“In the app space it's not like a shelf at a grocery store where people are looking at the Campbell soup and then the store brand soup and doing the math. People are coming in from ads and they don't necessarily have that frame of reference.”

App users rarely comparison-shop on price — especially via paid acquisition funnels

The grocery-shelf mental model leads many founders to underprice defensively, assuming users are comparing options side by side. In paid acquisition channels users arrive at a single paywall with no visible competitor pricing — the relevant comparison is their own perception of value. This makes aggressive defensive discounting far less necessary than founders assume.