Claudio Lassala's Blog

Price, cost, and value: people use these words interchangeably, but they mean different things, and that difference matters more than most businesses realize.

In Brazil, you’ll hear someone ask Quanto custa? (How much does it cost me?) or Qual é o preço? (What’s your price?). Two different questions from two different vantage points: the buyer’s burden versus the seller’s ask. And then there’s Qual é o valor? — which translates literally as “What’s the value?” but in everyday speech means “how much do I have to pay?” Value, in that context, gets flattened into price.

But value is much harder to calculate than price.

Value Is Subjective, and Context Decides It

Consider a car worth $30,000 on the market. Now imagine that car once belonged to a celebrity and has their autograph on the dashboard. The market price says $30,000. The perceived value might be $40,000 — or more — depending on who’s buying. The number doesn’t change; the meaning behind it does.

The same principle shows up with a museum painting. To the curator who knows its history, it’s priceless. To someone walking by without context, it might look like just a framed canvas. Neither person is wrong. They’re just perceiving value through different lenses.

Value is tied to identity, aspiration, and what the buyer cares about at that moment.

The Five Types of Value (and Why They Matter for Stories)

Years ago, I started noticing that user stories in software projects often collapse this complexity. A “user story” is supposed to represent value, but value to whom?

Here is the shortened version using the core definitions provided earlier:

• Business value: What the organization gains, measured in revenue, cost reduction, or strategic growth.

• Customer value: What the person paying for the product gains, typically focused on ROI and solved business problems.

• User value: What the person operating the software gains day-to-day, like ease of use, saved time, and smoother workflows.

• Societal value: The broader impact on communities and the environment, focusing on sustainability, ethics, and accessibility.

• Alignment value: The harmony and connective tissue that bridges these goals together, keeping the product sustainable.

I later came across these five types of value in the book Outcomes Over Output. The categories clicked immediately, because they matched what I’d been wrestling with for years. When a story says it delivers “value,” it’s worth asking: to whom, through what lens, and why does it matter to them?

Digging into that question leads you from the surface feature all the way back to identity. Something is valuable because it solves a problem. The problem matters because it connects to a need. The need exists because of an aspiration. The aspiration comes from what a person values about themselves and their life. Miss that chain of reasoning, and you might build something technically correct that no one actually cares about.

Same Product, Different Value

Choosing a restaurant illustrates this well.

If I need to eat quickly, I want nourishment. Speed matters more than ambiance. I’ll pick whatever gets food on the table fast, and I’ll pay accordingly.

If I’m celebrating an anniversary, the same plate of food suddenly carries the weight of that occasion. I want the setting, the service, the experience. I’m willing to pay more, not because the food changed, but because what I’m actually buying has shifted. The restaurant’s value is now bound up with something I hold deeply.

The same logic applied when I was regularly riding motorcycles at racetracks. Other riders would go to a suspension service vendor, state their specs, get the job done, and move on. Transactional. Efficient.

I gravitated toward a different vendor. He’d walk me through every adjustment, explain the reasoning, tell me why he was recommending one component over another, even knowing I had no background in any of it. He cared about his craft and about his customers. I paid more. Gladly. Because I could tell the difference, and that difference was worth something to me.

The AI Cost-Cutting Trap

There’s a pattern I’m watching businesses fall into: identify where humans are doing repetitive work, replace them with AI, reduce costs, protect margin. On a spreadsheet, it looks clean. In practice, it can quietly destroy revenue.

If customers perceive less value in a product or service because the human element is gone, they may stop buying. They may pay less. They may leave. The cost went down, but so did the revenue. Net result: not better.

I had this experience firsthand with Cursor. I needed help with something, reached out to support, and the first several exchanges came from an AI assistant. I asked to escalate to a human. When I finally got one, that person didn’t try to reason with me or work through the situation. They just applied policy.

The AI-first approach had already eroded my patience. The human interaction finished the job. I cancelled. They cut costs on that interaction; they also lost my business.

What Customer Support Could Actually Be

Customer support often gets reduced to its most transactional form: figure out what the customer wants, look it up, close the ticket. But what if the software got good enough that customers could find most of those answers themselves? That’s increasingly realistic.

That doesn’t mean the support team disappears. It means their role shifts. Instead of telling people which buttons to click, they can focus on relationships. On understanding why a customer is struggling, what’s actually going on in their situation, what the business might be missing.

That’s information the business can’t get from a ticket queue. It comes from someone taking the time to listen.

There’s a reskilling opportunity hidden inside the AI wave that most organizations aren’t seeing. People who understand customers deeply, because they’ve been in the trenches with them, can move into sales, marketing, product. That knowledge has real business value, if anyone bothers to leverage it.

Lead with Value, Not Price

When you lead a conversation with cost, you put people on the defensive immediately. Their guard goes up. When you lead with value, when you help someone understand what they’d actually gain, the cost conversation that follows is easier. They’re engaged. They’re interested. Even if the number surprises them, they have something real to negotiate around.

This applies whether you’re selling software, a service, or a consulting engagement. Get the person to feel the value first. Then discuss price.

What I’m learning is that the most durable competitive advantage isn’t being the cheapest option. It’s being the one people trust to actually care about what they’re getting, and about them.