Watching competitors in markets you do not operate in
A competitor in another market is running your experiment for you, at their expense. Watching them is the cheapest product research that exists, and almost nobody does it.
The most underused source in competitive intelligence is a company in a market you do not operate in, doing the thing you are about to do, two years ahead of you.
They are running your experiment. They are paying for it. And the results are public.
Free negative results
This is the good part and almost nobody exploits it.
Somewhere, a company structurally similar to yours has already tried the thing you are considering. A usage-based pricing model. A freemium tier. A partner channel. An enterprise motion.
They tried it. It worked or it did not. And you can go and see which, without spending a year and a budget finding out yourself.
If their pricing page shows a tier that existed eighteen months ago and does not exist now, that tier failed. Somebody killed it. That is a negative result you did not have to pay for, and negative results are the expensive kind.
Most companies are extremely reluctant to learn from anyone outside their own market, which is a strange form of provincialism given that the lesson is free.
Local pricing tells you what a market bears
Do not just convert the currency and compare. That will mislead you.
What translates is the shape. The ratio between their cheapest and most expensive tier. The number of tiers. Whether the entry point is aimed at an individual or a team. Whether they moved it up or down last year.
A market where the same category of product sustains a much higher price ratio is a market with different expectations, and that tells you something about how a buyer in that market thinks. A market where everyone has raced to the bottom is a market you may not want to enter.
The language friction is smaller than it feels
People skip this whole practice because the competitor's site is in a language they do not read, and it feels like a project.
It is not. Machine translation is entirely adequate for signal detection, and signal detection is all you need.
You are not trying to appreciate the nuance of their copy. You are trying to notice that the pricing page changed, that they posted five sales roles, that a new tier appeared. You need enough translation to know that something happened and roughly what. You do not need it to be beautiful.
The barrier here is habit, not capability. Nobody looks, so nobody knows, so it stays valuable.
The caution
Do not assume it transfers.
A pricing model that works in one market can fail in another for reasons that have nothing to do with the model: different buying norms, different procurement culture, different tolerance for annual contracts.
So treat what you find as a hypothesis with evidence attached, not as a proven result. Which is still enormously more than you had before, and it cost you nothing but the willingness to look somewhere unfamiliar.