--- title: SaaS Fundamentals 03 - Price testing with Lookup Keys slug: saas-fundamentals-03-price-testing-with-lookup-keys published_at: 2022-09-02 15:00:00 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:05 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how to use lookup keys and transfer lookup key to test different prices for your SaaS business without needing to deploy any new code. Lookup keys are a lesser known high leverage feature of the Stripe API. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Lookup Keys https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/manage-prices#lookup-keys Price lookup_key API reference https://stripe.com/docs/api/prices/update#update_price-lookup_key Price transfer_lookup_key API reference https://stripe.com/docs/api/prices/update#update_price-transfer_lookup_key ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, subscriptions, SaaS, saas business model, startups 101, software as a service, SaaS fundamentals, Price testing with lookup keys, @cjav_dev, Stripe prices, Stripe Products, lookup_key, lookup_keys, transfer_lookup_key] views: 1135 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/saas-fundamentals-03-price-testing-with-lookup-keys youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-shbqtjrRM0 youtube_id: -shbqtjrRM0 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/-shbqtjrRM0 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-shbqtjrRM0/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # SaaS Fundamentals 03 - Price testing with Lookup Keys *Published: September 02, 2022* *Views: 1135* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-shbqtjrRM0) [![SaaS Fundamentals 03 - Price testing with Lookup Keys](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-shbqtjrRM0/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-shbqtjrRM0) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how to use lookup keys and transfer lookup key to test different prices for your SaaS business without needing to deploy any new code. Lookup keys are a lesser known high leverage feature of the Stripe API. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Lookup Keys https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/manage-prices#lookup-keys Price lookup_key API reference https://stripe.com/docs/api/prices/update#update_price-lookup_key Price transfer_lookup_key API reference https://stripe.com/docs/api/prices/update#update_price-transfer_lookup_key ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 ## Transcript in the last episode we looked at modeling our products and prices we set up three different products startup business and enterprise and each of those have both a monthly price and an annual price in this episode i want to talk about a more advanced feature of the api that is that is api only as of this recording and that is lookup keys so each price object has a property called a lookup key the lookup key comes in handy when we're trying to build a really dynamic pricing page that allows us to test out different prices now by default we might only have one monthly price for a given product that we want to display on our pricing page however if we want to test out our pricing so for instance if we wanted to change our price from 24 a month to 28 a month and see how that performed rather than needing to deploy new code that referenced those certain price objects what we could do is use a lookup key and have the same lookup key on the old price and transfer that to the new price so let's take a look at what i'm talking about so here we have a six prices we're using the stripe shell here to list out the prices so we're saying stripe prices list this gives us all of our different price objects so within here we have one price that is twenty four dollars and that is underneath the uh the start up here so if for instance what one thing that we could do is copy the id of the monthly price that is this this price here and say that we want to update this so stripe prices update pass in the id of that price and give it a look up key of startup this is going to set the lookup key on the price to start up now every single price in your stripe account has to have a either a nil lookup key or a unique lookup key so this lookup key is going to be unique across your stripe account what's cool is that what we can do now is say stripe prices list and we can ask for only the lookup only the prices that have the lookup keys of startup that will return just this single price that is the startup price now you can start to imagine maybe you already have the idea or an inkling about how you might build a pricing page where you say just give me the prices where the lookup keys are startup or business or enterprise and that would give you back just the prices that you need what's really cool is there is another argument to the api when you're when you're creating prices is to create a brand new price and transfer the lookup key from the old price to the new to a new price so let's say we wanted to say um let's say we wanted to test out some pricing for a new pricing level for this given product so we're going to create another monthly price we're going to try increasing the price and see how that performs in the market so we're going to say stripe prices create for the product that we already have the um the unit amount this time is going to be 28 and the currency is going to be the same recurring interval is going to be month tax behavior is exclusive still but now we can say look up key we want the lookup key for this new price to be stirred up and we can say transfer lookup key true what that will do is it will move the lookup key called startup from the old price to the new price now when we say stripe prices list for startup as our lookup key the price that we're getting back is at the 28 amount so we just created a brand new price and moved the lookup key from the old price to the new price that's really powerful because when we build our pricing page later we want to do it based on lookup keys again this is an api only feature so we need to use the api or the stripe cli or this stripe shell here in order to work with and modify those lookup keys on price objects this is something that we hope to add to the dashboard uh soon but for now this is api only so that is how you use lookup keys they're very powerful and i would say it's a bit of a more advanced feature not necessarily required for bus for modeling your business it can be very handy if you're going to build your own pricing page all right thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) 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