10 ms·

A Guide to Pricing Plans

282 points by jkuria 7y ago

turkeywelder 7y ago
As a consumer I'm really not a fan of these techniques. I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. It seems to be working out. I think people appreciate the straightforward approach when everything these days seems to have a pricing table.
- sampsonitify 7y ago
  There are no rules to life - you get to decide what you do with your own life. Assuming you make a comfortable living out of what you do, the Craigslist approach - they make a LOT of money but leave 90%+ of what is possible on the table - is a perfectly valid plan. If you want to make more - and the reasons for that can vary from pure greed to absolute need - experimenting with pricing can have the best effect, as every extra dollar MRR compounds over time, and it is often easier to get 10% out of customers than 10% more customers. The patio11 "charge more" advice is an easy place to start, and if you grandfather in all old accounts, there is minimal risk in doing so. But it is your business, so do what you think is best.
- seanwilson 7y ago
  > I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. I offer an annual discount for a product of mine, primarily because for a one year plan it only costs me a single transaction cost from my payment processor instead of x12 transaction costs.
  - turkeywelder 7y ago
    Nothing at all wrong with it. It's just something we haven't done yet. Priorities, features and bugs all battle for our limited resources.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  It is proven that a very large portion of the population gets a thrill or some type of desirable chemical reaction in their brain when they purchase something for a “reduced” price. People like to feel that they’re special and got something that maybe someone else didn’t, or that “they” beat the system. Most obvious recent example is to search online for JC Penney’s pricing strategy fail, where a prominent Apple executive had the same exact thought you did, and completely alienated the JC Penney shoppers who actually like seeing a price tag say $100 and then get surprised with various discounts at the cash register and see it be $20.
csa 7y ago
This article does a very good job of explaining (with examples) some of the fundamentals of pricing plans. It describes the basics of the “blocking and tackling” if pricing that so many businesses get wrong. If you own a business, especially in the current environment, I would strongly suggest exploring the ideas in this article.
erikrothoff 7y ago
Honestly, this just feels like marketing bull. What conversion effects are realistic to expect after implementing any of these? My experience after trying a couple is zero change in conversion and zero change in any customer satisfaction metric. It might work if you have product market fit and need to optimise the last 3% in conversions.
- csa 7y ago
  1. Yes, you do need product market fit. While there can be some benefit in overall conversion rate, the larger improvement will usually be in people being willing to pay a higher price and/or selecting a more expensive plan. These up sells are basically free money. 2. In most cases, a 3% improvement from a pricing page that previously did not implement any of these ideas would be a very low rate of improvement. 3. If you think that this is marketing bull, then I am guessing you simply haven’t tried to run any experiments like this or read about folks who diligently did. All of these ideas are rock solid.
HatchedLake721 7y ago
That's a very great article. I'm actually launching https://automations.io https://automations.io next week, and I can tell you from my experience that setting a price for your product is tough.
davidajackson 7y ago
> Yes, Product C is slightly cheaper than the most expensive option, but it offers less storage than any of the options. Why would a business want wrong looking pricing on their pricing page, "decoy"s aside? Seems that would deter people more. Makes the business seem like it doesn't have its stuff together. Would you trust a company that seems like it can't do simple math? I think the author may be getting at something here--perhaps adding a third, unrelated or irrelevant option drives more conversions, but nonsensical pricing doesn't seem like the way to do that.
- csa 7y ago
  Yeah. Their first example of the decoy is not the best, imho. The Economist example is much better. IIRC, around the time the Economist did this change, their annual print price increased. I imagine that this change made the transition much smoother.
- perennate 7y ago
  Agreed. I have this on a pricing page out of laziness after adding a new option (it's still there, actually), where one option is strictly better than another, and all it leads to is e-mails asking what's special about the old option that makes it more expensive.
- Guest0918231 7y ago
  It would make more sense to have prices $40, $50, $60, where the $50 plan is always on sale for $30. Then, you effectively have a $30 and $60 plan, and the $40 is a decoy to make $30 seem like great value. I designed a quick example below. That being said, I have no experience with pricing strategies, and I feel like this example is missing out on users and businesses that would be willing to spend $100. https://i.imgur.com/vzaoy8q.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vzaoy8q.jpg
  - listenallyall 7y ago
    $29 would likely work a whole lot better than $30
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
