How to discover competitors' pricing, the legal way

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Secret Research Techniques On Peptides

Today we have another guest post from Sarah Cohan. Sarah gave this talk at Knowledgefest last year and it both impressed and creeped out enough people that I thought it would be great for the OOP readers 🙂

5 years ago I wrote a post on “secret research techniques”. I thought I was very smart and advanced. Sarah gave her presentation and I realized I merely adopted the sleuthing techniques, she was born in it.

Today she’s going to teach you how to use them to find your competitors’ pricing. We know you’re all nosy little f***s, we’re just trying to help you.

So you’re trying to find your competitors’ prices

-By Sarah Cohan

Stop me if this sounds familiar - you’ve got a sales deal where the buyer came back asking if you can lower your price. Your Sales leader thinks you should do it because you’re bidding against Competitor X and you’ve lost deals before because Competitor X charges less. But your CEO says you have a better product and you should really be charging more. Oh, and nobody here actually knows what Competitor X charges. Cool cool cool.

If you haven’t been in that particular situation, maybe one of these sounds familiar…

• You made up your pricing for that one customer that one time, and somehow it’s still there 6 months later. Halp. 
• You want to understand prevailing pricing models - is PEPM dead? Is putting fees at risk table stakes? Is there a way competitors are making money that you’re not - like onboarding or offboarding fees?
• Buyers ask you to sweeten the deal and include more in your packaging. Or they don’t ask, but you want to look more generous than the other guy.
• You’re in a heavily-consulted space and want to see how you look when “spreadsheeted.” 

So can’t you just check your competitor’s website? Probably not - unless you’re in a B2C business (or even if you are) most companies aren’t fully transparent about their pricing and packaging. You have to “talk to a sales rep to learn more.” Yeah, no thanks Chad.  So how do you get data on your competitors’ pricing when everyone is actively hiding that information, not just from you but from their buyers? 

To be clear, we’re not talking about corporate espionage here. This focuses on publicly-available information and/or above-board research that’s conducted under clear guidelines to avoid inappropriate disclosure. The Spy vs. Spy method is high drama but I’ll leave that to Deel and Rippling.

The goal for this post is to give you some tricks to find competitive intelligence related to pricing, so you can price based on more than vibes. 

First: Price is never just a number

Before we get started, I want to emphasize that you need to know more than just the rate to benchmark your pricing.

Let’s say your price is $100 PPPM and you find a competitor priced at $75 PPPM. Ok, that seems cheaper, on its face you might think your price is too high. But what does that $75 include? If the model requires devices like a scale or glucose monitor, is that billed separately? Or what if your rate is all-in with no implementation fees and your competitor has everything unbundled? You can't make a decision just based on the number alone unless you’re sure you’re comparing apples to apples.

‍Here’s an example - 

Check out this San Joaquin Valley Insurance Authority analysis of diabetes management vendors 

• Livongo/Teladoc diabetes management - $107 PPPM - “features” section notes that devices like glucose monitor are included
• Omada diabetes management - $89 PPPM - no mention of devices included

Something else to keep in mind is that different customers have different prices. That $107 PPPM that Livongo proposed to SJVIA? They got a raw deal - the School Board of Clay County’s price for Livongo was $75 PPPM 9 months later. 

Yes, custom pricing is common and makes it nearly impossible to say “this is competitor X’s price for Y product.” You’ll always be triangulating - I’ve tracked this with spreadsheets capturing various factors like $rate, type of rate (PPPM vs. PEPM etc.), type of customer, program, inclusions/exclusions, and value-based components like fees at risk or performance guarantees. It’s never pretty, but it’s better than false precision. You can also crowdsource from folks in Sales, CS, the exec team, etc. to help triangulate from multiple sources.

The takeaway here is when you're setting prices you need to know not JUST the rate but what's included in that rate and what it applies to. The good news is that sometimes this information can be found online, if you know how to look for it.

