What is competitive pricing analysis?
A competitive pricing analysis sees you gather the prices of your competitors’ products over time. You’ll use this data to draw comparisons and conclusions about which direction your own pricing strategy should head in.
Competitive pricing analysis can alert you to shifts in market trends as far as product pricing goes, and can help you position your products more effectively.
Why bother with competitive pricing analysis?
You stop bleeding profits you don't know you're losing
If a competitor starts undercutting you and you haven't noticed, you can't respond. You won't revisit your messaging to justify your price. You won't look at whether there are supply chain efficiencies they've found that you haven't. Running a regular competitor pricing analysis means you catch those shifts early enough to do something about them.
You make smarter calls on market share
Whether you're competing on price or positioning at a premium, you need real data to back the decision. Knowing what competitors charge, and roughly why, gives you a cleaner basis for your own pricing rather than guesswork.
You learn something about how buyers actually think
Cheaper isn't always better. In high-stakes categories, a lower price can signal risk rather than value. When you look at pricing data alongside what you already know about your customers' buying behavior, you often get a clearer picture of what they're actually weighing up when they choose.
You can get ahead of where prices are going, not just where they are
Trend-spotting needs historical data. A single data point isn't much, but it's the start. Pull competitor pricing consistently, and within a few months, you'll have enough to see patterns, anticipate moves, and price proactively rather than reactively.
Who uses competitor price analysis, and why
Competitor pricing analysis isn't owned by one team. Different functions use it for different reasons, and the same data can answer very different questions depending on who's asking.
Sales teams use it in live deals
When a prospect says "Competitor X is cheaper," reps need to know whether that's true, how to respond, and what the total cost difference actually looks like once you account for add-ons and contract terms. A good pricing battlecard built from regular analysis makes that conversation easier.
Product teams use it to make packaging and feature decisions
If competitors are charging extra for something you include by default, that's a positioning advantage worth communicating. If they're gating a feature you're giving away for free, it might be worth reconsidering the tier it sits in.
Marketing teams use it to sharpen messaging
Knowing where you're cheaper, where you're pricier, and why gives you the raw material for honest, specific positioning. Vague claims about "value" don't land. Specific comparisons do.
Strategy and leadership use it to spot market trends and anticipate competitive moves
If two of your main competitors have both raised prices in the last 6 months, that's a signal worth paying attention to.
In most businesses, the competitive intelligence function owns the data collection and analysis, and then distributes it to these teams in formats they can actually use: battlecards for sales, positioning notes for marketing, packaging input for product.
How to do competitive pricing analysis
Much like any other aspect of competitive analysis, a pricing analysis involves three or four distinct stages:
- As a preliminary stage, identify the competitors you’ll be looking into.
- Gather the necessary data.
- Analyze the necessary data and draw conclusions.
- Share your conclusions and work with others to convert them into an action plan.
Let’s examine those stages in detail.
1 – Identify the competitors you want to pull data on
First, figure out the shortlist of competitors you want to study. As we’ll discuss a little later on, it’s simply not practical to pull data from dozens of competitors all at once.
Instead, prioritize your competitors into a shortlist of those most relevant to your business success. While it’s not wise to ignore indirect competitors entirely, you have limited resources.
What criteria should you use for this? Maybe beating these select competitors means vastly more market share for you than winning versus any others. These would make good candidates.
Or, their products might just be the most similar to your own, so you’ve decided it’s important to know how they’re pricing those products.
That makes identifying the competitors you want to pull data on a crucial first step in competitive pricing analysis.
2 – Pull pricing data
Now it’s time to actually pull pricing data from these competitors.
Depending on the industry and sector you work in, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Many businesses don’t make their prices publicly available. Some don’t list pricing information on their websites at all, making it difficult to pull accurate pricing information on their products without contacting the business. And if you’re not actually interested in using their product, you’re unlikely to get very far asking for a quote.
Other challenges include the accuracy of the pricing information and how frequently you need to update it. If yours is a dynamic industry, competitors can change their prices extremely often with fluctuations in the state of their supply chains, the exchange rate, and the prices set by their manufacturers. If you need very accurate pricing data, you’ll need to sample prices more frequently in accordance in these cases.
Here are a few different ways of getting your hands on pricing data:
- Ask your customers and prospects.
- Ask reps from other departments.
- Look for resellers and/or distributors.