I like the Golden Ratio approach (b+a : b as b:a). So you get a simple 5-3-2-1 approach 49 - 29 - 19 for your pricing plans. Or I guess 125 - 74 - 49 It's just easier to remember a fibonacci sequence than worry about marketing research. What surprises me however is the reverse ordering '''Reordering the pricing table in descending order from fastest/most expensive to lowest/cheapest resulted in a 14.9% increase in overall orders.''' I am not sure this carries from pricing - I recently bought a new ISP connection at home (lockdown, plus fibre to house suddenly became available). I went for the most expensive- partly because the feature set was easily rankable. I could get 300, 600 or 1Gb - so going for the top level seemed easy (plus lockdown panic). But with features that don't rank (a book, a book with video course, a book with two hour consult with author), suddenly I am not comparing the same feature (download speed) but more of it, I am having to ask do I want this extra feature at all - i am in effect not making a pricing decision but making a feature choice decision, proxied by price. So I am not sure the research carries over. And that leads me back to the easy version of use the fib.
gk1 7y ago
This is all about tricking people, and nothing about designing pricing to match the value provided. Pricing, especially for software products, is one of the biggest levers for increasing revenue through new and even current customers. It’s very important to get it right, and to experiment occasionally. (I know because I’ve done it for companies.) It involves a lot more than growth-hacking the pricing page.
- thomk 7y ago
  Can you expand a bit? I'm genuinely curious about your experience helping customers price products.
  - gk1 7y ago
    Two examples of many, to illustrate there's more to it than playing Malcom Gladwell with the price points: == 1. A software company that most people here would recognize (and many use) asked me to find out why corporate/enterprise users weren't upgrading from the free and low-cost plans to the upper tiers. After extensive research and customer interviews, I identified five main benefits their enterprise users were getting from the platform. The twist: Four of those five benefits were available on the free plan. And the "premium" features on the top plans were of no use to them. No wonder they weren't upgrading. Soon after, the company overhauled their pricing plans to capture more value ($$) from the benefits they provide. This was a major breakthrough for them and led to fantastic outcomes. === 2. Another software startup, smaller than the one above but still recognizable by a good fraction of HNers, was losing potential customers because their pricing tiers were based on # of servers. Because 1) EC2 and Docker were becoming a thing at the time, so pinning the price to "number of servers" resulted in some absurdly high quotes for not-so-large teams, and 2) the legacy/incumbent providers pinned their pricing to data volumes, so the people who wanted to switch found it hard to compare pricing and see that this company's plans were a better value. We changed the pricing to be based on data volume and designed the tiers to be a bit lower than the big incumbents and to not encourage current customers to downgrade. === And sure, while this was all going on there were designers and product marketers busying themselves with optimizing the pricing pages for conversions. However, a good outcome for them would be a 5–10% increase in signups, whereas the outcomes from the two examples above were measured in seven-figure increases in ARR and VC rounds.
nsarafa 7y ago
Curious to read this, but the images won't load
- moonlighter 7y ago
  They started loading for me after reloading the page without Content Blockers.
- jkuria 7y ago
  Something we are looking into.
wackget 7y ago
That website looks (and reads) like one of those single-page secret ebook sales web pages from the 90s.
- jkuria 7y ago
  We are working on the look and feel but there is lots of great content. What do you think of these mockups: https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/EeSqcKq53LJMt5dsYTeOldABKOG49X0WP4Smgfws8sqDyA?e=PpQCCi https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/... https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/EROp2SosfyVJjNXCXJlxL80BGZjOVKJ1esadLMGMw3PUeQ?e=PnVhHT https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/...
  - aurbano 7y ago
    I'll try to give some subjective constructive criticisim. Honestly, it feels "clickbaity". I guess it's due to the topics typically being found in content aggregating websites, or the question format. Take for example the top post right now on HN: "It's Time to Build" by Marc Andreessen - it would've been a completely different vibe if he called it "What are the Top Countries in the World Not Doing Right?" or something like that.
- csa 7y ago
  It may be. My personal take on it is that there are many millions of dollars left on the table because people don’t do basic things like the ideas in the article. These ideas have been around since the 1980s... they are not new. That said, people still don’t implement them or implement them well.
lmeyerov 7y ago
This is pretty bad advice: the more imp thing is figuring out pricing plans that increases consumption and scale. These are games you play after you figure that out. 10% boost is cool, expontential and magnitudes growth is your real business. Ex: can you get a tier for light users that converts when they're ready, goes up as they get addicted and happier, and then again as they go pro? Are the numbers aligned with their constraints/need/journey? Playing with color order matters way less and wastes your time from figuring this kind of stuff out. In contrast, for this hack stuff, the a/b testing people have realized for most co's, a lot of work to maintain for only limited benefits, so only do when you make enough money to layer on the maintenance $ for the limited lift.