Welcome to the art and science of pricing CI: part detective work, part reading minutes from a city council meeting agenda from 2022. One caveat: I’ve mostly done this when looking for vendor pricing. In the process I’ve also seen pricing for other orgs like PBMs, payers/TPAs, and provider billing, but this runthrough will focus on vendor examples.

But first…the last run of courses

One more reminder on courses, all of which are doing their last runs this fall (except for healthcare 101, I’ll continue to teach that).

• Healthcare 101 (starts 9/22) - I’ll teach you and your team how healthcare works. How everyone makes money, the big laws to know, trends affecting payers/pharma/etc. Enrollment ends next week!

• How to contract with Payers (starts 9/22) - We’ll teach you how to get in-network with payers, how to negotiate your rates, figure out your market, etc. Enrollment ends next week!
• Selling to Health Systems (starts 10/6) - If you need to sell to hospitals, you can’t just like…show up. We’ll teach you how to sell to hospitals the right way, which include assignments to refine your pitch. 
• EHR Data 101 (starts 10/14) - Hands on, practical introduction to working with data from electronic health record (EHR) systems, analyzing it, speaking caringly to it, etc.

We’ll do group rates, custom workshops, etc. - email sales@outofpocket.health and we’ll send you details.

And finally, we have our three big events happening this fall - Healthcare Datacamp, Healthcare AI Hackathon, and Ops Knowledgefest. We’re sold out of all of them, but if you’re interested in sponsoring you should hit us up at sales@outofpocket.health (esp if you’re trying to get in front of engineers or healthcare ops people).

Method 1: Creative web searching

Our goal here is to force Google to turn up documents or pages that contain a company’s price,  using Boolean syntax (example resource on Boolean syntax here from Ahrefs). Surprisingly, contracts and proposals describing vendors’ pricing are sometimes publicly available online. So let’s find those.

A few pro tips here

1. Juicy document types - Over the years I’ve found certain types of B2B proposals or contracts where health tech / healthcare vendor pricing shows up online. They’re usually in PDFs or PPT docs. For example:
   

• Local government RFPs
  
• School district meeting notes
  
• Consultant presentations 
  
• Pharmacy & Therapeutics committee meeting minutes (aka P&T - these are the plan sponsor committees that review PBM/pharma pricing and policies)

2. Before starting research, write down your goal - It’s easy to get dragged down rabbit holes doing this research. Who knew there was so much valuable information hidden online? It’s tempting to get sidetracked by other details you turn up (wait, THAT company was considered for this RFP?!), but stay focused by reminding yourself what you intended to look for
3. Hone your search using what you already know - If you already know something about the company’s pricing or commercial strategy, that gives you a shortcut to find other details in iterative searches. For example, if you know peers use PMPM pricing, you can search for results that must contain “PMPM” to turn up documents that likely have an example of their actual rates. Or, if you know one of their customers (find these on websites, announced on Linkedin, or co-speakers at events) you can check for that contract online using “customer name” AND “competitor”.

Let’s try it

As an example, pretend you want to find Abridge’s per-user pricing.

Why am I researching? Maybe I'm at a competitor and I want to raise my prices or change my pricing strategy. Or maybe I sell software with a similar value-proposition as Abridge in a different part of healthcare and want to understand how to think about my pricing strategy 

What do I already know about Abridge? I think they charge a per-clinician user fee and I know they work with Sutter.

Start by trying the search terms that would turn up the ideal result if it was readily available, including “$” to filter only for results containing a dollar sign, to make sure it's showing an actual rate.   

1. Start with the obvious -- 

abridge ai cost per user "$"‍

You might find low-hanging fruit and can stop here. But if not, it can help identify what “noisy” other companies or common words to filter out as you focus. In this case, there’s another company called Abridge that does cloud management, so I want to exclude those results

2. Exclude noise -- ‍

abridge ai cost per user "$" -"cloud management"‍

**This step can be especially useful for companies with common names or that have multiple lines of business and you only care about one

Note - sometimes you find things that look useful on sources like review sites and comparison tools, but there isn’t a good source provided. That can be informative, but I tend not to rely on those because I don’t know how to evaluate the credibility of the information. It could be very old or misconstrued. 

