how to price your first digital product (without undercharging)

I priced my first product at $3.

Not $3 for strategic reasons. $3 because I was terrified of what would happen if I charged more. What if nobody bought it? At $3, the risk felt manageable.

I sold a few copies at $3. Then someone told me to raise the price. I bumped it to $9. Sales kept coming. I raised it to $17. Same conversion rate.

That product is now $27. I make more per sale and sell about the same volume. I left a significant amount of money on the table in those early months, and I didn't have to.

Here's what I learned about pricing.

Why People Underprice (And Why It Backfires)

The logic of underpricing goes: "If I charge less, more people will buy, and I'll make more money in total."

This is usually wrong for two reasons.

First, price signals quality. A $3 PDF doesn't feel like something that will solve a real problem. A $27 PDF feels like a real product that someone put real work into. Counterintuitively, higher prices often increase trust and conversion rate — especially for first-time buyers who have no other signal of quality.

Second, the volume math rarely works out. To match the revenue of selling 10 copies at $27, you'd need to sell 90 copies at $3. You're not going to get 9x the buyers at 1/9th the price. The audiences don't scale that way.

A Simple Pricing Framework

When I price a product now, I think through three questions:

1. What is the cost of the problem I'm solving?

If someone buys my productivity template and it saves them two hours a week for a month, that's eight hours of time back. Most people would gladly pay $30 for that. Price relative to the value delivered, not relative to the time it took you to make it.

2. What are similar products priced at?

Search for competing products in your category. What's the range? Where does your product fit in terms of scope and depth? You don't have to beat the lowest price — you should be in a reasonable range for what you're offering.

3. What does this price say about the product?

A $5 product says "this might be okay." A $27 product says "this solves a real problem." A $97 product says "this is a serious resource." Match the price to the positioning you want.

Practical Price Ranges by Product Type

Based on what I've observed and tested:

• Checklists / resource lists: $5–$15
• Templates (Notion, Canva, spreadsheet): $9–$49
• Short PDF guides (10–30 pages): $12–$39
• Ebooks (40–100+ pages): $17–$97
• Bundles (multiple products together): $47–$197

These are ranges, not rules. A highly specific template that solves a painful problem can sell for $49 even at 10 pages. A vague 80-page ebook with generic advice might struggle at $17.

The specificity and clarity of the solution matter more than the length.

Testing Your Price

You don't have to get it perfect on the first try.

I recommend starting at a price in the middle of the range for your category, then testing upward. Raise the price 20% after your first 10–15 sales. If conversion holds, raise it again. Keep going until you see conversion drop meaningfully.

Most people never find the ceiling because they assume they're already close to it. They're not.

I've found that my conversion rates have been consistent across a 3x price range for the same products. The price wasn't the bottleneck — the description and the traffic source were.

The Platform I Use

I list all my products on MadeThis. Adjusting prices there takes seconds. If I want to test a new price, I change it and the next buyer sees the new number. No rebuilding anything, no code changes.

This makes testing much easier than it would be on a platform that requires more friction to update.

Practical Takeaway

Price your first product based on the value it delivers, not the time it took to make. Look at comparable products, pick a number in the reasonable range, and resist the instinct to go lower out of fear.

If your first price feels slightly uncomfortable, you're probably in the right zone. The market will tell you quickly if you're wrong — but most first-time sellers are wrong in the direction of too cheap, not too expensive.

Browse my products to see how I price them at /products, or read about how I set up and run my digital product business at /copilot.