You are on a call with a company in Munich. You give them the number, braced for the part where they push back.
They say that sounds fine.
No pause, no counter, no request to see what the cheaper tier looks like. Just fine, send the contract.
That silence is the most expensive piece of information you have ever been given, and almost every founder here misreads what to do about it.
The instinct is to raise the price. That is the wrong first move, and the reason is the part nobody says out loud. Your low price did not only cost you revenue. It quietly decided what you built, which means the higher number is not yet justified by the product you have.
So: fix what the price specified, then price by market and by packaging rather than by a blanket increase, and when you deal with the existing base, grandfather the product rather than the price. That last distinction is the whole thing and I will come back to it.
Why 1.3 million people is the worst possible sample
Some numbers for the general environment, and then an honest caveat about them.
For 2025, the latest full year available, Germany’s household consumption price level sat about 8.3% above the EU average according to Destatis, and Sweden’s about 21% above it. Eurostat places Estonia below the EU average. That is roughly a thirty point spread between here and Stockholm on what ordinary things cost.
Now the caveat, because I have seen founders use figures like these as a multiplier and it is wrong. Those are consumer price levels. They tell you nothing directly about what a procurement team pays for business software.
If anything they understate the gap. A B2B software price is anchored to two things: the cost of the labour it displaces and the size of the budget it comes out of. Both of those diverge far more sharply between Tallinn and Munich than a basket of groceries does.
Which brings us to the sample problem.
Thirty domestic customers in a market of 1.3 million is not a sample of your addressable market. It is close to a census of the most price-sensitive slice of it, taken by a founder who was grateful anybody said yes at all.
You did not discover your price. You discovered the price of being unknown in the cheapest part of your smallest market.
The part nobody tells you: the price specified the product
Here is the argument I would actually defend, and it is why “just raise it” does not work.
Go and look at what your original price quietly decided for you.
How many hours of onboarding you could afford to give each customer. Whether you have anybody answering support on a Friday evening. Whether you built single sign on, audit logs, role permissions. Whether you have a data processing agreement a legal team will accept without rewriting. Whether you can survive a procurement cycle that wants quarterly invoicing, a named account contact and a security review, which I have written about as answering a vendor security questionnaire.
Every one of those was affordable or not affordable because of the number you picked in year one.
So you quote Munich three times your domestic price, and they do not blink at the number. They ask for the things a buyer at that price expects. And you do not have them.
The founder then concludes that the export market will not really pay the higher price. The truth is that the product was built to a specification set by a price chosen badly, in a market that was never the target.
A low price is not a discount on your product. It is a specification for it.
Segmented pricing means a different product, not a different number
This is where most attempts go wrong, so be precise about it.
Regional pricing with no difference in what is delivered is arbitrage. Your customers will find out, and in a market of this size they will find out quickly, because the Estonian buyer and the German buyer will end up at the same conference. Then you are not a company with a pricing strategy, you are a company that charged somebody more for the same thing.
The legitimate reason for a different number is a different product. So build the thing the export buyer actually needs, and let that be the tier that carries the export price.
In practice that usually means the unglamorous list. The security and compliance artefacts. A real service level commitment with a consequence attached. A named human rather than a shared inbox. Invoicing and payment terms that fit a finance department rather than a card. Implementation support that assumes the buyer has their own internal politics to manage.
None of that is features. All of it is what a company paying several times more is actually buying, and it is why the price difference is defensible when somebody asks.
The grandfathering decision, said plainly
The standard advice is to grandfather your early customers forever because the goodwill is cheap. I think that is lazy, and it is usually given by people who have not had to run the company afterwards.
My position: grandfather the product, not the price.
Your first thirty customers keep what they bought, at what they agreed to pay. They do not get the new tier for free. That is a promise you can say out loud without embarrassment, it is what you would want if you were them, and it turns an awkward conversation about increases into a straightforward conversation about upgrades.
Now the honest cost, because there is one.
Some of them will still leave when they work out that a company in Germany pays more and gets a better version. In a market this small, they will work it out. You should decide now whether you can absorb that, while it is a calculation rather than a crisis.
What you must not do is decide it later, under pressure, customer by customer. That produces a secret discount schedule, which is the worst pricing structure in existence, because nobody inside the company can tell you what anything costs any more.
Where I come out
The uncomfortable conclusion is that your first thirty customers were a product research exercise that you paid for and mistook for a pricing exercise.
That is fine, and it is close to unavoidable when you are starting from a market this size. What is not fine is leaving the price there for the next three years because the base makes changing it feel rude.
Build the export tier. Price it for the market it is for. Keep the old customers on the old thing and tell them so directly.
If you’d like to think through your own tiering or how to handle the conversation with an existing base, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on getting marketing and sales pointed the same way cover the part where the new price has to be defended in a call. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.