3. Add a client name, and get specific on file type -- ‍

abridge cost per user and "$" -"cloud management" and "sutter health" filetype:pdf

Now we’re talking. The second result looks good because it's from a relevant buyer type (health system) and is a PDF seemingly published under a Finance filepath  

4. Rejoice

Yup, this is a client’s board meeting review of Abridge’s line-item pricing contract. Again, we don’t know if this is still relevant or how widespread this pricing is, but at least we know when it’s from and what the context is. This source also tells us what’s included in that price and what type of client it is, which can help us infer what contexts we could generalize this to - for example, if we’re pitching a small local FQHC we could infer this is more applicable compared to a massive regional system.

Method 2: End-User Support Pages Are a Goldmine

Let’s go through a business model-specific tactic for B2B2C businesses, where you often find member education documents with valuable information about packaging - like how many sessions or what devices are included. Because of ERISA rules*, a self-insured employer has to bill employees who haven’t hit their deductible for the cost of the service, so the pre-deductible member cost can indicate the vendor’s actual charges to the employer.

(*disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, this is what I’ve understood from legal interpretations but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, more like a conservative approach to a grey area. Definitely don’t @ me.)

[NK note: And really definitely don’t @ me. The phrase “first dollar coverage” is a jumpscare for me.]

Want to know how much Teladoc charges members with high-deductible plans for mental health services, so you can understand how BetterHelp sponsors every podcast? Find a member handbook from any employer benefit guide and there it is —cost-sharing details, eligibility rules, and the occasional accidental overshare. Since member handbook language is a little more predictable – usually contains “eligible” and/or “benefit” we can skip some steps. 

Search for Teladoc customer benefit handbook PDFs that contain “deductible”, “teladoc” AND “eligible” filetype:pdf. Check out the first page of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas benefit guide. Many public institutions have to publish these, and they’re a great source of information around health benefits. 

If we dig around we see that BCBSTX administers the plan, on page 13 you can see the different rates Teladoc offers.

You can find similar info on other sources like:

• Employer microsites (e.g., “Lyra for Walmart”)
• Member-facing eligibility checkers with employer dropdowns may or may not be an actual client list (in this example it’s unclear because many options say the employer isn’t eligible, but if you have some known customers you can cross-check to see the language it would return for a “hit”)
• Benefits presentations shared by HR departments in PDF/PPT that get indexed by Google

Remember these sources aren’t just about pricing—they’ll tell you how competitors package, how many sessions are included, and if they’re sending members random CGMs or scales in the mail. You need that to figure out how you stack up.

Method 3: Pay the Pros

If you’ve got a budget (lol), pay for win/loss interviews or third-party competitive intelligence research. For ~$5–10K, you can get a generalist CI platform like Klue or an industry-specialist boutique firm like Clear GTM to interview your customers and buyers, competitors’ customers, and “industry experts” (looking at you, guy who charges $1000/hour on GLG) for intel on pricing benchmarks. 

[NK note: I get an expert network request probably every week for things I’m completely unqualified for like “CUDA expertise” or “using quotation marks appropriately”. I debate saying yes just to see how far I can get, but I do recommend having good filter questions for the “experts” to get the right person. Otherwise I’ll be there.]

They’ll do this research above-board with clear directions to interview subjects not to reveal confidential information. Investing in this research has the added benefit of getting a bunch more information outside pricing and deliverables like battlecards and win/loss reports. Very worth the money for those in competitive parts of the industry, in my opinion. 

There’s also Exits & Outcomes which is a paid newsletter providing pricing research in addition to other health tech industry analysis. 

