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A Guide to Pricing Plans (capitalandgrowth.org)
282 points by jkuria on April 18, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 75 comments



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...


All the mind manipulation traps presented in the article are deceptive and fraudulent. They all should be made illegal if they are not already.


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.


I wont agree to it. I would call them hacks, are hacks fraudulent?


This post is precisely why sites like shithnsays and ngate exist.

I pity the sociopathic state of your mind.


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.


Why would you design a price for "value provided"? That's highly subjective to the user. Users also generally only pay for what they expect to pay, not the value they're getting.

For instance, some utility might save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars over the course of its usage, which is tremendous value. Yet if the average user expects that it should cost no more than, say, twenty dollars, that's what they'll be ready to pay.

This is why anchoring is beneficial, it gives you the opportunity to tilt that expectation a little bit.

Is that "tricking the user"? Arguably, but since you can't know the value users will actually get out of your product, any claims in that regard will fall under "marketing BS" as well. Pick your bullshit wisely.


I'm not Greg Kogan, of course, but...

It is indeed highly subjective to the user. So, part of the job of marketing is, segment your market, decide which one is most lucrative, target them with pricing that optimizes the outcome for that segment, and then adjust the product packaging to give yourself the most flexibility to attempt to repeat the process with the next segment of customers.

You learn the value your users get from your offerings by talking to them.

From 10+ years of watching this conversation recur on HN and talking to people running businesses, it seems like probably one of the most common mistakes business owners here make is trying to target an overly broad group of customers, and setting a very low ceiling on their prices to make sure everyone in that group can afford the product. That never seems to work well. On the other hand: setting a price for your product that only works for customers who can put it to extremely lucrative use? That's a strategy I've seen succeed a bunch.

It all depends on your product and your company; you can win big with fixed (maybe low) prices and a huge, undifferentiated customer base, if the stars align. They seem not to most of the time.


I don't disagree with you at all. Segment your market. Focus on the most lucrative group first. When you have done all that, apply the usual tricks.

That all implies that there is such a lucrative group that has the expectation to pay a handsome sum for your product. It implies that there is no competition that has already driven the price into the ground.

If your product is truly novel and there is no competition, better set a higher price. You can always go lower and see how much more revenue you can get. Over time however, competition will show up and put the price closer to cost, or even below cost. Users will no longer expect to pay the older prices, so they won't - no matter how much value they get.


> some utility might save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars over the course of its usage

Yes, "might":

> you can't know the value users will actually get out of your product

So the problem you have is that you think (but don't know) that your product is much more valuable to your users than they think it is (since they're only willing to pay $20 for it).

You're not going to fix that problem by hacking how your pricing is presented on a web page. Which is why people view trying to fix it by hacking how your pricing is presented on a web page as "tricking the user".

> This is why anchoring is beneficial, it gives you the opportunity to tilt that expectation a little bit.

If your program is actually worth thousands of dollars to the user, but they're only willing to pay $20 given their current knowledge, you don't want to tilt their expectations by "a little bit". You want to tilt their expectations by a couple of orders of magnitude. Which, as noted above, is not doable by hacking how your pricing is presented on a web page.


> So the problem you have is that you think (but don't know) that your product is much more valuable to your users than they think it is (since they're only willing to pay $20 for it).

No, the problem is that whatever you think your product is worth is irrelevant. What matters is your costs, that puts the bottom on the price, unless you want to burn cash for growth. Your customers expectations are the ceiling.

Of course all your customers are not alike and maybe there's 10% that would pay so much more to outperform the other 90% in revenue. That's when upselling comes into play, or maybe you want to focus only on the 10% entirely.

> If your program is actually worth thousands of dollars to the user, but they're only willing to pay $20 given their current knowledge, you don't want to tilt their expectations by "a little bit". You want to tilt their expectations by a couple of orders of magnitude. Which, as noted above, is not doable by hacking how your pricing is presented on a web page.

It's not doable at all. Nobody who expects to pay $20 for something will shell out $200 for it, unless they have looked everywhere and figured that everyone else charges in the same ballpark, or that you are the only option and they really need your product.

Anchoring isn't magic, it's the same kind of trick that makes $9.99 appear substantially cheaper than $10.00. It'll give you a slight boost.


> What matters is your costs, that puts the bottom on the price, unless you want to burn cash for growth.

Ok, so in the situation you describe, what are your costs? If that's so important, why haven't you told us what it is?

> Your customers expectations are the ceiling.

