Strategy & Planning

How to run a pricing analysis as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Strategy & PlanningFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You set your course price two years ago based on a gut feeling and what the person you follow on Twitter was charging. Since then you've launched four cohorts, added a self-paced tier, started offering 1:1 coaching add-ons, and watched your Stripe dashboard without ever sitting down to ask whether the pricing architecture actually makes sense. Your competitors just raised prices. Your refund rate ticked up after the last cohort. Your Kajabi analytics and your Stripe exports live in separate tabs and neither one tells you which offer converts best at which price point. Stitching it together means a Saturday afternoon in Google Sheets you don't have.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live pricing dashboard that pulls your Stripe revenue by product, cohort, and pricing tier so you can see average revenue per student, refund rate by offer, and which upsell actually converts — without opening a spreadsheet

A scenario model showing what happens to your runway and monthly revenue if you raise your flagship course by $200, add a payment plan option, or cut the 1:1 coaching tier entirely

A weekly digest that ties your pricing and conversion data together and tells you the three things worth acting on this week — so pricing analysis becomes a standing habit, not a once-a-year panic

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, customers, invoices, and subscriptions refresh automatically and live in Starch's database. Starch also syncs your Plaid bank account data on a schedule for burn rate and cash position. PostHog is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live for conversion funnel data. Gmail is synced so the weekly digest lands in your inbox. Kajabi and Teachable are reached through browser automation — no API needed — for enrollment counts and completion rates that don't live in Stripe.

Prompts to copy

Build me a pricing analysis dashboard that pulls from my Stripe data and breaks down revenue by product — show me units sold, average order value, refund rate, and net revenue for each offer: the flagship cohort, the self-paced course, and the 1:1 coaching package. Add a comparison view so I can see how each performed across my last four launches.

Create three pricing scenarios: (1) I raise the cohort from $997 to $1,197 and conversion drops 15%, (2) I add a three-pay option at $397/month and conversion increases 20%, (3) I retire the 1:1 coaching offer entirely. Show me what each scenario does to my monthly revenue and 12-month runway, using my actual Stripe and Plaid data as the baseline.

Set up a weekly pricing digest that looks at my Stripe data and emails me every Monday with: which offer drove the most revenue last week, whether my refund rate changed, any new payment failures or subscription churns, and one specific pricing or packaging change worth testing.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Stripe: Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule, pulling charges, invoices, subscriptions, and customer records. This becomes the foundation of every pricing view — no CSV exports required.

2 Connect Plaid: Starch syncs your bank account data on a schedule so your cash position and monthly burn are reflected accurately in any scenario model alongside your Stripe revenue.

3 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query your sales page conversion rates, checkout drop-off points, and traffic sources live when your apps need them.

4 Tell Starch to build the pricing breakdown dashboard. Describe exactly what you want: 'Break my Stripe revenue into three buckets — cohort, self-paced, and coaching add-on — and show me units sold, average order value, refund count, and net revenue for each of the last six months.'

5 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Your actual Stripe and Plaid numbers are already the baseline. Add your first scenario: a price increase on the flagship cohort. Adjust the conversion rate assumption downward and let the model show you whether higher price-per-seat offsets the expected drop in enrollments.

6 Add a second scenario for a payment plan option. If your cohort is $997 lump sum and you're considering $397 × 3, model the cash timing difference — when does the revenue actually hit your account, and does that create a gap before your next launch?

7 Add a third scenario that removes your lowest-margin offer entirely. For most solo coaches this is 1:1 time — price it out honestly: hours delivered, effective hourly rate, and what that capacity is worth if redeployed into a group offer.

8 For Kajabi or Teachable enrollment and completion data that doesn't appear in Stripe, tell Starch to pull it through browser automation: 'Log into my Kajabi account and pull the enrollment count and average completion rate for each course from the analytics tab.' Starch automates this through your browser — no API needed.

9 Set up the Growth Analyst app and point it at your PostHog conversion data and Stripe revenue. Configure the weekly digest prompt: 'Every Monday, email me which offer converted best last week, whether my refund rate is trending up or down, and one pricing or packaging idea worth testing based on the data.'

10 After your next cohort launch, return to the pricing dashboard and compare actuals against the scenario you modeled. Note where your conversion rate assumption was off — this becomes the calibration input for the next scenario cycle.

11 Use the Transaction Insights app to audit your tool spend against your per-student revenue. Kajabi, Zoom, ConvertKit, Circle — run the prompt: 'Show me every recurring SaaS charge from my Plaid account in the last 90 days, grouped by vendor, with a month-over-month trend.' Price your offers knowing what it actually costs to deliver them.

12 When you're ready to communicate a price change to your list, describe the announcement email in Starch: 'Draft a price increase announcement for my cohort — going from $997 to $1,197 in 30 days — that leads with the value added since the last cohort and gives current subscribers a grandfathered enrollment window.' Send through your connected Gmail.

