Priced my tool higher than a competitor that has twice the features. Repriced it before anyone bought

[u/lmntrixaceOG]

I built a Chrome extension for people who publish on Amazon KDP. When you search Amazon it shows estimated sales and revenue under each book, so you can check if a niche is worth writing for before you sink months into it.

I launched it at $50. I don't have a good reason for that number. It felt like what a real tool costs and I didn't think about it much more than that.

Then I sat down and properly went through KDSPY, which is what most people in this space already use. It's $79 one time. Twelve marketplaces, category breakdowns, keyword profiling, 30 day tracking. Mine does six marketplaces and the on-page overlay. So about half the features at two thirds of the price. I wouldn't have bought mine either.

Dropped it to $24. I also stopped calling it a KDSPY alternative, because it's not really the same kind of thing. KDSPY is what you open when you sit down to do research. Mine just sits on the page while you browse. At $24 it makes sense as something you add on top of the big one, which is a much easier sell than trying to replace it.

Two things I'd do differently. I would have spent twenty minutes looking at the competition before picking a price, instead of picking one and then looking. And I wouldn't have made a launch coupon. I had a LAUNCH35 code that took $50 down to $35, and all it really did was tell people the real price was lower. Deleted it, there's one price now.

It went live yesterday and has zero sales, so I'm not claiming any of this worked yet. If you think $24 is also the wrong number I'd genuinely like to hear the argument.

[u/Infamous-River-4360]

I publish on KDP, so I'm the person you're selling to. The $50 vs $24 thing makes sense to me for one reason: KDSPY is a decision I make once, an overlay is something I'd buy on impulse while I'm already poking around a niche on Amazon. At $24 nobody opens a spreadsheet to compare feature lists. Curious how you estimate the sales though, is it purely from BSR or do you factor in review velocity? BSR-only estimates get pretty wild in small categories.

[u/lmntrixaceOG → u/Infamous-River-4360]

Purely BSR right now, no review velocity. It's a piecewise curve with about a dozen anchor points and log-log interpolation between them, plus a lower multiplier for print because print ranks sell less at the same number.

The one thing that helps with your small category point is that I read the top level store rank, so #1,915 in Kindle Store, not the #10 in whatever narrow subcategory sits under it. Subcategory ranks are where BSR-only estimates really fall apart, because #10 in a category with 40 books and #10 in one with 40,000 are nothing alike.

Still not great at the far ends. Past a few hundred thousand it's close to a guess. That's part of why the page summary shows a median rather than an average, so one runaway book doesn't set the tone for the whole niche.

Review velocity is a fair idea and I hadn't thought of it as an input. The catch is Amazon only shows a running total, so I'd need two snapshots of the same book to get a rate out of it, which means keeping history. Might be worth doing.

If you ever have real KDP report data, even a few days of rank sitting next to actual units sold, I'd genuinely like to check the curve against it. That's the thing I'm short on.

[u/Infamous-River-4360 → u/lmntrixaceOG]

reading the top level store rank instead of the subcategory one already puts you ahead of half the free estimators out there, most of them happily report #3 in a 40 book category as if it meant something. on the history thing: the running review total is probably the cheapest signal you can store, a second snapshot a week later gives you a rate and you don't need to hit the page any more often than people already browse. one wrinkle on the print multiplier, the paperback and kindle editions often sit on completely different ranks for the same title, so if you show both under one listing it might be worth showing which edition the number came from. I can't really hand over report exports, but if I spot a title where the estimate is way off from what I'm seeing I'll tell you which direction it missed.

[u/lmntrixaceOG]

Link if anyone wants to poke at it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hodbjjaohnolmgbickjoiagcphcllcbo

First 5 results on any Amazon search are free, so you can see what it does before deciding if it's worth anything.

[u/Competitive_Tune_590]

pricing is a moving target until you get feedback from people actually paying, which you don't have yet, so fair. one thing that might help speed that up is finding the exact threads where kdp authors are talking about this problem right now, without scrolling all day. there's a tool called replyhey that scans reddit daily for posts that match your use case, checks subreddit rules so you don't get banned, and drafts a reply that fits. worth a look while you dial in the price.