Your customers' expectations are based on what they think the value of the product is to them, which is based on what they think the product can do for them. If your product is worth $1000 to a significant number of customers, it must be able to do valuable things for customers that products selling for $20 a unit just can't do. Tell your customers what those things are, and their expectations will change.

What is true is that the number of customers that can get $1000 of value from your product will be significantly less than the number that can get $20 of value from it. But it makes a big difference whether the first number is zero (or close enough to it to make no difference) or a significant fraction of the second number. Your hypothetical was that it's the latter.


In my view, if you're charging $20 for a utility that demonstrably saves companies hundreds of hours of labor, then you're leaving a whole lot of money on the table.


The $20 figure may be more appropriate to the average consumer, but the same principle applies to companies. However, then it gets way more complicated because more people are involved in the purchasing decision and the users aren't necessarily the ones deciding the purchase. Getting a small purchase through is exponentially easier.

Most companies aren't actually all that efficient, they are very good at creating busywork. Lots of human factors are at play. Changing workflows is a tough sell.

Also, what's a "demonstrable" saving? Sure, I can sing the praises of my product, of course I will. I can bring testimonials. The person at the other side will not take it at face value.

They have a budget, they have an expectation of how much to spend. They can't just add my promised savings to their budget. Nobody is getting fired for wasting money on the purpose it was already budgeted for.


Consumers are expert at detecting what has value for them. Putting the "correct" price on it means locating it on the can-pay / will-pay / will-pirate normal distribution of price vs profit chart you've seen .

If something saves me thousands of hours, I am not likely to both miss that fact and stay in business to be a customer for long.

Sellers have a harder problem figuring out what consumers value. The solutions to that are things like collecting useage data, eating your own dogfood or BYOC (be your own customer), outright feature requests, competitor's decisions ( which are market-proven value assignments) etc.

Also 0.xxx versions serve this purpose- it's partially a pre-market exploration of the value of features before a pricing / version segregation attempt is made .

There's just no way consumers doesn't know what they value when they use it or its not there.

There is a class of things which consumers dont' know they value because they've never had it to value in the first place (Pinterest, Instagram) but that's a different thing than assigning different values to different aggregates of established features.


This why GP is saying pricing is one of the biggest levers for increasing revenue. If you're charging $20 for the service and focusing on tricks like these, then you'll not make as much compared to realizing that utilities are willing to pay much more and focusing sales efforts on them.


Which is to say that they're both potentially sort of right, but that the blog post is talking about tactics and not really addressing strategy.


> This is all about tricking people, and nothing about designing pricing to match the value provided.

Hmmmm... maybe.

That said, I would say that they are more often just a way for a company to price their products in a way that more accurately reflects the value to the purchaser.

The easiest example of this is anchoring. The difference in a pricing page that offers 100-220 and a page that offers 100-220-500 is typically very large, and that’s true even if no one selects the 500 option! Having that high end third option effectively gives folks the permission to select a more expensive option that probably has more utility for them and/or their organization.


> Having that high end third option effectively gives folks the permission to select a more expensive option that probably has more utility for them and/or their organization

You're assuming that just, you know, telling your customers about what extra features they get in the more expensive 220 option isn't enough to persuade the ones for whom it would genuinely add value to choose it.

Which means either you aren't communicating your features effectively (and you should fix that instead of worrying about hacking your pricing page) or you think your customers aren't capable of judging what's in their own best interest given accurate information, so you have to manipulate them for their own good. The GP, by saying "this is all about tricking people", is simply expressing what to me is highly justified skepticism about the latter position.


I appreciate what you are saying here, and I used to think that way, too.

That said, the more I have learned about psychology and behavioral economics/finance, the more I have come to understand that humans are fundamentally irrational (at least on a surface level). The more I use that as my operating assumption when modeling customer behavior, the more accurate my models have seemed to be.

On the surface, that seems to be a depressing assumption to make about humanity. What I have come to understand/believe is that the surface level irrationality of most customers is actually fairly rational once the whole person is taken into account — especially their psychological make up.

Using the 100-220-500 example, some people will rarely or never take the highest priced option of something. They use this as a (useful, imho) quick and dirty heuristic to avoid being or being seen as a spendthrift. You seem to be assuming that everyone has the heuristic of “what's in their own best interest given accurate information”, and my data over the decades is that this stance is relatively rare (<10% of a diverse group of people). To be fair, it is a more common amongst the pure/hardcore hyper-logical engineering crowd that are probably much more common in places like HN, but that is a very small percentage of most markets.

