The reality is your clients already have a number in their head before you even send that quote. A range, actually. A price that makes them suspicious, a price that makes them flinch, and a sweet spot in the middle where they’d say yes without blinking. You just don’t know what those numbers are yet. But you, me, goldilocks and a Dutch dude are going to work that out.

You’ve known since you were a kid that something can be too cheap to trust, too expensive to justify, or sitting right in that sweet spot where it just feels… right. You didn’t need a degree for that. Goldilocks figured it out in someone else’s house with a bowl of porridge.

In the Goldilocks story “Just right” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because in real life, there isn’t one magic number. There’s a range.

A zone where your price feels credible, fair, and worth it, and that zone has a floor and a ceiling. Go below the floor and clients start wondering what’s wrong with you. Go above the ceiling and they check out entirely.

Turns out a Dutch economist figured this out in 1976 and built a whole research model around it. His name was Peter van Westendorp, and the framework he developed, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM), is essentially the Goldilocks test with two extra questions and a graph.

It’s actually pretty clever. And if you use it properly, it can genuinely inform your pricing. The key words there being: properly and inform. Not dictate. Not replace. Not do the whole job for you.

Let’s dig in.

Van Westendorp took the Goldilocks insight and formalised it. Instead of three options (too cheap, too expensive, just right), he split “just right” into two questions, giving you a range rather than a single point. The result is four questions that map your market’s full psychological pricing landscape.

You survey a group of potential buyers, collect their answers, plot them on a graph, and find where the curves intersect. 

The red “Too Cheap” line starts high and drops as price increases: at $1,000, around 80% of people think it’s suspiciously cheap, but by $3,000 almost nobody does. The blue and purple lines work in the opposite direction, rising as price goes up.

Where they all converge is the Acceptable Price Range: the green zone between roughly $2,000 and $4,000 where the fewest people are put off in either direction.

This is the zone where most buyers will say yes, bounded by “suspiciously cheap” on one end and “absolutely not” on the other.

In traditional product-based markets, this is genuinely gold. A software company launching a new subscription tier, a product designer pricing a physical item, a SaaS brand figuring out their annual plan? Yes. Absolutely. Run this model. Bake it into your launch strategy.

But before you go building a survey for your next logo client, let’s talk about why it’s more complicated for us.

Let’s give credit where it’s due, because this model absolutely earns its reputation in the right context. Van Westendorp shines when:

In all of these cases, you’re dealing with market-wide perception of a consistent product. That’s exactly what this model was designed for. Use it. Love it.

Related Reading: If you’re thinking about packaging your services and want to understand how different pricing methods stack up, The Freelancer’s Smorgasbord of Pricing Methods breaks down every approach you could use and when each one makes sense.

The Van Westendorp model is built on the assumption that you’re selling something consistent and repeatable to a large, homogeneous group of buyers who all share similar context. A chocolate bar is a chocolate bar. A Netflix subscription is a Netflix subscription. But a brand identity for a wellness startup is not the same as a brand identity for a construction company, even if both involve logos.

When the work is bespoke, the cracks show up pretty fast. Here’s why:

The whole premise of Van Westendorp relies on averaging out responses across a large group to find a representative range. But your client roster is probably a mixed bag. A small business owner running a side hustle out of their spare room has a wildly different budget ceiling than a funded startup with a marketing team. Averaging their price perceptions together doesn’t give you useful data. It gives you a mushy number that satisfies nobody particularly well.

We know from problem-based pricing that the urgency of a client’s situation fundamentally changes what they’ll pay. A client who needs their website rebuilt in the next ten days before a product launch will pay significantly more than one with a three-month runway. A Van Westendorp survey taken in December gives you a snapshot frozen in time, but your clients are coming to you with wildly varying levels of urgency, complexity, and perceived risk.

Their willingness to pay isn’t a fixed personality trait. It changes based on the problem, the stakes, and how desperate the situation is. Surveys can’t capture that. Only the actual conversation can.

This is the big one. The Van Westendorp model tells you what your clients are willing to pay. It tells you absolutely nothing about what you need to earn to run a profitable business, pay yourself a real income, cover your software subscriptions, your superannuation, your tax obligations, and your not-insignificant caffeine habit.

