Asking what somebody would pay is the most useful question a signup form can carry and the most frequently over-read. Both facts come from the same place: people answer it, and their answers are not forecasts.
The wording changes the answer more than the market does
"How much would you pay for this?" invites a number people have not thought about, produced on the spot to be agreeable. You will get a distribution that says more about your phrasing than about your market.
Three framings that do better, in order of how much work they are:
Anchor to what they already spend. "What do you currently spend on solving this?" is a question about the past, and the past happened. It is the single best version, because it cannot be answered aspirationally.
Bracket rather than open. Offer ranges — free only, under $10, $10–25, $25–50, $50+ — rather than a text box. People pick a bracket more honestly than they type a number, brackets are comparable across respondents, and you avoid the free-text answers that are jokes, currencies you did not expect, or "depends".
Ask about the decision, not the price. "Who would sign this off?" tells you whether you are selling to a person or a company, which changes your entire go-to-market and is worth more than the number.
Why brackets beat a text box
You will be tempted by free text because it feels like richer data. It is not.
A text box produces answers you have to clean: "20", "$20", "20/mo", "£15", "depends on features", "whatever it's worth", and a handful of people typing 1000000 for fun. Cleaning that is an afternoon, and the cleaning decisions are yours, which means the distribution partly reflects your judgement.
Brackets give you a distribution immediately and they let you see the shape, which is where the actual finding lives.
Keep free text for a different question. "What would make it worth that?" after a bracket is the best follow-up on the form, and the answers are the closest thing to a product roadmap you will get before building.
Three readings that are worth something
Ranking. If $19 answers outnumber $9 answers three to one, that ordering is informative even though neither number is a prediction. It is a comparison between two things measured the same way, which is the only kind of comparison this data supports.
The cliff. Somewhere the distribution falls off a shelf. That point is usually visible and usually not where you guessed. Finding it is the main practical reason to ask.
Segmentation. The people who picked the top bracket are a different population from the ones who picked the bottom, and the difference between what those two groups wrote in the free-text box is the most valuable thing on the whole form. Not the prices. The words. If the high bracket describes a problem that costs them money and the low bracket describes a mild annoyance, you have found your customer and it may not be who you designed for.
The reading that is not worth anything
Multiplying the average by your list size.
A stated price is a statement, not a payment. Nobody on a waitlist has transacted, and the gap
between what people say and what they do runs in one direction. Osokoro shows a recommendation
alongside these answers and it carries a disclaimer saying it is not a guarantee of demand, revenue or
future purchases — the thresholds behind that recommendation live in VERDICT_THRESHOLDS in
packages/domain/src/validation.ts, and the product links to them from the page. A heuristic that
hides its cutoffs is asking for more trust than a heuristic deserves.
Use the answers to choose between options. Do not use them to forecast revenue.
Where to put it on the form
Not first. The first question should be the one that costs nothing and identifies them — an email, or what they do. A price question first reads as a sales screen and depresses your completion rate on everything after it.
Not last, either, if you also have a free-text question. Put the free text after the bracket so it is answered in the context of the number they just picked, which is what makes the two readable together.
Always optional. A mandatory price question loses you the people who have not decided, and those people are informative in their own right.
What this needs
Custom questions are on Starter ($10/mo) and up. The free plan gives you a hosted page, referrals, email verification and a validation snapshot — enough to run the page, not enough to run the survey.
Verify addresses before reading any of this. An unverified list contains disposable addresses, bots, and anyone gaming a referral queue, and none of them have opinions about your pricing worth acting on.
What to do once you have it
Pick the bracket just below the cliff and put a price there. Then write to the list — with a real email, three weeks in — and count replies rather than opens. Somebody who picked the $50 bracket and then never responds to anything is a data point about the reliability of brackets, and you get it for free by asking.
That sequence gets you from "people said" to something a little closer to "people did", which is the whole journey available before you charge anybody.