More or Less: Pick One Pricing Strategy and Align to It
Commit to one of the three self-consistent pricing strategies — More for More, More for Less, or Less for Less — then align your whole company behind it. Adapted from More or less.
- Input
- Your current reality: what you charge, what your marketing promises, and which market segments you serve — pasted, in a file, or drawn out by questions.
- Output
- A PRICING-STRATEGY.md: the strategy you committed to with its consequences accepted, plus a keep / stop / start plan ordered by how much each mismatch contradicts your one story.
What this is about
The most costly pricing mistake is not charging too little or too much. It is charging in a way that contradicts your promise. Your homepage says "Highest quality." Your pricing page says "lowest price." One page says "Trusted by enterprises." Another page says "credit card only." Each decision made sense on the day you made it. But side by side, the decisions tell the customer three different stories. A confused customer does not buy. There are only three self-consistent ways to price a business. More for More: the best product, priced to match. More for Less: everything you actually need, at a reasonable price. Less for Less: a minimal product, at a very low price. Most companies mix two or three of these strategies right now, without knowing it.
This skill fixes the problem in two steps. First, it makes you choose one strategy. It collects what you charge, what you promise, and who you serve today. It maps this reality onto the three strategies. It shows you exactly where you mix them. Then it questions your trade-offs, back and forth, until you commit to one strategy. You must accept all the consequences of your choice. Do not wish them away. Each strategy has its own requirement to meet. More for More needs a specific "best at what," done to a genuine extreme, and a customer with a large budget to buy it. More for Less keeps only the features that half your customers use. Less for Less works only when your low price comes from trade-offs your competitors refuse to copy. It never works if your only claim is "we'll just be cheaper."
Next, with your choice locked in, the skill makes you align your business to it. It uses the same facts it already collected. It checks every signal your business sends — pricing page, homepage copy, feature set, support SLA, onboarding, hiring bar, roadmap — and sorts each signal into keep, stop, or start. It orders the list by how much each signal contradicts your chosen story. The biggest contradictions come first. A pricing strategy that contradicts itself makes your message weak and confusing, and leaves customers uneasy (lost trust is a smaller, later effect). You keep what is consistent, change what fights your choice, and add the moves that are missing. The exercise ends with a file you can act on and read again in a week.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-more-or-less We charge $19/mo for our design tool, our homepage says
"the most powerful design suite on the planet," and most of our customers
are hobbyists and students. Something feels off about our pricing but I
can't name it. Here's our pricing page and homepage — figure out which
strategy we should actually run.
The skill reads your real prices, promises, and customer segments. It shows you where they tell different stories. It questions you, one point at a time, until you commit to a single strategy. Then it gives you a prioritized keep / stop / start plan for aligning everything behind it.
One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory when you invoke it, or point to your existing pricing and marketing files. The skill then keeps the method's files together in that location. If you do not name a location, the skill asks before it creates anything.
From the source
Two sources form the foundation of this skill:
- More or less — the three strategies in full. It explains what each strategy promises, the market it wins, and the consequences it brings. It explains why the only wrong choice is no choice at all. This article is the core map. This skill fits your business onto this map.
- As in Chapter 6 of Hidden Multipliers: Price Is Not Just a Number (section "Mixed Signals") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the self-consistency multiplier and the operational demands of each strategy. This includes the More-for-Less feature filter: build only features that 50% or more of customers use, or that 15% or more of customers buy specifically for. It also explains why misalignment destroys premium positioning faster than any competitor can.
Supporting sources each supply a piece of the mechanism:
- Sometimes never compete on price — the Less-for-Less requirement in depth. It shows how IKEA, Southwest, Costco, and Vanguard made a low price the outcome of linked weaknesses that competitors will not copy. This shows why "we'll just be cheaper" is not a real strategy.
- Pricing determines your business model — why your price level decides your whole business structure: team, support, sales process, and funding. These are the consequences you accept when you commit to a strategy.
- As in Chapter 5 of Hidden Multipliers: Price Is Just a Number — hiddenmultipliers.com — why raising prices often increases signups, by moving you into a healthier customer segment. This matters because committing to More for More or More for Less often means you must raise prices out of a low-value market.
- Willingness to pay — the Love and Utility drivers. A More-for-More company uses these drivers to name its "best at what." The company must execute this to an extreme, not just slightly above average.