Proposal Pricing Intelligence
Wethos is Vertical SaaS with pricing intelligence, built to help over 100,000 SMBs win bigger clients and scale. The platform helps customers price complex projects quickly, invoice their clients, get paid and pay others, all in one place.
It's Friday at 5pm and you're an independent consultant who just got off a call with a dream client. They loved the idea, they're ready to move forward, and then they ask the one question you've been dreading: "So what would this cost?" You freeze. Not because you don't know how to do the work, but because you have no idea what it's actually worth.
PROBLEM
Pricing is the single most cited reason freelancers feel stuck below six figures.
Freelancers don't have a reliable way to know what to charge. A designer can look up salary ranges for a full-time job in seconds, but there's no equivalent for "brand identity package for a Series A startup." That ambiguity pushes people in one of two directions, they either underprice out of fear of losing the deal, or they guess high and lose it anyway.
SOLUTION
Pricing recommendations based on what real users were charging
We shipped pricing intelligence directly inside the scope-building flow. This gives freelancers a real-time recommended price for any service or project based on first-party data from thousands of other freelancers pricing similar work.
Published a robust library of templates
Starting first with services and scopes of work, and eventually expanded into contract terms as well, this enabled users to scope complex projects much faster. A data growth loop drove constant improvements, the more users used it the better the data got, which led to winning larger contract sizes.
Calculator built right into the scope tool
Users search and select services from a shared library to build out a scope, watching the price update as they go. Designed the UX around patterns from e-commerce like customizing shoes or cars. A panel slides out from the right side of the screen, making it easy to add services or contract terms to customize your scope.
Gated data to drive conversion
Access to the actual recommended price was gated behind Wethos Pro. Free users could see every line item in a template, but the number itself was obfuscated from view. In order to see price points users were prompted to upgrade to Pro.
RESULTS
Increased free to paid conversion from 5% to 18%. Pro subscribers tripled their average contract size.
My role in this
I built the underlying data model that enabled us to provide pricing recommendations to end users, and oversaw the process of gathering, parsing, and publishing updated data on an ongoing basis. I also led the design of the UX, pushing the team to take inspiration from more consumer friendly applications and working with them to create a gated experience that still provided value while increasing conversion.
What I'd do differently
Gating pricing data created a paradox in who actually converted. The freelancers most motivated to unlock pricing data were disproportionately newer to freelancing, earlier in their business, and more subscription-sensitive than our broader user base. They converted at a high rate, but many churned shortly after getting the specific number they came for, only to reactivate months later when they needed a new price point. In effect, the ICP that the subscription model converted best was in some tension with the ICP we were trying to build a durable, recurring business around. Payments revenue ended up absorbing some of that gap, but if I were doing this again, I'd think earlier about whether a usage-based or per-lookup model fit that user's actual behavior better than a flat monthly subscription.