joosters 7y ago
...Yet, this formula has never before been stated. That is, until now. ...page goes on to detail things that have been widely published and discussed all over the place.
- jkuria 7y ago
  The independent findings have been published but no one had put them into a cohesive whole "formula". All the technologies Tesla uses existed but no one had created a Tesla :)
  - csa 7y ago
    All of these ideas were discussed in a pricing seminar I had in the early 90s. For anyone who has studied pricing the least bit, these ideas, even put all into one page, are not particularly novel. The hard part, imho, is to get people to actually believe these ideas work. As replies on this thread show, there are doubters even though these ideas are just pricing fundamentals.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      Yeah I was surprised by how this article tried to oversell itself as if it was revealing some fundamental secret. This stuff is marketing and pricing 101. Reading that the author thinks presenting it in this way is somehow novel is a red flag for me that they aren't experts or qualified to be presenting this material, since experts and practitioners should be more than familiar enough with these tactics to know that this is like the most basic set of pricing tactics anyone would learn. What would be more powerful is a "formula" for figuring out the exact willingness to pay for a product to know what number to anchor/distract around as your target number. Figuring out willingness to pay is one of the actually hardest problems out there that a never before seen formula would be interesting for. But like, the anchoring effect? That's not even marketing 101, that's covered in AP psychology
na85 7y ago
FTA: >And, unless you’re an old Grandpa, you probably don’t care about reading a paper copy. Maybe I just have a strange peer group but I and most of my friends prefer hard copies. I pay for a paper subscription to The Economist, for example. In my experience it's the boomers that are buying phone-based magazine or newspaper subscriptions. I can't think of a worse reading experience.
Xunxi 7y ago
This nugget from 2012 https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick...
noncoml 7y ago
Can someone send this to dropbox please? Their pricing plans make absolutely no sense. Maybe they can get some ideas
brentis 7y ago
I've mixed my plans over time and features recently. LMK what you think. Basic: 10.99/mo PRO: 24.99/mo PRO Semi-annual:$99/6 mo.
- csa 7y ago
  Without knowing what your product is or what your market is, my default comment is that you could probably change it to 38, 98, and 198 and increase total revenue while ridding yourself of a small number of customers that eat up a lot of customer service time. The 6-month pricing seems unnecessarily manipulative.
dahdum 7y ago
On tablet the share widget on the left covers the content and follows you down the page, making it near unreadable.
samdung 7y ago
Perhaps relevant: What makes a good subscription billing system? https://dev.to/shoplytics/what-makes-a-good-subscription-billing-system-3id6 https://dev.to/shoplytics/what-makes-a-good-subscription-bil...
elgfare 7y ago
Having a price crossed out to give the impression of a sale is just straight up lying. It's illegal here in Norway at least. The product must have been sold a certain number of times for the crossed out price in order for it to be legally presented as a "before" price. https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/lov-og-rett/veiledninger-og-retningslinjer/forbrukertilsynets-veiledning-prismarkedsforing#chapter-3-2 https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/lov-og-rett/veiledninger-og...
- bmn__ 7y ago
  All the mind manipulation traps presented in the article are deceptive and fraudulent. They all should be made illegal if they are not already.
  - sarfrazarshad 7y ago
    I wont agree to it. I would call them hacks, are hacks fraudulent?
    - bmn__ 7y ago
      This post is precisely why sites like shithnsays and ngate exist. I pity the sociopathic state of your mind.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    The trouble is that the decoy option in particular can be legitimate—it can be a real plan that you do actually sell, and that does offer more than the usual one; it’s just not needed for most people. Tell people they must list the plans from cheapest to most expensive, left to right or top to bottom? Well and good; compliance is easy. Disallow such indication of “specials”? Yeah, that can be done, though marketers will grumble a lot at you. But the decoy? There’s no sane way of banning that in general, though you could ban some forms of it. The paradox of choice? Yeah, you could ban this (and doing so would be consistent with opt-in doctrine which is widely used in things like spam legislation), but marketers would definitely growl at you and test the boundaries. Downthread someone’s mentioned “$9.99” as a form of anchoring. I wish that was banned, e.g. you can’t price within 1% below some notion of “round number”, so that $14,999 would have to go up to $15,000 or down to $14,850.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AnonC 7y ago
The key points and references were good, but the examples failed to make an impact for me. Some of the examples look meaningless, like the one for decoy pricing.
sarfrazarshad 7y ago
Great read. Pricing products was always not clear to me. I think the article makes a lot of sense for Saas products. But, the only thing I am not so clear about is how can there be such a huge difference between 3 price options and 4 options.