If your market research tells you clients expect to pay $2,500 for a logo but that number doesn’t actually cover your costs and sustain your business, you have a problem that data cannot fix. Undercharging is one of the most common traps creatives fall into, and using market perception as your sole pricing input is a fast track to staying there.

Put it this way: the same person who tells you $3,000 is way too expensive for a brand identity might pay $4,500 six weeks later when they’ve seen your portfolio, heard your pitch, understood the problem they’re trying to solve, and actually trust you to solve it. What people say they’ll pay in theory and what they actually hand over in practice are regularly very different numbers. You can account for this somewhat, but you can’t eliminate it.

I’m genuinely not here to trash Van Westendorp. It’s a legitimate, well-researched tool with real applications. But it’s one ingredient, not the whole recipe, and using it as your singular pricing compass is like trying to build a dish using only salt. Technically a food. Deeply unhelpful.

Your pricing needs to start with your numbers. What does it actually cost to run your business? What income do you need to live well, not just survive? What’s the minimum hourly equivalent you’d accept before you’re better off getting a job? These foundations come first, and they have nothing to do with what your clients expect to pay. You can check where you stand using the Freelance Pricing Calculator.

Then layer in the value you’re delivering. A rebrand that helps a client charge premium rates, attract better clients, and stop competing on price is worth significantly more than the hours it takes you to execute it. Higher prices signal higher quality, but that signal has to be supported by genuine value communication, a strong portfolio, testimonials, and positioning that backs it up.

Market data like Van Westendorp comes in after that. As context, not a ceiling, not a directive.

If you want to use this model well, here’s how to do it without setting yourself up for the kind of pricing that leaves you resenting your clients at 11pm on a Tuesday.

If you’re building a productised service, a workshop, a course, or a set-price offer, running a Van Westendorp survey with your actual audience is genuinely useful.

You’re selling the same thing to multiple people, which is the context the model was designed for. Get your floor from your numbers first, then use the survey data to understand where in the acceptable range you want to position.

Don’t survey your entire network and average the results. Your contacts are probably at wildly different stages with wildly different budgets — a startup founder has a completely different price ceiling to a corporate marketing manager, even if both need the same deliverable.

Choose to speak to the clients you’re actually targeting with this offer. If you’re building a brand package for established small businesses, ask them, not the mate who got a freebie quote from you three years ago and never followed through.

This is where the model genuinely earns its keep for creatives. We spend so much mental energy worrying about being too expensive that we completely ignore the other risk: being so cheap that clients assume we’re not the real deal. Undercharging doesn’t just hurt your bank account. It actively signals lower quality to the exact clients you want to attract. The Van Westendorp model gives you a data-backed lower bound that you can use to stop underselling yourself.

The research on price-quality perception is consistent: charging too little can be just as damaging as charging too much. The clients you actually want aren’t looking for the cheapest option. They’re looking for the right one. Discounting is a similar trap, and the psychology behind it is the same.

The model gives you a range. The lower end of that range is where clients will still say yes, but there’s no reason to live down there. You’re not optimising for the lowest price people will accept. You’re building a business that sustains you and lets you do your best work. Pricing for time alone already robs you of leverage. Don’t let market research rob you of it too.

Your price perception isn’t just about the number. It’s about everything that surrounds it: your portfolio, your process, the way you communicate, the outcomes you can prove, the clients you’ve worked with. Different pricing methods combined with strong positioning can shift a client’s acceptable range upward before you’ve even said a number. Van Westendorp is measuring a baseline expectation. Your job is to exceed it.

It captures what people expect to pay at a moment in time, for a hypothetical thing, and their actual behaviour when money is on the table will often look different.

For bespoke creative work, it’s most useful as a sense-check on productised offers and a handy reminder that being too cheap is just as much of a problem as being too expensive. It’s not a substitute for knowing your numbers, understanding the value you create, or having the confidence to charge what the work is actually worth.

Pricing will never be a “survey says” situation. It’s part science, part strategy, and a decent chunk of just backing yourself.

You get to influence that number. You get to set the price on the access to your creative genius. That’s the hard you choose, but it pays off, trust me.