pricing

Pricing

Pick the fee surface → name the payer → compute the floor → pull comparables → set the number → write the test that would prove it wrong. Output is a decision in .claude/context/pricing.md, not a menu of options.

Generic SaaS pricing (per-seat, freemium tiers, “contact sales”) misleads here. Revenue on Solana is mostly a fee taken inside a transaction, often paid by someone other than the user, against costs denominated in SOL.

Context handoff

• At start, read .claude/context/idea.md, .claude/context/positioning.md and .claude/context/build.md if present. idea.md gives the wedge and demand evidence, positioning.md the ICP and the alternatives you beat, build.md what is deployed and the traction. Only ask what they don’t answer.
• If .claude/context/pricing.md exists, this is a re-price: read it, and go to step 7 before changing anything.
• On completion, write .claude/context/pricing.md in the format in pricing-format.md. A deck’s business-model slide and investor diligence answers should come from this file, so they never disagree with it.

Workflow

1. Who pays, for what

Ask, one at a time, skipping what context answers:

1. What is the unit of value: a swap, a mint, a settled payment, an API call, a seat in a DAO tool?
2. Who signs the transaction, and who is the fee payer? Are they the same wallet?
3. Who is the customer with a budget: the end user, an integrator, a protocol, a DAO or foundation?
4. What does that customer use today instead, and what does it cost them?
5. Is the fee logic inside a deployed program, or offchain (API key, subscription)?

If answers 2 and 3 name different parties, price for the one with the budget. The payer ≠ user patterns show how.

2. Pick the fee surface

Choose from fee-surfaces.md: bps on amount, flat lamports per action, spread, Token-2022 transfer fee, priority-fee markup, rent capture, offchain subscription or API tier, token-gated tier. For each candidate, write down whether the user sees it in the wallet’s pre-sign simulation. A fee the user discovers after signing costs more in trust than it earns.

A token-gated tier needs its own check before it goes further: run the 5x test. If the gate’s dollar value or your revenue depends on the token price, flag it and route the token mechanics to crypto-legal-skill, which is information-only and not a lawyer.

3. Compute the floor

Build the per-unit cost from floor-costs.md: signatures and priority fees per action, rent you front and whether you get it back, RPC and indexer spend per user action, oracle updates. Re-query rent and fees on the day; the numbers there are dated, and rent has been cut twice with further cuts proposed but not scheduled. A price below the floor at the expected volume is a subsidy. Name who funds it and until when.

4. Pull comparables

Use wtp-methods.md:

• DefiLlama fees and revenue per protocol, the take rate (revenue ÷ fees), and annualised fees-to-TVL, for every comparable you can name
• published fee schedules from the venues your user already uses
• bounty and grant rates for the same job
• the cost of the bad alternative (the value ratio)

Every row gets a source and a date. A number with no source does not go in the table.

5. Read the demand evidence

Grade the WTP evidence on the signal ladder. Surveys and “I’d pay for that” are the bottom rung, because this audience answers them dishonestly. If nothing above the weak rung exists, the number in step 6 is a hypothesis, so say that in pricing.md and make the falsification test cheaper and sooner.

6. Set the number and the test

• One model, one number, and the range you rejected on each side with the reason.
• The floor margin at three volumes: the volume you have, ten times that, and the break-even volume.
• The falsification test: an observable result, a threshold, a date, and the action you take if it fails. Example shape: “If fewer than N of the M integrators we pitched at X bps sign by DATE, we drop to Y bps or switch to a flat fee.” The founder picks N, M, X and Y; don’t invent them.

7. Plan the change before you ship the first price

A fee inside a deployed program changes only through a program upgrade or an admin instruction, with an announcement attached. Decide the change path now, using changing-price.md: a config account, a hard cap in code, timelock and notice, and a grandfathering mechanism if you need one. If the fee lives in program code, hand the implementation to an engineer. solanabr/ai-kit’s /plan-feature covers the account design.

Boundaries

• Legal and tax. Whether a fee model, a fee-share to token holders, or a token-gated tier is lawful where you operate is crypto-legal-skill’s question: /airdrop-assessment and its tokenomics-legality decision tree. It is information-only, and this skill won’t improvise an answer.
• Token supply and allocation belong to tokenomics, which is ai-kit’s token-engineer agent. Tokenomics decides the allocation, pricing decides the invoice, and crypto-legal decides whether the invoice is legal where you are.
• The pitch. The business-model slide belongs to pitch-deck. Hand it the numbers from pricing.md.

Output

• .claude/context/pricing.md, committed (format: pricing-format.md)
• A one-paragraph summary for the founder: the number, the floor margin, and the falsification date