282 points by jkuria 7y ago

As a consumer I'm really not a fan of these techniques. I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. It seems to be working out. I think people appreciate the straightforward approach when everything these days seems to have a pricing table.

sampsonitify 7y ago
There are no rules to life - you get to decide what you do with your own life. Assuming you make a comfortable living out of what you do, the Craigslist approach - they make a LOT of money but leave 90%+ of what is possible on the table - is a perfectly valid plan. If you want to make more - and the reasons for that can vary from pure greed to absolute need - experimenting with pricing can have the best effect, as every extra dollar MRR compounds over time, and it is often easier to get 10% out of customers than 10% more customers. The patio11 "charge more" advice is an easy place to start, and if you grandfather in all old accounts, there is minimal risk in doing so. But it is your business, so do what you think is best.
seanwilson 7y ago
> I'm biased but our SaaS just has one price, no annual discount, no messing. I offer an annual discount for a product of mine, primarily because for a one year plan it only costs me a single transaction cost from my payment processor instead of x12 transaction costs.
- turkeywelder 7y ago
  Nothing at all wrong with it. It's just something we haven't done yet. Priorities, features and bugs all battle for our limited resources.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
It is proven that a very large portion of the population gets a thrill or some type of desirable chemical reaction in their brain when they purchase something for a “reduced” price. People like to feel that they’re special and got something that maybe someone else didn’t, or that “they” beat the system. Most obvious recent example is to search online for JC Penney’s pricing strategy fail, where a prominent Apple executive had the same exact thought you did, and completely alienated the JC Penney shoppers who actually like seeing a price tag say $100 and then get surprised with various discounts at the cash register and see it be $20.

csa 7y ago

This article does a very good job of explaining (with examples) some of the fundamentals of pricing plans. It describes the basics of the “blocking and tackling” if pricing that so many businesses get wrong. If you own a business, especially in the current environment, I would strongly suggest exploring the ideas in this article.

