When I launched my products, I thought I was being clever by making it super affordable. "$5 a month," I thought. "Who wouldn't sign up for that?"

Apparently…lots of people! Sales were sluggish. The tool wasn't being taken seriously. So in a moment of frustration (and maybe a bit of spite), I raised the price to $49 per month.

Sales went up. Not just a little - significantly. Same tool, same features, just a different price tag. Turns out, a higher price actually suggested higher value to potential customers. They were also “better” customers - less questions, fewer demands, easier payment.

That was a real eye-opener. Pricing isn't just about making something affordable - it's about positioning and perceived value.

And today, we're going to dive into this and all the other aspects of packaging up your AI tool for launch.

Let’s get started

Paywall Pricing

Getting Set Up

First, let's talk about the technical side.

When I started my first online businesses 10+ years ago I had to work out an eCom system, set up subscriptions, hook it Paypal…all sorts of nonsense. A pain in the butt.

It used to be a major block to setting up and selling online. Because you had to sort all the eCom infrastructure out yourself and it was easy to make (expensive!) mistakes.

Thankfully we have tools that do all this for us now in a couple of clicks. This is another good reason for using a front-end building tool like Launch Lemonade. Let’s walk through getting everything set up so we can take payments.

Creating Your Public Page

The first step is setting up your public-facing page. Think of this as your storefront - it's where people will discover, try, and eventually buy your tool.

1. Create a Page and Embed Your Tool Inside Launch Lemonade, create a new Page and embed your existing Lemonade (your tool) into it. While you can actually embed multiple tools into one page and sell them as a bundle, I'd recommend keeping it simple for now - one tool, one page. Get that working well before you start expanding!

2. Configure Page Settings This is crucial and easy to miss - make sure to set your page to 'Business' instead of 'Team'. The Team setting is for internal tools, while Business allows for public access and payments. It's a small dropdown menu that makes a huge difference!

3. Brand Your Page Take time to make this look professional

• Add your logo

• Choose your colour scheme

• Write a clear, compelling description

First impressions really matter here. Keep it simple here. We’re actually going to add a landing page/sales page in front of this Public page in the final Part. This is where we’ll have more details. More on that later.

4. Set up Stripe First head to Stripe and make an account. Stripe is the default tool for most online businesses now. There are alternatives but you need a good reason to choose them over Stripe honestly. Creating an account is free but Stripe takes ~1-3% of every transaction + a flat fee of 20p. This will depend entirely on your locale so check pricing here - Stripe pricing.

5. Connect Stripe In LaunchLemonade you’ll now connect your Stripe account. It takes a few clicks. And that’s basically it. Your technical set up is done. Waaaay easier than it used to be, believe me!

Pricing Strategy

Normally when building an AI tool you need to think about the cost of your calls.

Basically, each time your tool is used it sends a request to ChatGPT or Claude or whichever model you chose. The AI model processes that request and sends back its response.

You are charged for this - sending, processing and receiving the result.

The cost of each request is low. Very low. Which makes AI tools so exciting.

But it can add up. If a user is sending thousands of messages a week suddenly your AI bill starts to rise.

If you have 1000 users all sending that amount? Oh oh!

Because of this normally we need to do calculations to work out

• how much people will use the tool

• the cost per user using the tool

• what limits if any we need to build in

• segmented plans for different use rates

etc. etc. All to make sure we have a profit after the AI costs.

Here's where Launch Lemonade really shines - you get unlimited credits.

This just makes life much easier. The calculation is simplified: you cost is now fixed to your Launch Lemonade subscription, which means we can focus entirely on value-based pricing.

We can think less about our costs. And more about how valuable this is to our customers. Which is important because customers don’t care about our costs.

Here are three powerful approaches to finding your price point

Market Research Study your competitors, but don't just copy them. Look at

• Their pricing structure

• Features offered at each tier

• How they position themselves

• Their target market

Use this as market intelligence, not a template. Remember - they might have different costs, different target customers, or different business models entirely. Your goal is to understand the market, not replicate someone else's strategy.

Customer Feedback This is gold if done right. Survey your early testers about pricing, but here's the trick - give them free accounts first and ask how much they’d be willing to pay if they were paying. Why? Because if they're thinking about their own wallet, they'll lowball you. You want their honest opinion about value, not their budget constraints.

Ask questions like

• "What would be a fair price for this solution?"

• "How much time/money does this save you?"

• "What would the ROI be at X price point?"

Incremental Testing This is my favourite approach. Start with a low price for your first batch of customers (call it a "founder's deal" or "early bird pricing", wrap it up in marketing), then gradually increase it. Each increase is a test - you keep raising until you hit resistance.

This approach

• Creates natural urgency ("get in before the price goes up!")

• Rewards early adopters

• Gives you real market feedback

• Lets you find your ceiling organically

You’ll likely use a combination of these three methods to hone in on your first price. Don’t overly stress this decision. It can be changed. The only caveat here is that it’s better to start low and go up so that early customers aren’t burned. You want to reward early customers for their faith in you - so make sure they get a great deal!

Free Trial Strategy

LaunchLemonade allows us to give a certain number of free requests to our users.

You need to give people enough attempts to see the value, but not so many they never need to buy.

The magic number here is how many attempts it typically takes someone to get real value from your tool. If it usually takes 5 messages to get a good result, set the free trial to 5 attempts. If it's a one-shot tool that delivers immediate value, 1-2 attempts is plenty.

Think of it this way: What's the minimum number of tries someone needs to go "Ah, I get it. This is cool" That's your free trial sweet spot. You should know this from your early user testing. Which you did right? Right?

That’s all our final technical details sorted. We are now pretty much ready for launch. One final piece, covered in Part 5.We'll focus on creating a killer landing page - the final piece we need before launch. We'll talk about how to write compelling copy that converts visitors into customers.

Keep Prompting,

Kyle