Strategy & Planning

How to run a pricing analysis as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Pricing overhauls land on your plate because no one else can hold all the variables at once. You're pulling competitor pricing from five different websites manually, exporting Stripe data into a spreadsheet someone emailed you last quarter, asking the finance lead for a QuickBooks export that takes three days to arrive, and trying to reconcile what the VP of Sales thinks customers will actually pay against what the model says. By the time you have a clean picture, the CEO has already made a gut-call decision in a board prep meeting and you're reverse-engineering the rationale. The analysis took two weeks. The decision took twenty minutes.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live pricing intelligence dashboard that pulls your actual revenue data from Stripe and Plaid, layers in competitor pricing scraped from their public pages, and surfaces where your tiers are mis-priced relative to your current conversion and churn patterns

A scenario model that lets you test 'raise SMB tier by 15%,' 'collapse three tiers into two,' or 'add a usage-based overlay' side-by-side, each showing the projected runway and revenue impact against your real baseline

A repeatable pricing review workflow that runs quarterly — no spreadsheet archaeology required — so pricing decisions are driven by fresh data rather than last year's assumptions

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scenario Analysis Transaction Insights Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule — charges, subscriptions, invoices, and customer records — and syncs your Plaid transaction data on a schedule for burn rate context. Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the growth digest runs. Competitor pricing pages are automated through your browser — no API needed — so the comparison table updates without you logging in to anything.

Prompts to copy

Build me a pricing scenario model using our Stripe revenue data as the baseline. I want to compare three scenarios: (1) raise our Pro tier from $299 to $349/month, (2) eliminate our Starter tier and move those customers to a usage-based plan, and (3) keep current pricing but add a $99 add-on module. Show me projected MRR, churn-adjusted ARR at 5% and 8% monthly churn, and runway impact for each scenario using our current Plaid burn rate.

Pull our last 12 months of Stripe charges and show me average revenue per account by pricing tier, month-over-month expansion versus contraction, and which tiers have the highest involuntary churn. Flag any tier where contraction MRR exceeded expansion MRR for more than two consecutive months.

Scrape the public pricing pages for Notion, ClickUp, and Asana and pull their current plan names, price points, seat limits, and feature gates into a comparison table. No API needed — just pull it from their websites.

Every Monday, pull our PostHog signup data and tell me which pricing tier new signups are landing on, what their activation rate looks like in the first 14 days, and whether that's changed from the prior four weeks.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe and Plaid as scheduled-sync providers. Starch pulls your subscription data, charges, and bank transactions automatically — this is your pricing baseline, not a spreadsheet someone exported last quarter.

2 Open the Scenario Analysis app from the App Store and tell Starch your current tier structure and price points. The app uses your live Stripe data as the baseline so your scenarios start from reality, not a model someone built in 2023.

3 Define the scenarios you actually care about: tier consolidation, price increases by segment, usage-based overlays, or adding an enterprise floor. Describe each one in plain English and Starch builds the model.

4 Prompt Starch to pull competitor pricing from public pages using browser automation. Give it three to five competitor URLs and ask for a structured comparison table — plan names, price points, seat limits, key feature gates. This runs without any API access to those products.

5 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog and install the Growth Analyst app. Configure it to report weekly on which pricing tier new signups are selecting and what their activation rate looks like in the first 14 days — this tells you whether your pricing is selecting for the right customers.

6 Pull the Transaction Insights app to layer in spend context. If you're modeling a price increase to extend runway, you need both sides of the equation — the revenue scenarios and the actual burn rate by category.

7 Run the scenario comparison. Ask Starch to show you MRR, ARR at two different churn rate assumptions, and runway impact for each scenario side-by-side. Reference your real Plaid burn numbers, not a static assumption.

8 Ask Starch to flag the scenarios where break-even shifts by more than 60 days — those are the decisions that actually change your fundraising timeline and the CEO needs to see them framed that way.

9 Build a pricing review view that saves this analysis as a live surface, not a static doc. Next quarter, you refresh the Stripe baseline and re-run — you're not starting from scratch.

10 Export the scenario comparison to share with the CEO and CFO. Describe the output format you need — a clean table, a narrative summary, or the inputs for a board slide — and Starch formats it accordingly.

