Table stakes vs. differentiators: a framework for feature-based pricing
Two numbers per feature — how many competitors offer it, and what premium it carries — tell you what to include, what to charge for, and what to build.
Feature lists get priced by intuition. Something feels premium, so it goes on the top tier; something feels basic, so it is included everywhere. Occasionally that intuition is right. More often it is a memory of what the market looked like when the pricing page was written.
There is a more mechanical way to decide, and it needs only two inputs you can get from public pricing pages: coverage — the share of competitors who offer the feature at all — and premium — how much more the plans that include it cost than the plans that do not.
The four quadrants
Price premium ↑
Market coverage →
Table stakes — high coverage, low premium. Everyone offers it and nobody charges for it. Mobile apps, basic integrations, two-factor authentication. You need them to be considered and you cannot monetise them. Listing them prominently on a pricing page costs you nothing but earns nothing either.
Differentiators — moderate coverage, high premium. Some competitors have it, and the ones who do charge more. This is where pricing power lives. If you have a differentiator, it belongs above the fold in your sales conversation and it justifies sitting above the market median.
Opportunities — low coverage, high premium. Rare, and the few who offer it charge well for it. Either the market has not caught up or there is a real barrier to building it. Worth investigating before your next roadmap round; worth pricing deliberately if you already have one by accident.
Niche — low coverage, low premium. Few offer it and it carries no premium. Usually a legacy request from one large customer. Keep it if it is cheap to maintain, but do not build a plan around it.
Placing your own features
Take the fifteen features buyers actually ask about. For each one, count how many of your tracked competitors include it, how many sell it as an add-on, and how many lack it. An add-on counts as coverage, but its price is the cleanest premium signal you will find — a competitor who charges €9 per seat for an AI add-on has published exactly what they think it is worth.
For premium, compare plan prices with and without the feature, within a segment. Cross-segment comparison contaminates the number: enterprise plans are more expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with the feature you are studying.
Two quadrant moves matter more than the rest. A feature you treat as a differentiator that is actually table stakes is a story your buyers have stopped believing — and often a discount you are giving away. A table-stakes feature you charge for is a deal-blocker in a competitive evaluation.
What each quadrant implies
Include table stakes on every plan, and stop spending page real estate defending them. Gate differentiators, name them in the plan description, and let them carry your position above median. Price opportunities explicitly rather than bundling them — an opportunity buried inside a bundle earns nothing. Leave niche features where they are.
One caution: quadrants describe the market, not your strategy. A deliberate decision to include a differentiator for free in order to win a segment is legitimate. Doing it because nobody noticed the quadrant is not.
Quadrants drift
Dedicated support is the standard example. Ten years ago in B2B SaaS a named contact and a response-time guarantee sat firmly in the differentiator quadrant — a minority offered it and they charged a clear premium. As enterprise buyers made it a procurement requirement, coverage rose. The premium fell to almost nothing, and today a support commitment reads as table stakes on most mid-market plans; the differentiator moved to onboarding and implementation services.
Every feature travels that path at some speed. Which means a quadrant map is a snapshot with a shelf life, usually two or three quarters. Rebuild it before a pricing decision, not once.
Getting the numbers without the spreadsheet
Coverage and premium are both computable from the same feature matrix you would build for a pricing benchmark, which is why Market Sonar computes them for you: features are extracted from every tracked competitor, normalised so two names for one capability collapse into one row, and the features rival plans charge more for are listed with their coverage and premium.
Either way, the discipline is the same. Two numbers per feature, one map, revisited every few quarters. It converts an argument about what feels premium into a question about what the market charges.
From reading to your own market.
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