What Should I Charge? Generic AI Has an Answer. It's the Wrong One.

Research your competitors. Calculate your value. Land somewhere between twenty and a hundred dollars a month. Sounds reasonable. Feels like a starting point.

It’s a dead zone dressed up as a framework.

That twenty-to-a-hundred range is where everyone lands when they don’t know your business. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just generic. And generic pricing advice in a market full of generic memberships is how you end up competing on price with sites that have nothing to do with yours.

Here’s what a different kind of answer looks like.

A member asked that same question and what came back wasn’t a number. It was a shape. Their audience is high-intent but price-sensitive. That’s a specific combination, and it points to a specific part of the barbell: under twenty dollars, high volume, with a hard annual push at checkout. Or, if they want to go the other direction, a premium cohort tier at five hundred or more. Two real options for that business. Not a range. Not a formula. Two actual paths, with the reasoning already baked in.

The generic answer couldn’t have known that. It doesn’t know whether the audience is price-sensitive or price-indifferent. It doesn’t know whether high volume or high margin fits the model better. It doesn’t know anything about the site, so it gives you a number that fits every site, which means it fits none of them.

The difference isn’t confidence. It’s that one answer knows which end of the barbell you’re on before it opens its mouth.

A formula gives you a range. An answer tells you which end of the barbell is yours.