A team copied a competitor's price for two years, then discovered their best customers would have paid four times as much.
This is an anonymised composite, not a report about a named company. The situation and numbers are typical rather than reported.
A three-person B2B tool for veterinary practices. About $18k MRR, 140 customers, growing steadily. Priced at $29/month per practice from the first week, chosen because the nearest competitor charged $35 and they wanted to be cheaper.
Growth was fine but the money was not. CAC was around $310 through paid search, so payback took eleven months, and the two founders had not paid themselves in seven. Every plan to fix it involved acquiring more customers faster.
Whether to keep optimising acquisition cost, or to accept that the price itself was the thing that had never been tested.
They interviewed twelve customers, expecting to hear that $29 was already a stretch. Instead they found the tool was replacing about six hours of admin per week, and three separate customers said unprompted that they had assumed it would cost more and had checked twice that they were on the right plan. They moved new customers to $89, and existing ones to $59 with three months' notice and a personal email from a founder.
MRR roughly doubled inside two quarters. Nine of the 140 churned — fewer than the twenty-five they had budgeted for. Payback fell to under four months, which let them turn paid search back up.
One honest caveat: they got lucky on timing. A regulatory change that year had made practice admin heavier, so the value of the tool had genuinely risen since they set the original price. Some of what they discovered was not a pricing mistake they had always been making — it was a price that had gone stale.