What have you learned about pricing?

Hey everyone - I'm launching my first product soon & would love to tap into this community's experience on price-setting for B2C software (ours helps job seekers).

The long story short is we’ve been leaning towards entering a fairly established market at significantly lower pricing (like ~4-5x) than competitors. The thesis is this will help us A) attract users in general, and B) drive better unit economics by focusing more on capturing paid users and not focusing (much?) on total user acquisition (paid + free).

Here are my primary questions:

1. Is there a “too low” when it comes to pricing (i.e. as a percentage market rates)? While we offer a feature-rich product, I’m starting to have doubts that the pricing might cheapen product perception before users even give it a chance.

2. How have you decided how much to give away for free if you do run free accounts? Ideally I think we’d lean into a trial-only model, but competitors all have free accounts, so I feel somewhat pressured into going this route as well).

3. How important were/are free user accounts to your software? What would I be missing out on by not chasing/having as many free users? Obviously more users = more awareness, but does that mean better awareness? Does that matter when you're the "new guy"?

I can add some context specific to our app in the comments in case it’s helpful for anyone generous enough to provide feedback.

Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts, advice, and any good vibes you can send our way!

Dan

p.s. Not sure if I'm permitted to share our launch page in this forum. I'll update if that's permissible.