- Look on competitors’ websites.
- Search on public forums.
- Speak to industry contacts and experts.
Here’s a bit more detail:
(I) Ask your customers and prospects
Even if price information isn’t listed on a competitor’s website, or in any physical location, there’s nothing to stop you asking your customers and prospects about their own findings.
Few will do more in-depth market research than prospects motivated to find a good deal. So during your win/loss interviews, or any other stage of your competitive intelligence research that touches base with customers, make sure to do some digging on pricing information. You’ll soon get a sense for how much your main competitors are charging.
You can even ask whether competitors have put prices up or down recently. If the prospect or customer has recently adopted, or moved away from, one of your competitors, they might just have the answer.
(II) Ask reps from other departments
Even if your business doesn’t do a ton of customer research yet, your sales and customer success teams will still regularly hold conversations with won and lost prospects. If you can get these groups to systematically ask and log information about pricing as a part of these conversations, you’ll have access to pricing info you might not find elsewhere.
(III) Look for resellers and/or distributors
With a bit of detective work, you can usually identify a reseller. They’ll typically use similar language and messaging as your competitor, but with subtle differences in branding, like different packaging or colors.
Some of these businesses won’t have the same qualms about listing pricing information publicly as your competitor has. If you can sample a few at a time, you’ll get a decent spread of prices that have a direct correlation to the price of your competitor’s products.
(IV) Look on competitor websites
This one’s obvious, but you shouldn’t overlook it. Not all businesses are against making their prices publicly visible. In some industries, it’s even the norm, making it very easy to access up-to-date, accurate price data.
(V) Search on public forums
Noticing a theme, here? Pricing information is collected through many of the same channels as your other competitive intelligence data. Online forums like Reddit or even LinkedIn are home to groups of people with no qualms about candidly discussing their experiences with your competitors. That includes what they paid.
(VI) Speak to industry contacts and experts
Any business leader wondering how to price their products probably has a network of contacts in their industry. There’s nothing stopping you from consulting with these people (whether as a favor between friends or as a professional contract with industry consultants) and getting hold of pricing data that way.
(VII) Cross-source verification and mystery shopping
A single data point is a starting point, not a conclusion.
If you've pulled a price from a reseller listing or picked it up in a win/loss interview, cross-check it before you act on it. Resellers sometimes mark up, apply regional pricing, or list outdated figures. Prospects sometimes misremember or misquote what they were told.
Cross-source verification means getting the same data point from at least 2 independent sources before treating it as reliable. Here's how that works in practice:
Mystery shopping. Have someone go through a competitor's sales process as a genuine prospect. They'll get quoted, see the actual proposal, and learn how pricing is structured, what's negotiable, and what terms typically look like. This is more effort than a web search, but it gets you data you can't find anywhere else. If doing this yourself creates a conflict of interest, hire a third-party firm to run it.
Triangulating from multiple channels. Cross-reference what your win/loss interviews tell you against what you find in public forums, against what resellers list, and against what your sales team logs in the CRM. If 3 sources put a competitor's mid-market price at roughly $X, you can work with that. If the sources contradict each other, dig further before drawing conclusions.
Prospect feedback from lost deals. Prospects who chose a competitor over you had a direct pricing conversation with them. Their recollection is imperfect, but it's direct. Over enough lost deals, the pattern sharpens.
The more sources you're using, the more confident you can be in what you're working with. And the more confident you are, the more defensible your analysis is when you present it to leadership.
3 – Compare and analyze your pricing data
With pricing data in-hand, it’s time to put it to work.
The more data points you have, the easier it’ll be to identify trends, as we mentioned earlier.
But a single set of up-to-date prices for each of the competitors on your shortlist is more than enough to get started with. Combine this information with what else you know of their positioning strategies. Are they the budget option? Are they the luxury, premium option? What else about their messaging and branding gives you that impression? And where are the open gaps in the market you can position yourself to fill?
A competitive pricing analysis tends to go hand-in-hand with a competitive gap analysis or a market opportunity analysis for this reason. A comprehensive analysis of the competitive landscape and your place within it compared to your competitors can give you a clear view of where to plant yourself to capture the largest possible market share.
Alex Walton
4 – Come up with an action plan
So, knowing what you know of your competitors’ prices, what will you do?
Does your competitive pricing strategy need to change? Will you change your own pricing? Or can it stay the same?
