This guide covers everything you need to run a Van Westendorp PSM pricing study in OpinionX -- what the method tells you, how to set it up, what your survey participants experience, and how to read every result.

Whether you've run 100 pricing surveys before or 0, this guide is for you. At OpinionX, we remove unnecessary jargon from advanced market research methods, so other than the quirky name 'Van Westendorp', you'll find everything in this guide clearly explained with adjoining examples wherever relevant.

If you're just looking to learn about Van Westendorp surveys in general, you should check out our blog post Van Westendorp for Pricing Research, which is more of a 'beginners guide' to the method rather than being specifically about how it works on our survey platform OpinionX.

Van Westendorp (also called the 'Price Sensitivity Meter') helps you answer one question: what price should we charge?

Instead of asking people the loaded, unreliable question "how much would you pay?", the Van Westendorp survey asks four different pricing questions questions about what counts as too cheap, a bargain, kinda expensive, and a complete rip-off.

Putting the answers for these four questions together reveal the range of prices your market will accept and the points within that range worth paying attention to. From that, we can pull an Optimal Price -- aka the price that the lowest percentage of your target customers consider too cheap or too expensive.

It's a good fit when you're pricing something new, sanity-checking an existing price, or entering a new market and have no strong anchor yet. It's a versatile research method that works for both products and services, and one-time purchases or subscriptions alike.

In OpinionX, Van Westendorp is a built-in question type. You add it like any other question, fill in a few optional settings, and OpinionX handles everything else -- the voting experience for respondents, the logic that keeps answers sensible, analyzing the results, and creating charts for you automatically.

Every Van Westendorp block asks the same four questions about your product. OpinionX pre-fills them with standard wording, which you can edit and translate to any languages you want (suggestion: use our AI auto-translate or multi-language features). The default wording on OpinionX for those questions are:

Considering our product and the value you get from it:

Each respondent answers all four with a single price. Because the questions build on one another, OpinionX enforces a rule that each answer must be higher than the last (more on that below). This prevents people from accidentally saying their "bargain" price is higher than their "too expensive" price, which wouldn't make sense.

Tip: Customize your survey's color scheme from the Preview Mode style editor.

Van Westendorp asks people for price impressions regarding a product, but it doesn't ask whether they'd actually buy your product at those prices. That's why the Newton-Miller-Smith extension was created.

This extension adds two extra questions to the end of a Van Westendorp survey section, showing respondents the price they choose for 'Bargain' (Q2) and 'Costly' (Q3), and asking them how likely they would be to actually buy the product at those two specific prices on a five-point scale:

When you're setting up your Van Westendorp survey, you'll see an option in the block settings menu (bottom-right ⚙️ icon during Survey Setup) labelled 'Show price elasticity questions', which controls whether the two additional 1-5 scale questions are asked.

When enabled, your results dashboard will include an additional chart titled 'Purchase Likelihood & Revenue', which is calculated and created automatically for you once responses start rolling in for your survey.

For each question, your survey respondent is given the text prompt and asked to set a price. They have three different ways they can choose that price:

Three things happen automatically to keep answers clean and unconstrained:

The practical upside of these details: respondents can't give logically impossible answers, and they're never prevented from entering their true price — two things that significantly improve your data quality. These are unique features on OpinionX that you won't find on any other Van Westendorp survey platform.

Here's a step by step guide covering the entire process...

Create an OpinionX survey and choose 'Van Westendorp' as the question type, which you'll find under the 'Advanced' list of formats. OpinionX survey questions are fully customizable, so you can add any other question types to your survey too, including multiple other Van Westendorp sections!

Customize the main question with information about your product, add a product image (optional!) and a short lead-in line so every respondent is pricing the same thing. If you need more space, hit the block settings icon (bottom right, ⚙️ icon) and enable the checkbox titled "Show description" -- this adds an extra text field with smaller font that will display to survey respondents below the main question. Clarity here matters, vague or missing context is the most common cause of noisy pricing data.