erikrothoff 7y ago

Honestly, this just feels like marketing bull. What conversion effects are realistic to expect after implementing any of these? My experience after trying a couple is zero change in conversion and zero change in any customer satisfaction metric. It might work if you have product market fit and need to optimise the last 3% in conversions.

csa 7y ago
1. Yes, you do need product market fit. While there can be some benefit in overall conversion rate, the larger improvement will usually be in people being willing to pay a higher price and/or selecting a more expensive plan. These up sells are basically free money. 2. In most cases, a 3% improvement from a pricing page that previously did not implement any of these ideas would be a very low rate of improvement. 3. If you think that this is marketing bull, then I am guessing you simply haven’t tried to run any experiments like this or read about folks who diligently did. All of these ideas are rock solid.

HatchedLake721 7y ago

That's a very great article. I'm actually launching https://automations.io https://automations.io next week, and I can tell you from my experience that setting a price for your product is tough.

davidajackson 7y ago

> Yes, Product C is slightly cheaper than the most expensive option, but it offers less storage than any of the options. Why would a business want wrong looking pricing on their pricing page, "decoy"s aside? Seems that would deter people more. Makes the business seem like it doesn't have its stuff together. Would you trust a company that seems like it can't do simple math? I think the author may be getting at something here--perhaps adding a third, unrelated or irrelevant option drives more conversions, but nonsensical pricing doesn't seem like the way to do that.

csa 7y ago
Yeah. Their first example of the decoy is not the best, imho. The Economist example is much better. IIRC, around the time the Economist did this change, their annual print price increased. I imagine that this change made the transition much smoother.
perennate 7y ago
Agreed. I have this on a pricing page out of laziness after adding a new option (it's still there, actually), where one option is strictly better than another, and all it leads to is e-mails asking what's special about the old option that makes it more expensive.
Guest0918231 7y ago
It would make more sense to have prices $40, $50, $60, where the $50 plan is always on sale for $30. Then, you effectively have a $30 and $60 plan, and the $40 is a decoy to make $30 seem like great value. I designed a quick example below. That being said, I have no experience with pricing strategies, and I feel like this example is missing out on users and businesses that would be willing to spend $100. https://i.imgur.com/vzaoy8q.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vzaoy8q.jpg
- listenallyall 7y ago
  $29 would likely work a whole lot better than $30

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

I like the Golden Ratio approach (b+a : b as b:a). So you get a simple 5-3-2-1 approach 49 - 29 - 19 for your pricing plans. Or I guess 125 - 74 - 49 It's just easier to remember a fibonacci sequence than worry about marketing research. What surprises me however is the reverse ordering '''Reordering the pricing table in descending order from fastest/most expensive to lowest/cheapest resulted in a 14.9% increase in overall orders.''' I am not sure this carries from pricing - I recently bought a new ISP connection at home (lockdown, plus fibre to house suddenly became available). I went for the most expensive- partly because the feature set was easily rankable. I could get 300, 600 or 1Gb - so going for the top level seemed easy (plus lockdown panic). But with features that don't rank (a book, a book with video course, a book with two hour consult with author), suddenly I am not comparing the same feature (download speed) but more of it, I am having to ask do I want this extra feature at all - i am in effect not making a pricing decision but making a feature choice decision, proxied by price. So I am not sure the research carries over. And that leads me back to the easy version of use the fib.

gk1 7y ago

This is all about tricking people, and nothing about designing pricing to match the value provided. Pricing, especially for software products, is one of the biggest levers for increasing revenue through new and even current customers. It’s very important to get it right, and to experiment occasionally. (I know because I’ve done it for companies.) It involves a lot more than growth-hacking the pricing page.

