Basecamp charges $349/month flat — no per-seat pricing, no tiers, no enterprise plan. When they announced this in 2020, industry analysts predicted it would fail. Revenue grew 25% year-over-year. They applied one SCAMPER prompt to pricing: Eliminate. Remove tiers, remove complexity, remove the sales team. A single SCAMPER pricing strategy session can surface models your competitors haven't considered.

Why pricing deserves SCAMPER

Most founders copy their competitor's pricing page and adjust the numbers by 10-20%. The result: every SaaS in a category charges the same way — per seat, per month, three tiers. SCAMPER forces seven different angles on the same question, producing pricing ideas that break category convention.

Substitute the metric

What if you charged per outcome instead of per seat? Intercom experimented with charging based on active contacts rather than team size. Stripe charges per successful transaction — not per API call or per month. The substitution question: what metric aligns your revenue with your customer's success?

Combine pricing with another value

What if the price included something unexpected? ConvertKit includes free migration from any competitor — the price covers switching cost. Apple One bundles six services into one subscription. For your SCAMPER pricing strategy: what adjacent service could you include that makes the price feel like a deal without costing you much to deliver?

Adapt a model from another industry

Gyms pioneered the monthly membership model in the 1970s. SaaS adopted it 30 years later. What pricing model exists elsewhere that nobody has brought to your market? ClassPass adapted the airline model — credits that expire, flexible across venues. Your turn: what if your software priced like a gym, an airline, or a utility?

Modify the anchor

Liquid Death sells water for $1.69 per can — roughly 5x the price of tap water. They modified the anchor by competing against energy drinks ($3-4) instead of bottled water ($0.50). The same product at the same price feels cheap or expensive depending on what sits next to it. Modify your comparison set and you modify the perceived value.

Put the price to other use

What if the price itself became a marketing tool? Patagonia's pricing includes an environmental tax — 1% of revenue goes to environmental causes. The higher price signals values alignment. Costco's membership fee is the product — the low margins on goods are the feature. Can your pricing model signal something about your brand?

Eliminate a tier

Most pricing pages have three tiers because everyone else has three tiers. Linear has two. Basecamp has one. What happens if you remove your lowest tier entirely — does that change who signs up? What if you remove the enterprise tier and just charge the mid-tier price to everyone?

Reverse who pays

Gumroad reversed the payment direction — creators pay a percentage of sales instead of a monthly fee. The platform only makes money when creators make money. Duolingo reversed education pricing: the product is free, advertisers and premium subscribers fund it. What if your customer didn't pay — and someone else did?

Run all seven SCAMPER pricing strategy prompts against your current model. Twenty minutes of structured thinking. At least two ideas will challenge an assumption you didn't know you were making.