Can you identify any new trends in pricing behavior by combining your newest data with historical data?
It’s worth noting at this stage that it’s usually not the job of the competitive intelligence professional to devise and implement an action plan. That usually falls to leadership, or some other group of stakeholders.
What you should be prepared to do, however, is to communicate your findings while presenting a clear and defensible point of view. From there, you can work with these groups, if necessary, to chart a clear course of action in light of what you’ve found.
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Understanding competitor pricing models and structures
Before you can compare prices, you need to understand what you're actually comparing. A $50/month number means nothing if one competitor charges per seat and another charges a flat fee for unlimited users.
Pricing models vary a lot in B2B SaaS, and that variation shapes how deals get done. Here are the main structures you'll run into:
Per-seat pricing charges per user. Common in tools like CRMs and project management software. The headline price looks low, but scales up fast for larger teams.
Volume or usage-based pricing ties cost to consumption, whether that's API calls, records processed, or features accessed. It can look cheap at small scale and expensive at enterprise scale, or vice versa.
Tiered pricing bundles features into plan levels (Starter, Pro, Enterprise). The listed prices are usually just the floor. What's actually in each tier, and what gets gated, is where the real competitive intel lives.
Flat-rate or sitewide licensing gives unlimited access for a fixed fee. Less common, but can be a strong selling point when competitors charge per seat.
Beyond the base model, look for:
- Discount schedules: annual vs. monthly billing discounts, volume discounts, promotional pricing
- Add-ons and service fees: onboarding fees, support tiers, integrations that cost extra
- Contract length incentives: multi-year deals often come with pricing that's never made public
When you're logging competitor pricing, note the model alongside the price. Two competitors both charging "$200/month" can represent very different total costs of ownership depending on how they structure it.
Competitor pricing comparison table
Once you've pulled pricing data across your shortlist of competitors, a comparison table is the fastest way to see where you stand.
Here's a simple template you can adapt:
The goal here isn't a perfect dataset. It's a working view of the market. Even partial data tells you something: if 3 out of 5 competitors hide enterprise pricing, that tells you what buying decisions at that tier look like.
Update this table every quarter at minimum, or any time you hear of a pricing change through your win/loss interviews or sales conversations.
How to analyze competitors who don't publish pricing
Most B2B SaaS companies don't publish enterprise pricing. Many don't publish any pricing at all.
That doesn't mean you can't find it. It means you have to be more creative about where you look.
Here are the most reliable approaches:
Win/loss interviews
Prospects who evaluated your competitors went through their sales process. They got quoted. Ask what they were told. You won't always get a number, but you'll often get a range, a structure, or at least a sense of where pricing conversations went.
Lost deals
When you lose a deal to a competitor on price, that's data. Your sales team should be logging this. Over time, patterns emerge: "we keep losing on price to Competitor X at deals over $50k ARR" tells you something specific about where their pricing kicks in.
Your own sales team
Reps talk to prospects who are also talking to your competitors. A lot of pricing intel lives in CRM notes and never gets surfaced. Create a lightweight process for logging it.
Online communities
Reddit, G2, Capterra, and niche Slack communities regularly surface real pricing conversations. Search for your competitor's name alongside words like "price", "cost", "contract", "quote", or "how much".
Channel partners and resellers
Resellers often have pricing visibility that isn't public. If your competitor sells through a partner network, those partners may list pricing, or be willing to discuss it.
The short version: when pricing isn't public, it's usually still findable. It just requires more sources and more cross-checking. Don't treat "no pricing page" as a dead end.
Why can't you just automate this?
You can, partially. But there are some real constraints worth knowing before you go down that road.
Most competitor pricing is public
Retailers have online stores, SaaS companies have pricing pages, and none of that is behind a login. Technically, you could scrape it. Practically, it gets complicated fast.
Web scraping violates the terms of service of most websites
Many actively block it. In some jurisdictions it's a legal grey area, and in a few cases outright illegal. Beyond the legal side, building a scraper that works across multiple competitor sites is genuinely hard, because each site has a different structure and codebase. A script that works on one breaks on another.
That said, in 2026 the options have improved
AI-powered tools like Browse AI, Apify, and Bardeen let you set up no-code or low-code monitoring workflows without writing a scraper from scratch. Some can watch a specific page and alert you when the price changes. They don't solve the terms of service problem, but they lower the technical barrier considerably for the cases where scraping is permitted.