Some of that content can be found yourself with the tactics above, but again it takes a lot of time. Or, you know…hit me up. Note that the project management for this can still take significant bandwidth, and you’ll need upfront leadership alignment on goals and focus for these engagements.

Method 4: Ask Your Sales Team. Don’t Make it Weird. 

Sales, CS, and execs often know way more than you realize. They just need a little guidance on how to access their infinite wisdom, and where to share it.

Try asking:

• What questions are buyers asking about pricing in recent RFPs?
• When buyers push back on pricing, which other vendors do they seem to be considering?
• For customers who switched from a competitor, have you heard what devices or number of sessions (etc.) they were getting within that contract?
• What feedback have you heard from consultants or channel partners about how we stack up?

Even if they don’t have exact numbers, their gut sense of relative pricing is valuable. 

[NK note: now that so many of these sales calls are being recorded and transcribed, it feels like a good product to extract details like this from across the sales team and do the triangulation of concerns, competition, pricing, budgets, etc.]

Method 5: See What Else is Out There

When all else fails, look for non-pricing GTM clues that suggest what pricing might look like.

• Videos: Promotional videos about the product or end-user experience on Vimeo or Youtube can tell you what’s included in their price.
• App reviews: Cranky members have a lot to say - “They only gave me two sessions, then I could only talk to a bot”
• PR fluff: “We guarantee X% improvement or you don’t pay”—great for triangulating risk models.
• Secret shopping: Aka pretending you’re a potential customer to get the company to tell you their pricing. I wouldn’t recommend this - it’s considered an ethical grey area since by definition you’re being deceptive in gathering among the most sensitive info that your competitors don’t want to reveal. 

Wait wait - can’t AI do this for me? Yes and no. I’ve tried building custom GPTs and using Deep Research tools to find this stuff. So far,

I find it faster and easier to do it myself. Why? 

LLMs still seem to have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff - for example picking out which numbers in a document actually apply to the competitor in question (when multiple companies are mentioned) and what other information is associated with that price. Plus there’s the hallucination factor, where it mixes up the information and you have to untangle it - so the amount of time you’d spend checking the work could be spent just grabbing the information yourself, minus the frustration and confusion. 

That’s my experience after years of honing this skill - for someone totally new to this, your mileage may vary. Let me know if you find a way to do this better with AI!

Other pro tips and observations

• To expand on “write down your goal before you start” - Design your research with the output in mind. Do you need a full landscape analysis for your finance team, or just a gut check on one competitor for a single deal? What data does your internal audience need, and how will you share it with them? 
• Be sure to document your sources, including dates accessed and published, and download/archive if possible (in case it gets taken down later).
• Nothing will be perfect, but even directional info beats vibes-based pricing, so don’t pass over something just because it doesn’t match your expectations.
• Look past the first Google page. The good stuff lives in the shadows (like, on page 5).
• Offline sources = highly underrated.

You can absolutely learn how your competitors are charging. You just need the right mix of curiosity, Google syntax, and the willingness to read through more public records than a small-town journalist. Happy hunting, and may your PDFs always be searchable.

[NK note: I feel like Sarah could find anything. The library of Alexandria. The Epstein Files. My happiness. Just takes some Ninth Degree black belt Google-fu.

I do want to re-emphasize that pricing is only one thing to focus on. IMO it’s very easy to get obsessed with competitors' moves. You might wonder how they’re undercutting you, but what’s missing from your research is how the quality of service has changed or how their unit economics are unsustainable.

It’s worth knowing how you stack up against your competitors on pricing - and this process can help you do that. But my two cents is to not let their pricing dictate your product/strategy].

Thinksquad out,

Nikhil aka. “Search grasshopper” and Sarah Cohan aka. “Hide yo kids, Hide yo price”

Twitter: ​@nikillinit​

IG: ​@outofpockethealth​

Other posts: ​outofpocket.health/posts​

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