# Price against the cost of the mistake, not your competitors

- Category: business
- Author: Flavius D. (https://indie.md/people/flavius/)
- Source: https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-7-timisoara-april-2026/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/benchmark-against-cost-of-mistake/

For tools that sit on top of high-stakes decisions (hiring, compliance, security, legal), the wrong benchmark is competitor pricing. The right benchmark is the cost of one bad outcome. Pace is built for hiring, where a single bad hire typically costs one to two times the annual salary once you factor in ramp, opportunity cost, severance, and team drag. A tool that prevents one bad hire a year is paying for itself many times over at almost any price. Teach your prospects to do that math in the first five minutes of the demo, and pricing objections mostly go away.