Tearing down a competitor's pricing, and the business behind it

List what the competitor charges and how its plans step up, then work out why: the value metric, where the revenue sits and whether a high price pays for sales or is margin.

• Rebuild the plan logic. Ben Williams asks three questions of each plan: what problem it solves, who it is for and what moves a customer to the next one. Kyle Poyar puts every competitor in one spreadsheet with the same columns, from pricing model and value metric to free plan, public prices and promos. Across 40 leading AI apps, he found 70% used subscriptions and 64% published their prices.
• Use the product, then read the page's history. Elena Verna signs up with spare Gmail accounts to see where the first paywall and upgrade prompts land, then checks the Wayback Machine for what changed since last year. She warns against copying what you find, and re-checks AI competitors monthly because their pages change so often.
• Test the metric, then find where the money is. Kyle asks whether a customer gets twice the value when the metric doubles: seats suit a horizontal tool like Slack but can cap expansion in vertical products. Ben looks for where a competitor's revenue is concentrated. Alvaro Morales reads paired moves: within 10 days in mid-2025, OpenAI cut its most powerful model's price by 80% and moved ChatGPT Enterprise to prepaid credits, which he reads as protecting enterprise revenue while competing on API price.
• Ask what a high price pays for. Dan Hockenmaier writes the competitor's business as an equation to estimate what each customer costs to acquire, then checks whether a high price funds work you can see. DoorDash charged restaurants more than Grubhub because it ran delivery itself. In SaaS he looks for a demo gate with a large sales headcount, discounts off list and a cheaper self-serve tier. If none turn up, the gap is margin, and that is the opening.