are different things, and a cheap price quietly confuses the two.
Before you quote these numbers
This market is synthetic. Real demand curves are lumpier than a bell curve: segments, competitors, reference prices, the €99 reflex. The shape of the problem is real, though. Your revenue sits on a surface like this one whether you have ever charted it or not, and most companies pick a price by copying a competitor or adding a margin to their costs. That is choosing a point on this map blindfolded. For clients, diligentpixel builds the curve from real signals: what people actually paid, and what they turned down.
Curious where your price sits?
Tell us what you sell and how you priced it. We will tell you honestly whether your mountain is worth charting.
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