thomk 7y ago
Can you expand a bit? I'm genuinely curious about your experience helping customers price products.
- gk1 7y ago
  Two examples of many, to illustrate there's more to it than playing Malcom Gladwell with the price points: == 1. A software company that most people here would recognize (and many use) asked me to find out why corporate/enterprise users weren't upgrading from the free and low-cost plans to the upper tiers. After extensive research and customer interviews, I identified five main benefits their enterprise users were getting from the platform. The twist: Four of those five benefits were available on the free plan. And the "premium" features on the top plans were of no use to them. No wonder they weren't upgrading. Soon after, the company overhauled their pricing plans to capture more value ($$) from the benefits they provide. This was a major breakthrough for them and led to fantastic outcomes. === 2. Another software startup, smaller than the one above but still recognizable by a good fraction of HNers, was losing potential customers because their pricing tiers were based on # of servers. Because 1) EC2 and Docker were becoming a thing at the time, so pinning the price to "number of servers" resulted in some absurdly high quotes for not-so-large teams, and 2) the legacy/incumbent providers pinned their pricing to data volumes, so the people who wanted to switch found it hard to compare pricing and see that this company's plans were a better value. We changed the pricing to be based on data volume and designed the tiers to be a bit lower than the big incumbents and to not encourage current customers to downgrade. === And sure, while this was all going on there were designers and product marketers busying themselves with optimizing the pricing pages for conversions. However, a good outcome for them would be a 5–10% increase in signups, whereas the outcomes from the two examples above were measured in seven-figure increases in ARR and VC rounds.

nsarafa 7y ago

Curious to read this, but the images won't load

moonlighter 7y ago
They started loading for me after reloading the page without Content Blockers.
jkuria 7y ago
Something we are looking into.

wackget 7y ago

That website looks (and reads) like one of those single-page secret ebook sales web pages from the 90s.

jkuria 7y ago
We are working on the look and feel but there is lots of great content. What do you think of these mockups: https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/EeSqcKq53LJMt5dsYTeOldABKOG49X0WP4Smgfws8sqDyA?e=PpQCCi https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/... https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/EROp2SosfyVJjNXCXJlxL80BGZjOVKJ1esadLMGMw3PUeQ?e=PnVhHT https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/...
- aurbano 7y ago
  I'll try to give some subjective constructive criticisim. Honestly, it feels "clickbaity". I guess it's due to the topics typically being found in content aggregating websites, or the question format. Take for example the top post right now on HN: "It's Time to Build" by Marc Andreessen - it would've been a completely different vibe if he called it "What are the Top Countries in the World Not Doing Right?" or something like that.
csa 7y ago
It may be. My personal take on it is that there are many millions of dollars left on the table because people don’t do basic things like the ideas in the article. These ideas have been around since the 1980s... they are not new. That said, people still don’t implement them or implement them well.

lmeyerov 7y ago

This is pretty bad advice: the more imp thing is figuring out pricing plans that increases consumption and scale. These are games you play after you figure that out. 10% boost is cool, expontential and magnitudes growth is your real business. Ex: can you get a tier for light users that converts when they're ready, goes up as they get addicted and happier, and then again as they go pro? Are the numbers aligned with their constraints/need/journey? Playing with color order matters way less and wastes your time from figuring this kind of stuff out. In contrast, for this hack stuff, the a/b testing people have realized for most co's, a lot of work to maintain for only limited benefits, so only do when you make enough money to layer on the maintenance $ for the limited lift.

joosters 7y ago

...Yet, this formula has never before been stated. That is, until now. ...page goes on to detail things that have been widely published and discussed all over the place.