Note that “not being a spendthrift” is just one common heuristic. Another is “not being or being seen as cheap”. Another is “not being seen as different or rocking the boat” (this is why “most popular” works as a label on an option). Another is “being seen as rich” (some folks will just go in and buy the most expensive option as the default) or “being seen as significant” (patio11 has an example of his Japanese manager not being willing to take a smaller SAAS option because he didn’t want to present the label “freelancer” on an expense request).

The list goes on, and these are all very real heuristics that people use to make decisions — and they use these heuristics much more often than a holistic analysis of what is best for them or their organization.

Given the above, are these techniques “tricking people”? Maybe. I personally consider them to be tools that can be used responsibly or irresponsibly. An organization with rock solid ethics can use these techniques to hack their users brains to get them to more accurately do what is in the purchaser’s best interest. At least that is my opinion and my approach. YMMV.


> An organization with rock solid ethics can use these techniques to hack their users brains to get them to more accurately do what is in the purchaser’s best interest.

While I agree that people are far from perfectly rational, I strongly disagree with the viewpoint you are taking here. You do not know what is in the purchaser's best interest. Only they do.

Remember that the maxim that humans are far from perfectly rational applies to you too. If you think you are hacking users brains in their own best interests, is that really true, or has your own brain figured out a fancy rationalization that lets you do what's in your best interests even if it harms others? My money is on the latter.


I am not sure that I should continue this thread since human psychology is basically an infinitely deep rabbit hole, but...:

1. In many/most cases, there are a very limited set of user profiles that can be used to model purchaser behavior. A well-designed pricing scheme will accommodate these purchasers needs and wants. In some cases, a good pricing scheme will push the purchaser to be more analytic in matching their package with their actual needs (e.g., by not presenting them with an option that can satisfy a default heuristic that may not be useful in the specific purchasing context).

2. (See 2a for a succinct summary of this point. I am leaving this hear because it is a decent example.) In many cases, the consumer is price indifferent -- most or all of the options work for them, and the price (within a relatively wide range) will not make a difference in whether to purchase or not. In this case, it is in the provider's best interest to maximize the price. A simple example of this is the wine prices at my friend's winery. He makes a ridiculously good wine, with a very low tonnage per acre (leading to a very concentrated flavor), high quality french oak, etc. The amount of wine that they can make like this is limited by the terroir and the amount of land they own. Folks who are willing to buy wine of this quality are fairly price insensitive -- they just want a really good wine and (ideally) a really good story to go along with it. While his other wines are in the $20-$60 range, these top end estate wines are much higher (and should be even higher, imho). The folks who can pay $120 a bottle can pay $150 or $180, and that difference is insignificant to the purchasers. Their only top end is that they don't want to seem like they were ripped off, which basically means "not as high as their favorite hard-to-get wines". The extremely high margins on these wines make a real difference to my friend's bottom line.

2a. Let me try to summarize #2 better. Most cases of pricing have some sort of pricing asymmetry -- that is, the price within a wide range doesn't matter for one party, but it matters a lot, often on an existential level, for the other. Optimizing what the price-indifferent party pays is a reasonable and logical decision, imho.

3. Your are absolutely right that I have created a fancy rationalization for myself. I am both aware of that (and try my best to keep it in check), and I am OK with that -- it's a very human thing that allows us to live without falling into analysis paralysis.

4. Given #3, understanding why people make the decisions they do has literally been a lifelong mission for me. When I was in high school and early in college, I assumed that people were hyper-rational like I thought I was (I was not), and I assumed that all they needed was accurate information in order to make the "correct" choice. I cannot begin to tell you how wrong I was. What I have learned in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics/finance, and cognitive development has shown me that human needs and wants are shaped by a variety of factors. That said, the potential range of complex factors is actually fairly limited, but it is not as limited as "make a rational decision on the needs of the immediate context". Far from it. This is an area of specialty for me, and I consider it to be a very powerful specialty. I will admit that it gives me a massive unfair advantage in a lot of interactions. That said, I try my best to use my specialist knowledge responsibly. I don't always succeed, but I definitely try. When I am able to help people make better pricing decisions using my specialist knowledge, I do it with holistic good intent (whatever that means). I hope you can appreciate that not all sales and marketing actions are inherently evil, and an incredible amount of purchasing decisions happen in the realm of "price within a wide range does not matter for one party".

I hope you find this post informative. If you still think that price optimization is an elaborate scheme that tends to harm other people, then I am happy to agree to disagree and move on. That said, I hope my reply has shown that the issue has many layers of complexity that most people do not consider.