11 Set the Growth Analyst to run weekly so you catch tier migration patterns early. If customers in your SMB tier start downgrading at higher rates after a price change, you'll see it in the weekly digest before it shows up as a churn spike in your quarterly review.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Pricing Overhaul — 150-person SaaS company, $2.1M ARR

Sample numbers from a real run

Current Pro tier MRR (342 accounts × $299)	102,258
Current Starter tier MRR (891 accounts × $79)	70,389
Enterprise contracts (11 accounts, avg $4,100/mo)	45,100
Scenario A — Pro raised to $349, Starter eliminated (est. 12% Starter churn)	181,400
Scenario B — Collapse to two tiers + $99 add-on module (est. 18% expansion from existing Pro)	196,800
Current monthly burn (from Plaid)	312,000

The chief of staff at a 150-person SaaS company got handed the pricing project in late April when the CFO flagged that Starter tier customers had a 34% higher involuntary churn rate than Pro — meaning the $79 price point was attracting customers who couldn't sustain the product. The problem was that no one had a clean view of what changing the tier structure would actually do to MRR. Starch pulled 14 months of Stripe subscription data automatically and built a scenario model in an afternoon. Scenario A — raising Pro to $349 and retiring the Starter tier, migrating those customers to a free trial-to-Pro path — showed a projected MRR lift from $217,747 to roughly $181,400 net of estimated churn, with runway extending by 22 days at current burn of $312,000/month from Plaid. Scenario B, collapsing to two tiers and adding a $99 onboarding module as an add-on, showed a higher ceiling at ~$196,800 but higher execution risk. The browser automation pulled pricing pages from three direct competitors and showed that two of them had already moved away from sub-$100 entry tiers in the past six months. The chief of staff brought both scenarios to the CEO with the competitive context already built in — the meeting was a decision, not a data collection exercise.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

MRR by pricing tier — broken down monthly, with expansion vs. contraction separated

Involuntary churn rate by tier (failed payments / card declines as a signal of price sensitivity)

Time-to-activation by tier in the first 14 days (from PostHog) — indicates whether pricing is selecting for the right customer segment

Runway impact delta across scenarios — how many days does each pricing change add or subtract at current burn

Competitive price positioning — where your tiers sit relative to three to five direct competitors, updated quarterly

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Excel or Google Sheets built by hand

You can model anything in a spreadsheet, but the baseline is always a manual export — by the time you've pulled Stripe data, cleaned it, and built the scenarios, you're two days in and the assumptions are already stale.

Mosaic or Runway (financial planning tools)

Purpose-built for financial modeling and solid for CFO-driven forecasting, but require finance team setup and don't connect to your competitive research, PostHog activation data, or the ad-hoc scraping a pricing project actually needs.

Your BI tool (Looker, Metabase, whatever the last analyst left behind)

Good for historical reporting on data that's already clean, but building a pricing scenario model requires hypothetical inputs your BI tool doesn't handle — and it can't pull competitor pricing pages.

Asking the finance lead to run the model

Fine if your finance lead has bandwidth, but pricing projects don't respect the close cycle — you need the model now, not when they're free after month-end.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, transaction insights, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually have real-time Stripe data or is it a snapshot from whenever someone last exported?

Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule — charges, customers, invoices, subscriptions, and payouts — so the baseline in your scenario model reflects what's actually happening in your business, not an export from three weeks ago. You're not passing spreadsheets around.

Can Starch pull competitor pricing pages automatically, or do I have to enter that data manually?

Starch automates competitor pricing pages through your browser — no API needed. Give it the URLs and tell it what to extract (plan names, price points, seat limits, feature gates) and it pulls a structured comparison. If a competitor changes their pricing, you can re-run the scrape rather than manually checking five websites.

I need to show the CEO scenarios with different churn assumptions, not just one number. Can Starch do that?

Yes. The Scenario Analysis app is built for this. Tell Starch what churn rates you want to test — say, 5% and 9% monthly churn on the affected tier — and it runs the model at each assumption. You get side-by-side outputs showing MRR, ARR, and runway under each condition, so the conversation with the CEO is about which assumption is more realistic, not about what the math says.

We use QuickBooks for accounting, not just Stripe. Can I bring in QuickBooks data for the pricing analysis?

Yes. Starch syncs QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, and journal entries. One honest caveat: the QuickBooks report views (P&L summary, Transaction List) are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix. Entity-level data syncs normally, so if you need line-item invoice data or payment records to validate revenue figures, that works today.

I'm not the one who will maintain this — I'll hand it to someone else after the pricing project wraps. Will they be able to use it without rebuilding everything?

The apps and views you build in Starch persist as live surfaces, not one-off analyses. Whoever inherits it can refresh the Stripe baseline, adjust the scenario assumptions in plain English, and re-run the comparison. You're not handing them a spreadsheet with 14 tabs and a prayer.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have to get IT sign-off before connecting Stripe.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your IT or security review requires that certification, it's worth raising with your team before connecting Stripe or Plaid. That's the honest answer — and it's on the roadmap.