Does your price actually work? The unit-economics check

Customers accepting your price tells you it's not too high. It tells you nothing about whether it's high enough. A price can win the sale and still bleed the business — which is why pricing isn't done until you've checked the unit economics.

For an AI product especially, this matters: token costs are a real cost of goods, and they set a floor no price can go below.

Metric	What it tells you	Rough target
Gross margin	What's left after cost to serve	70%+ for SaaS
LTV:CAC	Value of a customer vs cost to acquire	3:1 or better
Payback period	Months to recoup acquisition cost	Under 12 months

The three numbers that decide viability

Gross margin is your price minus what it costs to serve one customer — below a healthy margin, growth just loses money faster. LTV:CAC compares what a customer is worth over their lifetime to what you paid to get them; under 3:1 and the model is shaky. Payback is how long until a customer has repaid their acquisition cost — the longer it is, the more cash you burn to grow.

These aren't finance-team abstractions. They're the difference between a price that funds the company and one that quietly drains it.

Checking your numbers

Cadenly's Pricing Strategy workflow runs this check on your proposed tiers — margin over cost, LTV:CAC, payback — and where you haven't given it a real number, it shows the formula so you can plug in your own. It flags any tier that's underwater. Honest math, not optimistic math.