The 9 best free resources on pricing
In short: The best free ways to learn pricing are Madhavan Ramanujam's episodes on Lenny's Podcast, Elena Verna's guide to pricing pages, Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletter and Neil Davidson's free ebook Don't Just Roll the Dice. If you buy one book, make it Monetizing Innovation.
Founders ask me where they can learn pricing on their own. The good news is that some of the best material on the topic costs nothing. The hard part is knowing where to start, because there is a lot of noise.
These are the nine free resources I send people to most often. They cover the fundamentals, pricing pages, packaging, usage-based models and pricing for AI products. At the end, I've added the one book I think is worth paying for.
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Start with the fundamentals
1. The art and science of pricing, Lenny's Podcast with Madhavan Ramanujam
If you only have an hour, start here. Madhavan has worked on pricing with hundreds of companies at Simon-Kucher, and this conversation covers the core ideas: talking to customers about willingness to pay early, segmenting by what customers value, and using behavioral pricing to shape how people buy.
2. How To Price For B2B, YC Startup School with Tom Blomfield
A short, practical talk for early-stage founders selling to businesses. It's especially useful if you're setting a price for the first time and need a starting point you can defend.
3. Don't Just Roll the Dice, by Neil Davidson
A short guide to software pricing from the co-founder of Redgate, free as a PDF. It's older than everything else on this list, but the fundamentals hold up: how customers perceive value, how to think about price points, and how to avoid guessing.
Get the pricing page right
4. The DNA of a great pricing page, by Elena Verna
Your pricing page is where your strategy meets the customer, and Elena's post is the best checklist I know for it. She covers how many plans to show, how to summarize them, what each call to action should be, how features should build from plan to plan, and how to handle add-ons. Use it to audit your own page before you change any prices.
Learn from people who do this every day
5. Pricing, Pricing, Pricing, the a16z Podcast
Mark Cranney, Martin Casado and Scott Kupor on pricing for startups, especially companies creating a new category. The core argument is to price aggressively early, use your sales team to learn what the market will pay, and package carefully so you don't give away future value. It's a classic for a reason.
6. Growth Unhinged, by Kyle Poyar
Kyle's newsletter is one of the best ongoing sources on monetization, with frequent posts on packaging, usage-based pricing and how real companies have changed their models. A few posts are partly behind a paywall, but most of the pricing writing is free.
7. Good Better Best, by Rob Litterst at PricingSaaS
A newsletter on how SaaS companies are actually changing their pricing and packaging, written by the team at PricingSaaS, which tracks pricing changes across thousands of companies. It's the easiest way to keep up with what your peers and competitors are doing.
Go deeper on usage-based and AI pricing
8. Recurring pricing models, Stripe docs
Not the first place you'd look for strategy, but Stripe's documentation is a clear reference for the main pricing models: flat rate, per seat, tiered and usage-based, including fixed fee plus overage, pay as you go and credit burndown. It's useful for product and engineering teams who have to make a model work in billing.
9. Pricing and scaling your AI product, Lenny's Podcast with Madhavan Ramanujam
Madhavan again, this time on AI. AI products break a lot of old pricing assumptions, because costs scale with usage and value can be tied to outcomes. This episode covers the common mistakes, how to choose a pricing model and when outcome-based pricing makes sense.
The one worth paying for
Monetizing Innovation, by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke
This isn't free, but it's the book I recommend most. Its central idea is that companies should design the product around the price, not the other way around: understand what customers will pay for before you build, then build to that. It's the book that best explains why pricing belongs with product, and why it should start long before launch.
Where should you start?
You don't need to work through all of it. If you're setting prices for the first time, start with the first two. If you're about to redesign your pricing page, read Elena's post. If you're building an AI product, listen to the second Madhavan episode. Then pick up the book when you're ready to make pricing part of how you build.