jkuria 7y ago
The independent findings have been published but no one had put them into a cohesive whole "formula". All the technologies Tesla uses existed but no one had created a Tesla :)
- csa 7y ago
  All of these ideas were discussed in a pricing seminar I had in the early 90s. For anyone who has studied pricing the least bit, these ideas, even put all into one page, are not particularly novel. The hard part, imho, is to get people to actually believe these ideas work. As replies on this thread show, there are doubters even though these ideas are just pricing fundamentals.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Yeah I was surprised by how this article tried to oversell itself as if it was revealing some fundamental secret. This stuff is marketing and pricing 101. Reading that the author thinks presenting it in this way is somehow novel is a red flag for me that they aren't experts or qualified to be presenting this material, since experts and practitioners should be more than familiar enough with these tactics to know that this is like the most basic set of pricing tactics anyone would learn. What would be more powerful is a "formula" for figuring out the exact willingness to pay for a product to know what number to anchor/distract around as your target number. Figuring out willingness to pay is one of the actually hardest problems out there that a never before seen formula would be interesting for. But like, the anchoring effect? That's not even marketing 101, that's covered in AP psychology

na85 7y ago

FTA: >And, unless you’re an old Grandpa, you probably don’t care about reading a paper copy. Maybe I just have a strange peer group but I and most of my friends prefer hard copies. I pay for a paper subscription to The Economist, for example. In my experience it's the boomers that are buying phone-based magazine or newspaper subscriptions. I can't think of a worse reading experience.

Xunxi 7y ago

This nugget from 2012 https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick...

noncoml 7y ago

Can someone send this to dropbox please? Their pricing plans make absolutely no sense. Maybe they can get some ideas

brentis 7y ago

I've mixed my plans over time and features recently. LMK what you think. Basic: 10.99/mo PRO: 24.99/mo PRO Semi-annual:$99/6 mo.

csa 7y ago
Without knowing what your product is or what your market is, my default comment is that you could probably change it to 38, 98, and 198 and increase total revenue while ridding yourself of a small number of customers that eat up a lot of customer service time. The 6-month pricing seems unnecessarily manipulative.

dahdum 7y ago

On tablet the share widget on the left covers the content and follows you down the page, making it near unreadable.

samdung 7y ago

Perhaps relevant: What makes a good subscription billing system? https://dev.to/shoplytics/what-makes-a-good-subscription-billing-system-3id6 https://dev.to/shoplytics/what-makes-a-good-subscription-bil...

elgfare 7y ago

Having a price crossed out to give the impression of a sale is just straight up lying. It's illegal here in Norway at least. The product must have been sold a certain number of times for the crossed out price in order for it to be legally presented as a "before" price. https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/lov-og-rett/veiledninger-og-retningslinjer/forbrukertilsynets-veiledning-prismarkedsforing#chapter-3-2 https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/lov-og-rett/veiledninger-og...

bmn__ 7y ago
All the mind manipulation traps presented in the article are deceptive and fraudulent. They all should be made illegal if they are not already.
- sarfrazarshad 7y ago
  I wont agree to it. I would call them hacks, are hacks fraudulent?
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    This post is precisely why sites like shithnsays and ngate exist. I pity the sociopathic state of your mind.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  The trouble is that the decoy option in particular can be legitimate—it can be a real plan that you do actually sell, and that does offer more than the usual one; it’s just not needed for most people. Tell people they must list the plans from cheapest to most expensive, left to right or top to bottom? Well and good; compliance is easy. Disallow such indication of “specials”? Yeah, that can be done, though marketers will grumble a lot at you. But the decoy? There’s no sane way of banning that in general, though you could ban some forms of it. The paradox of choice? Yeah, you could ban this (and doing so would be consistent with opt-in doctrine which is widely used in things like spam legislation), but marketers would definitely growl at you and test the boundaries. Downthread someone’s mentioned “$9.99” as a form of anchoring. I wish that was banned, e.g. you can’t price within 1% below some notion of “round number”, so that $14,999 would have to go up to $15,000 or down to $14,850.

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AnonC 7y ago

The key points and references were good, but the examples failed to make an impact for me. Some of the examples look meaningless, like the one for decoy pricing.

sarfrazarshad 7y ago

Great read. Pricing products was always not clear to me. I think the article makes a lot of sense for Saas products. But, the only thing I am not so clear about is how can there be such a huge difference between 3 price options and 4 options.