At nearly every business conference, and in what feels like every third LinkedIn post, someone is telling business owners to raise their prices.
They have not seen your pricing. They do not know your costs, your margins, your customers, your market, or whether your business is actually profitable. It does not matter. Raise your prices.
It has become the automatic mantra.
Charge for value, not time. Stop undercharging. Raise your rates every year. If people are not pushing back, you are too cheap. Do not leave money on the table.
Some of that advice is necessary. A business that cannot cover its costs, pay its people fairly, reinvest, absorb risk, and make a profit is not sustainable. Profit is not a dirty word. It is what allows a business to stay open, improve, hire, solve problems, and continue serving people.
But somewhere along the way, the message changed.
“Make sure you are paid fairly” became “charge the maximum amount someone will tolerate.”
And those are not the same thing.
The Maximum Is Not the Goal
A customer’s maximum willingness to pay is useful information. It tells you something about demand, perceived value, urgency, alternatives, and your position in the market.
It does not automatically tell you what you should charge.
There is a difference between a price that is profitable and sustainable and a price designed to extract every possible dollar before the customer walks away.
Businesses need to understand the difference because we are no longer having a conversation only about pricing strategy. We are having a conversation about what kind of economy, and what kind of business community, we want to build.
A fair price should do three things:
- Cover the true cost of delivering the product or service
- Generate a healthy profit for the business
- Leave the customer clearly better off because they made the purchase
That last part seems to be disappearing from the conversation.
The customer should not merely be willing to pay. They should feel the exchange was worth it. They should walk away believing they received real value—not wondering whether the business studied their tolerance, found their breaking point, and charged right up to it.
We Are Humans Serving Humans
We talk about customers as markets, segments, leads, average order values, conversions, lifetime value, and revenue opportunities.
Those things matter. Businesses need metrics. Leaders need to understand numbers. I am certainly not suggesting that business owners operate from vague feelings instead of sound economics.
But behind every metric is a person.
A family deciding whether they can still afford dinner out.
A founder looking at another software renewal and wondering which expense to cut.
A parent buying tickets because this is the concert their child has talked about for months.
A person trying to get to work, get home safely, feed their family, pay their insurance bill, or simply maintain the same basic quality of life they had a few years ago.
When we price only for the maximum amount someone can be pushed to pay, we stop seeing that person. We begin treating their budget as an asset waiting to be captured.
That is where capitalism gets a bad name.
Capitalism is not the problem. Creating value, solving problems, taking risks, building companies, hiring people, and earning a profit are all good things. They are necessary things.
The problem is when we confuse capitalism with extraction.
“Don’t Leave Money on the Table”
I hate the phrase “don’t leave money on the table.”
It sounds smart. Aggressive. Sophisticated. Like something a serious business owner should say.
But what does it actually mean?
Usually, it means this: if a customer would have paid more, you made a mistake by charging less.
I don’t agree.
Sometimes leaving money on the table means you priced with restraint. Sometimes it means you made room for the customer to benefit from the value you created. Sometimes it means you chose long-term trust over squeezing every last dollar out of one transaction.
That is not weakness. That is leadership.
A business owner has every right to earn a strong return. But a customer’s ability to pay more does not mean every available dollar belongs to the business.
There should be value left on both sides.
If I help a client solve a meaningful problem, I should be compensated fairly. If the outcome is significant, my price should reflect more than the number of hours I spent working. That is reasonable.
But if the client receives $500,000 in value, it does not automatically follow that I should try to take $499,999 of it.
A fair price is not the lowest possible price. It is the price that allows the business to thrive and allows the customer to feel they received something meaningful in return.
The Affordability Crisis Is Not Someone Else’s Problem
We keep talking about an affordability crisis in America. People are frustrated because they cannot afford the same basket of goods, services, experiences, and basic stability that many of us could afford when we were younger.
And yes, there are macroeconomic forces that individual businesses do not control.
Wars affect energy and supply chains. Interest rates affect mortgages, debt, construction, credit, and business investment. Housing shortages, insurance costs, healthcare costs, taxes, labor markets, and regulation all influence what people can afford. Housing and transportation alone accounted for roughly half of average household spending in the United States in 2024.[1]
No individual coffee shop, consultant, restaurant, software company, or retailer created that situation.
But businesses are not simply innocent bystanders, either.