Where APIs exist, they're still the cleanest route
Amazon's Product Advertising API is the most well-known example. Some pricing intelligence platforms, like Kompyte or Crayon, also pull this data for you as part of a broader competitive monitoring workflow.
For everyone else, a focused manual process is still the most reliable approach
Pick a shortlist of competitors worth tracking closely, check whether their terms of service permit data collection, and build a simple recurring process around that list. Trying to track everyone creates noise. A tight list you actually review is more useful than a sprawling dataset you don't.
Competitive pricing analysis examples
To really hammer these points home, we thought we’d walk you through a couple of competitive pricing analysis case studies.
Case study one: B2B workout equipment manufacturer and supplier
Who we are: We’re “Carbon Strength & Fitness,” a manufacturer and supplier of top-of-the-line workout and gym equipment.
What we do: We work with distributors to get our equipment out to high-end gyms for professional athletes and dedicated amateurs.
Our competitors: We consider our primary competitors to be Prime Fitness USA and Atlantis Strength. Both are based in the USA, whereas we are based in Europe, giving us a slight competitive advantage geographically when it comes to serving these regions.
Our product: We’re launching a new plate-loaded upper back- and lat-pulldown machine, and need to know how to price it. Atlantis Strength doesn’t list a price point on its website but, luckily, Prime Fitness does. Their machine is the current market leader, rapidly growing in demand thanks to its articulating handles and multiple possible loading patterns. These empower gym-goers to alter the movement’s resistance profile and arm path.
These are design features we’ve incorporated into our own product, while using more cost-effective materials in favor of a higher maintenance frequency. Our great relationship with suppliers and patented interlocking parts make our manufacturing costs lower than Prime’s and Atlantis’s.
The pricing analysis: We predict the lower initial outlay will make us a popular option for newly launching gyms with lower budgets that still want the best for their members. For that reason, we decide to charge a premium price, while undercutting Prime Fitness’s plate loaded pull down, which is priced at $3,072.00 per unit.
We’d like to price ours somewhere between this and Atlantis’s pull down machine, which a search on Reddit revealed has been sold in good but used-condition for around $950. From speaking with our network of contacts in the industry, we know used equipment tends to hold its value pretty well, never selling for much less than 70% of its original value so long as it’s well-maintained.
Judging by the condition of the piece, plus the fact it was purchased five years ago, we’ve adjusted for inflation and estimate the original value of the piece to be around $1500.
Since our machine is mechanically superior to the Atlantis, but we want to pass savings onto our customers and make additional profits in volume of sales, we decide to price our product at a little over $2000USD.
Case study two: B2C acoustic musical instrument manufacturer
Next, a B2C manufacturer of musical instruments.
Who we are: We’re “X Drums”, and we make acoustic drum kits.
What we do: We’re looking to launch a new range of affordable mid-range drum kits for students and casual players looking to get a great sound for less.
Our competitors: Mapex and Pearl drums are our two biggest competitors in this price range. Although other classic brands, like Gretsch, sell kits in this range, they tend to be smaller four-piece kits right in the lowest price ranges they sell at.
The pricing analysis: Although Mapex and Pearl don’t list prices on their websites, it’s not difficult to find prices for their drum kits on distributor websites. We know that drum kits in these price ranges cost around $1000.
With our manufacturing costs, we know we won’t be able to turn much of a profit selling at $1000. Since we don’t see a way to position our new brand name above our established competitors, we’ll price similarly, but offer deals that up-sell our other products. These will include items like kick drum pedals and our own-brand cymbals, allowing us to turn a profit on the bonuses in these package deals.
TL;DR
By now it should be clear, from the sample case studies and everything we’ve discussed in this article, how you can get started with competitive pricing analysis.
Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve learned:
- Competitive pricing analysis has you gather your competitor’s prices over time and use this data to make data driven, strategic decisions about your own products.
- Competitive pricing analysis helps you position your products more effectively while getting and staying ahead of evolving trends.
- It can be tricky to find accurate pricing data, but if you’re resourceful, and tread the path less traveled in your search, you’ll find information you can work with.
- Programmatic pricing analyses are often unethical and often less practical than you might think (though aren’t impossible).
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The main reasons why they struggle are:
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