> I hope you find this post informative.

I find it very informative about how you determine what pricing scheme is in your best interest. I see nothing whatever that justifies your earlier claim that you somehow know what is in the purchaser's best interest.

To be clear: I have no problem whatever with a seller who tells me up front that he is out to get the best deal for himself that he can and that's all he cares about. If I choose to buy from such a seller, I know what I'm getting into and I might still choose to buy if I am getting a reasonable deal for myself. There is often plenty of room for a win-win between two parties who both are seeking to maximize their own self-interest and don't make any pretense about knowing what's best for the other party. That is basically what you are describing in most of your post.

What I have a problem with is statements like this:

> I assumed that all they needed was accurate information in order to make the "correct" choice. I cannot begin to tell you how wrong I was.

The problem I have is that this statement contradicts what you yourself describe in the rest of your post. When you say that there are situations where the customer is price indifferent, you are not saying that they are irrational. You are saying that, given their particular situation, they are rationally being price indifferent--because the price literally does not matter to them as much as other factors. (For example, customers who are willing to pay $150 or $180 for a bottle of wine instead of $120 are not being irrational in paying more--the difference in price is literally negligible to them in comparison with, for example, not having to take a lot of time to find a good bottle of wine.)

In other words, I think you would be more honest to just admit that you are getting the best deal for yourself as a seller that you can, and that you expect your customers to get the best deal for themselves that they can, rather than claiming that you somehow know better than they do what is in their best interest.


Or maybe adding the 500 option is the way to communicate your features most effectively. i.e. it presents the top-end of what's possible and accurately showcases where your more expensive option is.


> maybe adding the 500 option is the way to communicate your features most effectively.

Not if nobody actually buys it, which was a premise of that particular example.


Especially then. It allows you to proportionally weight the price against what's available.

All of this is just effective communication.

In fact, considering that all we have available is the end result of the operation, I think the "effective communication" hypothesis is much stronger supported than the "tricking" hypothesis.


> all we have available is the end result of the operation

We have the result that more people bought the 220 option when the 500 option was offered.[

We do not know that still more people wouldn't have bought the 220 option if its features had been effectively communicated. If the 220 option really is a better deal for many customers, telling them so directly would seem to be a better strategy than hinting it to them by providing a 500 option that nobody actually buys. But this strategy was not even tried.


It certainly was. The features were showcased through comparison and analogy: a common technique to simplify understanding. This technique is frequently used in news (fifteen football fields), in technology (it would take a desktop 1000 years to calculate this), and really anywhere. It’s a damned good technique because it eases understanding.


> It certainly was.

I don't see anywhere in the article where it tells how they tried telling customers the advantages of the 220 option and how it would be a better value for them.


Can you expand a bit? I'm genuinely curious about your experience helping customers price products.


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.


> 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.


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


$29 would likely work a whole lot better than $30


$28 would work better than $29... the main point still holds.


you have no evidence for that claim... the '9' effect has been studied extensively


I think you missed my point. Whether it was 30 or 29, the idea still holds, and the idea was not optimizing to the single dollar level.


No, I didn't. If you're going to optimize the article's example, why stop halfway?


So, $39 would work better than $28?


Was this comment really worth exposing the fact that you don't understand why nearly every store in America prices with 9's?

But since you asked... lowering the price by $11 will require 28% more unit sales to cover the difference. Normally 28% more units would increase COGS, resulting in less profit on equivalent sales, requiring even larger unit growth, but we're talking about software here so let's ignore that. Regardless, I couldn't tell you which works better without some more data.

I will bet you, however, that $39 will outperform $40 in total revenue and profit.


The article also suggests you should start with the post expensive option (60 in your case)


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.


There's a known cognitive bias that kicks in with 3 items, realtors for example will exploit this. They'll show 2 similar houses and 1 different house, people will end up comparing the two similar houses more, and choose the one that's more of a bargain.


The examples for the decoy effect are absolutely awful.

Usually what is done is that you choose a minimum price lets say an ISP offers 25mbit for $20, 50mbit for $35 and 100mbit for $50. The 25mbit plan is obviously poor value but at the same time it is still the cheapest option. Some customers truly don't need more than 25mbit but if you are looking to spend more than $20 then you are more likely to go straight for 100mbit than for 50mbit.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.



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


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/...

https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/...


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.


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.


...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.


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 :)


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


They started loading for me after reloading the page without Content Blockers.


Something we are looking into.




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