This sets the initial top end of the slider on Q1 ('Too Cheap'). If you're worried about this biasing the respondent, remember that participants can easily push past this number and extend the range of the slider, and the slider's initial 'max' value for Q2-Q4 will be tailored based on their 'Too Cheap' answer. Check out this screenshot to see how this translates into the survey experience:

The standard wording is filled in for you. Edit it if your product needs different phrasing, but keep the meaning of each of the four intact. The order of these four cannot be changed, as the logic to prevent lower subsequent answers requires them to be shown in increasing order.

Enable the "Show price elasticity questions" checkbox if you want the revenue and demand analysis using the two additional Newton-Miller-Smith extension questions.

A few settings control formatting and scale:

Step 6. Preview and customize your survey's style

On your survey dashboard, click the 'Preview' button in the top-right corner to walk through the respondent experience yourself before sharing. Within the preview experience, you'll also find a menu for customizing the colors/style of your survey to suit your brand or personal preference.

Step 7. Add your other survey questions

On your Survey Setup dashboard, click 'Add another question' to include other research methods or survey questions in your study. Configure branching logic if you only want certain participants to see and answer your Van Westendorp study. Every change you make is automatically saved and backed up, so there's no 'publish' option -- once you're ready to launch, hit the big 'Share' button in the top right corner and choose your survey distribution method (eg. a simple 'Copy Link').

This is the classic Van Westendorp output, available on every Van Westendorp survey run on OpinionX. It shows four cumulative curves (one per question) with price on the horizontal x-axis and percentage of respondents on the vertical y-axis.

The key takeaways from Van Westendorp surveys are the points where these four lines cross on the Price Sensitivity chart:

If you're not sure what one of the lines means, just hover your mouse over any point on the chart and you'll see a handy little box pop up explaining exactly what the line represents at that exact price:

OpinionX automatically crunches the numbers from everyone's answers, runs the analysis, and identifies and labels the four key Van Westendorp points for you -- no manual work required!

Here are the four key points explained:

The span between 'Marginal Cheapness' and 'Marginal Expensiveness' is your range of acceptable prices; the window most of your market will tolerate the price. Most pricing decisions live inside that window, with the Optimal and Indifference points as references within that range. Van Westendorp doesn't hand you a single "correct" price; it hands you a defensible range and the landmarks inside it to inform your decision.

The main Price Sensitivity chart for your Van Westendorp survey will tell you the range your market will accept, but not which price inside that range to pick. That's where the second chart on OpinionX comes in -- the Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart.

The Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart targets a more strategic and actionable next step: of all the prices people are willing to pay, which one earns you the most?

It's the step from "what's acceptable" to "what's optimal," and it exists only because the two 'NMS extension' question gives OpinionX the extra purchase-intent data needed to model demand at every price.

The Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart has two different lines visible which each use a different vertical y-axis:

The estimated share of your market that would buy at each price. It typically falls steadily as price rises, because the more you charge, the fewer people buy.

This chart shows price × purchase likelihood at that price, averaged across your entire target market (including both interested buyers and disinterested non-buyers).

Every pricing decision is a tug-of-war between two forces: charging more per customer and keeping more customers. At low prices, increasing the asking price wins that fight, because you gain more overall revenue from the higher price than you lose from the few people who drop off. Eventually though you reach an inflection point where this logic flips -- each additional increase in price now loses you more customers than the extra revenue from the higher asking price makes up for, so average revenue falls. The top of that hump is where the two forces balance and that's called your revenue-maximizing price. Finding it is the single reason the Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart exists on OpinionX.

Because the metric is averaged across everyone in the target market rather than just buyers, it's directly comparable from one price to the next; a $10 price and a $40 price are measured on the same per-head basis, which is what lets the peak actually mean something. You'll likely notice that the peak sits to the right of where demand is highest -- the cheapest prices have the most buyers but they leave money on the table, so the revenue-maximizing price deliberately trades away some price-sensitive buyers for more overall revenue from the customers who are willing to stay.

The Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart has four key callouts that summarize it:

If you can't seem to find this chart in OpinionX, scroll to the default Van Westendorp chart on your results dashboard and then hit the 'Switch Charts' button (screenshot below).

If it doesn't appear there, then you haven't enabled the two extra Price Elasticity questions from the settings menu on your Van Westendorp block during survey setup:

There's a dropdown titled "How this chart works" beneath the Purchase Intent & Revenue chart that explains how the demand line is calculated. The two extra Price Elasticity questions ask each respondent how likely they'd buy the product at the prices they choose for the 'bargain' (Q2) and 'costly' (Q3) prices. When they choose an option on the 1-5 (definitely would → wouldn't buy) scale, OpinionX converts those answers into a likelihood:

The top of the scale maps to 80%, rather 100%, as a deliberate choice -- decades of research show people say they'll buy far more readily than they actually do, so every response is deflated to keep the estimate closer to real behaviour rather than 'survey enthusiasm'. OpinionX aggregates these deflated likelihoods across all respondents to build the likelihood curve, then multiplies by price to get the revenue curve.

One of the biggest advantages of running research on OpinionX's survey platform is that everything is compatible with our segmentation analysis engine! There are a bunch of ways you can use these analysis features on your Van Westendorp results:

Here's an example of Van Westendorp segmentation analysis in action:

In this screenshot, you can see a 'crosstab' from the Segments Tab on OpinionX. In this table, each column shows the results from one specific group of people. In this case, we're looking at 6 segments based on how people commute to work, and 2 segments based on gender.

We can see some huge differences between these groups -- for example, people who bike to work have the highest willingness to pay ($26 optimal price) compared to people who commute by public transport ($15 optimal price). That's a 74% higher willingness to pay for the exact same product! This is a great example of why segmenting your Van Westendorp reveals the most valuable insights from a pricing study!

Treat Van Westendorp charts and results as a guide to finding the right price, not a revenue forecast. Because stated intent overstates real purchasing (even after deflation), the price results are estimates, not predictions of your actual monthly revenue.

For example, the Purchase Intent & Revenue chart can be better considered as being great at:

For Van Westendorp surveys generally, a few habits meaningfully improve your data:

What happens if someone's price is higher than the slider shows?

The slider expands as they drag toward the top, and they can always type any figure into the number box. No answer is capped by the visible range.

I don't like the slider, can I hide it from survey participants?

You can disable the slider from the settings popup menu on the Van Westendorp block during survey setup. Hiding the slider means participants will need to manually type their answers in or use the +/- button. You will still need to fill in the 'Estimated Optimal Price' field on survey setup, as this informs the step interval rate on the +/- buttons, but otherwise won't show in any clear way.

Why is my "valid participants" count lower than my total responses?

All OpinionX survey methods are compatible with OpinionX's filtering, segmentation, and crosstab analysis features. Activating a filter or configuring an advanced segment lets you dynamically tailor which participants are counted on your results page, temporarily reducing the number of responses counted towards Van Westendorp analysis compared to the overall results.

Can I use this for subscriptions rather than just one-time purchases?

Yes, use the price suffix (eg. per month) for recurring pricing, or leave it off for one-off products. You can even test it with other pricing metrics like $_ per seat or €_ per 100 AI credits by customizing the price suffix field during survey setup. Van Westendorp is a very flexible and versatile survey method, it works the same either way, so get creative!

Which chart should I look at?

Start with the default Price Sensitivity to see your acceptable price range and reference points. If you enabled the two Price Elasticity questions and you care about revenue, switch to Purchase Likelihood & Revenue chart to find your revenue-maximizing price.

Is the revenue chart a forecast of what I'll earn?

No, treat it as a tool for finding the right price range and seeing how flat or sharp the revenue peak is, not as a prediction of actual revenue. Stated intent runs ahead of real-world purchasing, even after likelihood deflation.

Need a hand with your Van Westendorp survey? Reach out via the in-app live chat, book a survey setup call, or use the prepaid consulting credits included in your premium plan to call in an expert researcher to work in alongside you.