Every time a company raises prices because costs increased, that may be necessary. Every time a company raises prices because the product became meaningfully better, that may be justified. Every time a company adjusts pricing because it needs to remain viable, that may be responsible.
But when businesses raise prices simply because they can, because customers are still buying, because the market is confused, because switching is inconvenient, because people are desperate, or because an algorithm says there is more room — we contribute to the problem.
We cannot complain about affordability as though it is weather. It is also the cumulative result of millions of decisions made by people running businesses.
People like us.
AI Makes the Question More Urgent
This is no longer a theoretical concern.
We are now seeing companies use technology to identify what customers in different places—or eventually individual customers—may be willing to pay.
StubHub recently faced scrutiny after an NBC News test found different total prices for the same concert ticket viewed at the same time. StubHub said the differences came from anonymous, randomized pricing experiments rather than personal data, but the larger question remains: why should people pay different fees for the same seat and the same platform service simply because the company is testing how much the market will tolerate?[2][3]
McDonald’s has reportedly been using AI-assisted tools to recommend menu prices based in part on local customer willingness to pay. Franchisees retain final control, and different locations do have different costs and competitive conditions. Still, the system reportedly helped produce different prices for a Big Mac at restaurants only a few miles apart.[4]
This is not really about whether every Big Mac should cost the same.
It is about the question being optimized.
Is the question: What price allows us to serve customers well, cover our costs, reward our franchisees, and operate a healthy business?
Or is the question: How much more can we get from this person, in this neighborhood, at this moment, before they say no?
AI can answer the second question faster than any human being ever could.
That does not mean it should become the business model.
Fair Does Not Mean Cheap
To be clear: this is not a call for business owners to feel guilty for charging enough.
It is not a call to remain underpriced, underpaid, overworked, or resentful. It is not a call to absorb every cost increase personally. It is not a call to discount your expertise because someone else has a smaller budget.
A fair price can be premium.
A fair price can be profitable.
A fair price can be higher than competitors’ prices when the value, experience, expertise, risk, quality, or outcomes are truly different.
But fair has to mean more than, “Someone paid it.”
Fair means you can explain the price.
Fair means comparable customers are treated consistently unless there is a real reason for the difference.
Fair means you are not relying on hidden fees, confusion, false urgency, lock-in, desperation, or a customer’s inability to compare alternatives.
Fair means you know your costs and your value—but you also recognize that your customer is not a spreadsheet cell.
A Better Question for Business Owners
Instead of asking, “What is the most I can charge?” try asking:
- What does it truly cost to deliver this well?
- What profit do we need to remain healthy and excellent?
- What value does the customer receive?
- What value remains with the customer after they pay us?
- Could I explain this price openly to my highest-paying customer?
- Would I be comfortable if every company in my industry used this exact pricing logic?
- If our costs go down because of automation, scale, or AI, will any of that benefit reach the customer?
Those questions do not make pricing easier.
They make it more honest.
And perhaps that is the point.
We are not just setting a number. We are making a statement about what we believe our relationship with customers should be.
The Discipline We Need
There is a real discipline in pricing fairly.
It is easier to undercharge because you are uncomfortable talking about money.
It is also easier to overcharge because someone tells you that “premium pricing” is proof of confidence.
The harder work is understanding your economics, knowing the value you create, having the courage to charge appropriately, and exercising enough restraint not to turn every customer relationship into an extraction exercise.
We need businesses that can survive and grow.
We also need customers who can afford to live.
Those two things are not in conflict unless we decide they are.
A fair price does not leave the business broke. It does not leave the customer resentful. It leaves both people better off.
That should still be the point.
If you’re working through a pivotal decision of your own, The Edge Forums is where founders, executives, and operators sharpen the decisions most at risk of defining them. Apply or ask a question here.
Sources
[1] Housing and transportation accounted for 50 percent of household … https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/housing-and-transportation-accounted-for-50-percent-of-household-spending-in-2024.htm
[2] For the same ticket on StubHub, different prices for different people https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/stubhub-tickets-different-prices-for-different-people/4080713/
[3] How StubHub Fees and Pricing Work https://newsroom.stubhub.com/2026/09/30/how-stubhub-pricing-works/
[4] Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac https://www.reuters.com/business/inside-mcdonalds-push-have-ai-price-your-big-mac-2026-09-29/
