Pricing & Monetization Blog: Page 3

Sometimes, as I walk around Boca Raton, people come up to me and ask me "Who is your favorite pricing economist?". They typically expect me to name a famous economist like Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. They're all shocked when I tell them that the person who understood pricing best was the actor Bruce Lee. There is no example of his... [read more]

I've already written about trying to price your services. But let me ask you a related question. How much are you worth? That is to say, what price should the country put on your life? Non-economists would be aghast at that question, but its answer is central to the very way that the... [read more]

Sometimes my reputation as a software engineer preceeds me. Other times, people simply see me with a computer and try to hire me on the spot. I was recently approached by a businessman for a simple project in Boca Raton, Florida. It involved writing some custom software to spider through a website, download millions of records and organize... [read more]

Criminal enterprises are fantastic laboratories for the field of economics. When participants are willing to throw off the shackles of laws and/or morality, they can try all sorts of things to maximize their income streams. Though a staunch law abider myself, I am fascinated by folks who commit one crime in particular: racketeering. Despite... [read more]

Yesterday was election day in America. I cast my votes in federal, state and local races, but frankly, no issue caused me more headaches than a ballot initiative in Palm Beach County (home of Boca Raton). It wasn't because I felt extremely passionate about the issue, but because it dealt with my favorite topic: pricing. Here's the basic... [read more]

What's the one item that almost everyone sells but no one understands how to price? Their time. I was talking to a recent graduate a few days ago. He was salaried and working at a new job. As it turns out, he received straight salary, but was awarded no paid time off. Any hour he missed led to deductions from his paycheck. Immediately I... [read more]

Two decades ago folks in the software industry become fascinated by the concept of patterns. The thinking was that software engineers faced many challenges over and over again. If they could create a catalog of patterns (consisting of problems and recommended solutions) they could create better software solutions. For a while, they were quite... [read more]

As the author of Charge Like a Rhino: The Software Pricing Handbook, a lot of people have been asking me questions about how to price their products (software or otherwise). Needless to say, everyone was aghast when I announced that my next book would be priced significantly lower than my first. Was this an admission... [read more]

Tiered pricing is an excellent tactic for selling goods and services. Typically a handful of offerings are advertised in such a manner that allows a customer to select the one that best meets his needs and ability to pay. Its use is so prevalent that many expert marketers divide businesses into two types: Those that use tiered... [read more]

When I first started reading about pricing strategies, I thought that there were only two: those that relied on honesty and those that relied on lies (fraud). It all seemed pretty simple, but as usual the real world turned out to be more complex. Marketers soon realized that making statements that were completely devoid of meaning could be a... [read more]