EN Your cost is your business; the buyer can't see it and doesn't care. He has three lines in his head. Your cost is the floor — go under it and you're subsidising him. What he currently spends on this problem, in money and hours, is the reference, and that number is what "expensive" is measured against. What he'll earn or stop losing after switching is the ceiling. Cost-plus isn't wrong arithmetic, it just uses the floor and nothing else, so the number lands hard against the left edge of the range and everything to the right is money he'd have paid and you never asked for. Three questions get the reference out of him: how do you handle this today, roughly how many hours or how much a month is that, and what would those people do instead if it went away. Then quote by repeating his own number before yours — you're not persuading him, you're setting his figure beside yours. One exception: for bespoke or headcount-delivered work, price the floor first, separately, or you'll sell at a loss politely.
EN Quote one number and the only thing he can compare it to is not buying — zero — and everything looks expensive next to zero. Put up three tiers and the question silently changes from whether to buy into which one to buy: same person, same product, completely different question. That's why the top tier often isn't there to be sold; it's a ruler that turns the middle tier from "the expensive one" into "the middle one". Cut the tiers by which kind of buyer they're for, not by feature count. The low tier is for the DIY, small-budget people you shouldn't be fighting for anyway — its real job is to absorb "too expensive" so you can drop a tier instead of dropping your price. The middle tier is the one you actually want to sell, marked as what most people choose, which does the recommending and the social proof in one line. The top tier is the ruler. All of this is honest only if every tier is real: differences in scope, response time, volume, who does the work. Three names for the same thing at three prices is a stage set, and he will eventually compare notes with another customer.
他不是在算贵不贵，他是在感觉疼不疼
Paying registers as pain. That isn't a metaphor — you can watch it happen.
支付痛感脑岛左位数
一句话原则
买不买不是一道算术题，是两股力在拔河：一边是想要（东西带来的好处），一边是疼（掏钱这件事本身）。价格越过某个点，疼压过想要，他就说「我再看看」。这解释了一堆看着不理性的事：为什么包月比按次容易接受（疼一次 vs 疼很多次）；为什么「一天不到一杯咖啡」管用（把疼切碎）；为什么三十九比四十便宜得不成比例。而你能动的手不止降价——降价是减疼里最贵的一种。换单位、换付法、换参照，减同一份疼，却不折损价格。
EN Buying isn't arithmetic, it's a tug of war between wanting the thing and the pain of parting with money. Past a certain price the pain wins and you hear "let me think about it". That explains a pile of apparently irrational behaviour: why a monthly plan is easier to accept than paying per use (hurt once versus hurt often), why "less than a coffee a day" works, why 39 feels disproportionately cheaper than 40. The useful part is that discounting is only one lever on the pain side, and the most expensive one — you pay for it yourself. Changing the unit (per month, per person per day), changing the payment shape (pay later, in stages, on milestones), and changing the reference (compare to what he already spends, never to zero) reduce the same pain for free. Round numbers read as professional in high-trust services while charm endings read as retail, so pick by category rather than by habit. And showing him the result before you name the number lifts the other side of the rope entirely: same price, different outcome.
EN Price increases are resented over justification, almost never over size. People run a plain rule: you're entitled to protect the profit you had, but not to enlarge it by exploiting my situation. Costs went up so you followed — fair. You noticed I can't switch away — not fair, however sound that is economically. The same percentage with a different reason either passes quietly or buys you cancellations and a story people repeat. There's a second layer: existing customers react far more strongly to an increase than new customers do to the same higher price, because one is losing a price he already had and the other is merely not getting a bargain. So a notice needs four things or he'll fill the gaps himself, unfavourably: effective date, the real reason, what he gets more of, and what happens to existing customers. Two field habits: raise on new customers first and watch the close rate, then move existing ones in batches by contract date. Some churn is the point — check that the ones who leave are your least profitable and most demanding, not your best.