The pricing strategy nobody admits

Good morning, Riveters.

If you’ve wondered how companies keep raising prices in a shaky market and somehow get away with it, this week’s issue breaks down the surprising playbook hiding in plain sight. We’ll dig into what streaming services know about pricing that most founders ignore, and how to use those insights to your advantage without alienating your customers.

Plus, you'll discover the key economic signals shaping 2026 planning, the latest AI shifts that could reshape your product strategy, and what the newest funding moves say about startup momentum.

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

Want to catch up on previous issues? Read more here.

Economy
The 43-day U.S. federal government shutdown has ended, but economists warn that the data backlog and missing government operations still leave a “statistical blind spot” for the economy heading into year-end.
What this means to you: When planning budgets, hiring, or product launches, assume greater uncertainty in macro-signals. Be conservative with forecasts and build scenarios.
Source: Royal Bank

AI
A new U.S. federal initiative is prioritizing AI investment geared toward national competitiveness, primarily in AI infrastructure, energy, and defense.
What this means to you: Founders and product leads in AI (or adjacent domains) should pay attention: public funding and policy signals may influence partner/competitor landscapes faster than you expect.
Source: Fox Business

Startups
The latest US startup-funding tracking shows a new wave of large-round deals (including $100 M+ investments), signalling that VC money isn’t evaporating, it’s shifting toward fewer, larger bets.
What this means to you: Whether you’re raising or advising, expect tougher competition for capital unless you clearly differentiate. Keep your playbook sharp and your narrative crisp.
Source: Crunchbase News

The streaming giants keep hiking prices, and people keep paying. It looks irrational on the surface.

But underneath is one of the clearest case studies in pricing power that founders should study.

Streaming is a public experiment in how far a company can push its value, its tiers, its positioning, and its relationship with customers before something breaks. So far nothing has broken. That alone should make any entrepreneur pause.

Why does this matter for you?

Because raising prices is one of the fastest ways to grow a business, yet most teams fear it more than losing a top customer. Founders jump through hoops to add features, launch campaigns, or cut costs—and they treat pricing like a sacred stone that should never be moved. That’s the assumption worth challenging.

Streaming shows the opposite:

Here’s what’s happening beneath the headlines, and what we should learn from it.

It starts with the ladder. Streamers do not simply change a number on their website pricing page, they redraw the entire structure of choice. Good tier. Better tier. Best tier. All are priced to guide people somewhere intentionally. Netflix, Disney Plus, Max, and others adjust every rung so customers feel pulled to a tier instead of pushed out of the system.

That raises a question for any founder: is your pricing a staircase or a trapdoor?

Then there is the safety valve. Streamers keep their lowest tier cheap. The ad-supported plan gives frustrated subscribers a place to land. They can stay without committing to the full price. The company avoids the worst case: churn.

This is useful in every business. When someone cannot justify your main plan, do they have an easy downgrade path or only the exit?

Another clue sits in how these platforms frame value. They rarely announce a price hike alone. They pair it with new features, new rights, or new releases. It signals that quality costs something and puts the hike in a broader story.

You can do the same. The story matters more than the number.

Bundles are another tool. Disney folds Hulu and ESPN into packages that blur the edges. It becomes harder to assign a mental price to any single service. People focus on the combined value instead.

Ask yourself: what becomes possible if your product stops standing alone?

One more tactic that seems small but hits deep: grandfathering. Some streamers raise prices only for new subscribers, keeping long-time customers at their old rate for a stretch of time. It rewards loyalty. It avoids revolt. It buys trust.

And trust is the currency that makes future increases possible.

None of this works without data. Streamers watch churn, tier switches, upgrade paths, and reactions in real time. They treat pricing like a living experiment. And importantly, they accept that some churn is fine if the result is a healthier business.

That is the real lesson. Pricing power is not luck, it is design, structure, timing, storytelling, segmentation, and courage.

Before your next feature release or marketing push, ask a simple question: are you underpricing the value you already created?

You might be sitting on a growth lever.

If you’re a coach or consultant, podcast guesting is the NEW proven & fastest path to full calendars. Stop burning budget on ads and hoping for clicks. Podcast listeners lean in, hang on every word, and buy from guests who deliver real value (like you!). But appearing on dozens of incredible podcasts overnight as a guest has been impossible to all but the most famous until now.

Podcast guesting gets you permanent inbound guests, permanent SEO, and connects you to the best minds in your industry as peers.

PodPitch.com is the NEW software that books you as a guest (over and over!) on the exact kind of podcasts you want to appear on – automatically.

⚡ Drop your LinkedIn URL into PodPitch.
🤖 Scan 4 Million Podcasts: PodPitch.com's engine crawls every active show to surface your perfect podcast matches in seconds.
🔄 Listens to them For You: PodPitch literally listens to podcasts for you to think about how to best get the host's attention for your targets.
📈 Writes Emails, Sends, And Follows Up Until Booked: PodPitch.com writes hyper-personalized pitches, sends them from your email address, and will keep following up until you're booked.

👉 Want to go on 7+ podcasts every month and change your inbound for life? Book a demo now and we'll show you what podcasts YOU can guest on ASAP:

Book Your Incredible Demo Now

Raise revenue without new features by reshaping how customers choose.

Most teams try to grow by adding something. The smarter path is often reorganizing what you already have. Streamers just proved this on a national scale. They didn’t create entirely new products. They reshaped their pricing ladders, tightened the value story, and gave customers clearer steps up and safer steps down.

That single structural change unlocked more revenue than most feature roadmaps ever will. The play for your business is simple: audit your tiers, your plan names, and the real trade-offs between them. If customers can’t see the step they should take next, you’re leaving money on the table.