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

April 2026 Pricing Review — Cohort-Based Writing Course

Sample numbers from a real run

Flagship cohort (Q1 2026, 38 students @ $997)	37,886
Self-paced course (Q1 2026, 114 sales @ $297)	33,858
1:1 coaching add-on (Q1 2026, 6 clients @ $1,500)	9,000
Refunds issued (Q1 2026)	-4,182
Net Q1 revenue	76,562
Scenario A: raise cohort to $1,197, conversion -15% (32 students)	38,304
Scenario B: add $397x3 payment plan, conversion +20% (46 students)	54,862
Scenario C: retire 1:1 coaching, reallocate 18 hours to group content	71,680

You ran the numbers and found something uncomfortable: your self-paced course at $297 is generating almost as much gross revenue as your flagship cohort at $997, but with zero delivery overhead — no live calls, no Slack support, no cohort management. Your 1:1 coaching add-on looks like $9,000 in Q1 until you count the six hours per client across six clients: 36 hours of your time at an effective rate of $250/hour, while a group seat in your cohort earns you $997 for roughly the same instructional content delivered once. Scenario A (raising the cohort to $1,197 with a 15% conversion drop) actually nets you $418 more than Q1 with 6 fewer students to support. Scenario B (adding the three-pay option) projects $54,862 from the cohort alone — but the cash timing model shows a $12,000 gap in month two before the second payment installment hits, which you'd need to cover from self-paced sales or reserves. The weekly Growth Analyst digest flagged that your checkout page conversion dropped from 4.2% to 3.1% in the two weeks after you added a testimonials section — counterintuitive, but the PostHog data is unambiguous. You're testing a shorter checkout page next launch with that number in hand.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net revenue per student by offer (cohort vs. self-paced vs. coaching add-on)

Refund rate by cohort and by pricing tier (lump sum vs. payment plan)

Checkout page conversion rate by traffic source (email list vs. organic vs. paid)

Effective hourly rate for 1:1 and live cohort delivery vs. async offer margin

Monthly recurring tool spend as a percentage of gross revenue

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + Stripe CSV exports

Free and flexible, but you're rebuilding the same pivot table after every launch and the scenarios live in a spreadsheet no one updates when assumptions change.

Kajabi or Teachable built-in analytics

Shows you enrollment counts and completion rates but has no visibility into your bank account, refund patterns, or what happens to revenue if you change your pricing structure.

ProfitWell / Baremetrics

Good subscription revenue analytics for SaaS, but built for recurring billing — cohort-based and one-time course revenue doesn't map cleanly to their MRR and churn framing.

Hiring a fractional CFO or business manager

Gives you a human who can do the modeling, but at $1,500–$3,000/month this only makes sense once you're well past $500k ARR; Starch gets you the same analysis at a fraction of the cost while your business is still growing.

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

My course platform is Kajabi — does Starch connect to it directly?

Kajabi doesn't have a direct integration in Starch's catalog today, but Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. You can pull enrollment counts, completion rates, and student progress data from your Kajabi analytics dashboard using browser automation. For revenue data, Starch syncs your Stripe account on a schedule, which is where the money actually lives regardless of which course platform you use.

I use Teachable (or Thinkific) instead of Kajabi — does this still work?

Yes. The same browser automation approach applies to Teachable and Thinkific for enrollment and completion data. Revenue flows through Stripe either way, and that's the data doing the heavy lifting in your pricing analysis.

I'm not technical. How hard is it to set up the pricing dashboard?

You connect Stripe and Plaid by following Starch's guided setup — it's an OAuth flow, same as connecting any app. Then you describe what you want in plain English. 'Show me revenue by product for the last six months with refund rate and average order value' is a complete instruction. Starch builds the dashboard from that. You don't write code or configure schemas.

I use QuickBooks for my course business accounting — can Starch use that instead of or alongside Plaid?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, payments, and vendors — and can use it alongside your Plaid bank data. One note: QuickBooks report views like P&L summaries are temporarily unavailable due to a connector issue being fixed, but entity-level data (individual transactions, invoices, payments) syncs normally and is enough for most pricing analysis work.

Will this work if I use ConvertKit or Mailchimp for email and want to tie email performance to pricing conversion?

You can connect ConvertKit and Mailchimp from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your apps need the data. Pair that with PostHog for checkout funnel data and Stripe for revenue, and you can build a view that shows which email sequences and which list segments drive the highest-converting students at each price point.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I want to make sure student payment data is handled properly.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. Starch connects to your Stripe account and reads transaction data — it doesn't store raw card numbers or PII beyond what you explicitly build into your apps. If SOC 2 certification is a hard requirement for your business, that's worth knowing upfront.

How is this different from just looking at my Stripe dashboard?

Stripe shows you what happened. Starch lets you ask what would happen — and it ties your revenue data to your cash position, your tool costs, and your conversion funnel in one place. The scenario modeling is the part Stripe doesn't do: 'if I raise my price 20% and conversion drops 15%, am I ahead or behind?' That math lives in a spreadsheet today; Starch runs it against your actual numbers on demand.