Two weeks apart, two completely different conversations, the same sentence came out of my mouth.

On February 24, I told a bidder verification startup to make their pricing model “super simple, my mom can read it.” They’d built a tiered structure with base fees, per-bidder charges, monthly active user fees, revalidation windows, and a bidder-pay option. Smart people solving a real problem. But the pricing had become a mirror of their engineering, not what they were actually selling. I pushed them to kill the MAU charge entirely because customers would think they were being double-charged. Simplify to two price points: one flat fee for new bidders, a lower one for returning. They agreed.

On March 4, I told a colleague to “make it so simple your mom can do it without calling you.” She was pitching a skeptical client on auction services and couldn’t explain her own pricing during our call. Volume tiers, dual sales channels, per-unit fees that changed at three breakpoints. She knew the math. She just couldn’t say it out loud in a way that landed.

Both times, the advice wasn’t really about simplicity. It was about trust.

The Mechanism

A pricing structure you can’t explain clearly does one of two things to the person across the table. Either they think you’re confused about your own value, or they think you’re hiding something. Both kill deals.

The startup had the first problem. Their model reflected genuine uncertainty about where the value lived. Is it in validation? Revalidation? Active monitoring? Monthly access? When you charge for everything, you’re telling the customer you don’t know which part matters most. The moment we collapsed it to two numbers, the value became obvious: you pay to verify a bidder, and it costs less the second time because the work is already done.

My colleague had the second problem. Her math was sound, but the structure felt like it was designed to squeeze every tier rather than make a clear offer. The client, already skeptical of auctions, would read that complexity as a trap. When I told her to lead with auction and treat direct sale as the backup, the pricing simplified itself. One channel, one fee, one value story.

The Connection

Five Guys doesn’t hand you a menu that says “Large fries: $6.49 (includes 47% overfill surcharge amortized across projected waste).” They fill the cup, drop it in the bag, and scoop more on top. The price is the price. The experience is the explanation.

That’s what clear pricing does. It removes the need to explain yourself. When the startup says “one fee for new, less for returning,” nobody asks what they’re paying for. When my colleague says “one flat fee per unit and we handle everything,” the client doesn’t need a spreadsheet. The price IS the pitch.

Jeff Bezos and Jim Sinegal had it right. Two types of companies: those that work hard to charge more and those that work hard to charge less. But there’s a piece nobody talks about. The companies that win are the ones whose pricing tells you instantly which type they are. Confusion about price is confusion about identity.

The Test

Before you quote a price, run it through one filter: could your mom follow this without asking a clarifying question?

My mom is soon to be 75. I love her, but she’s not the most technology-forward person. She gets overwhelmed and confused by things I take for granted. That’s not a weakness in the test. That IS the test. She has no context, no industry jargon, no patience for cleverness, and no obligation to figure out what you meant. She’s the purest version of your customer’s first impression.

If the answer is no, the problem isn’t that you need a better slide deck. It’s that you haven’t finished the harder work of deciding what you’re actually selling.

Beyond Pricing

The mom test isn’t just a pricing filter. It’s the same standard I use when building for grafeauction.com. Tools, procedures, UX/UI, workflows, all of it. If my mom can’t figure out how to register, place a bid, or pick up her item without calling someone, the design failed. Not her.

This is the same instinct, just applied to a different surface. Pricing complexity signals identity confusion. Interface complexity signals that you built for yourself instead of your user. In both cases, the fix isn’t a tutorial or an explainer. It’s removing the thing that made you need one.

What’s Open

  • Where does Grafe fail this test? Our buyer’s premium is simple (one number, done). But our seller-side fee structure has commission tiers, marketing cost recovery, reimbursable expenses, and admin fees that vary by deal type. Would my mom follow that?
  • Is there a version of this that applies to non-monetary pricing? An incentive program I reviewed for an industry association had the same problem: too many conditions, too many edge cases. The incentive amount is simple. The guardrails around it aren’t.
  • A platform partnership I structured recently landed cleanly because it was designed as a one-page handshake. Zero commission, a flat admin fee, and a standard buyer’s premium. Three numbers. That’s the standard.