I fixed my SaaS churn by raising the price 40%. Has anyone else tried this?

Month 9 of Genie 007. Trial activation was OK but monthly churn was ugly — around 35% on the first cohort.

I'd rebuilt onboarding twice. Added tooltips. Shortened the setup flow. Added a quick-start video. Nothing moved the number.

One afternoon I just changed the price. £4.99 to £6.99. 40% increase. No announcement, no A/B test, no big plan. Just changed it.

A month later I ran the cohort comparison.

Churn on the £6.99 cohort was 22% lower than the £4.99 cohort at the same point.

My working theory: price filters intent before your product ever gets to run its onboarding. The person who signs up at £4.99 is often in "exploring whether I have this problem" mode. The person who signs up at £6.99 has usually already decided they have the problem. They come in differently. They activate differently.

The £4.99 users were costing me the most to serve (highest support load, most "this doesn't work for me" feedback, fastest churn) and converting the worst long-term.

Raising price was the lever I kept ignoring because it felt backwards when growth was slow. Every founder instinct says lower the barrier. But sometimes the barrier is the filter.

A few things I noticed after the change:

• Support ticket volume dropped noticeably
• Users now arrive knowing exactly what they want to use it for
• Referrals ticked up slightly — people who are committed talk about it more

Not a huge difference in absolute price terms. But the psychological difference in who it attracts seems real and measurable.

Has anyone else deliberately raised price to fix a retention or quality-of-user problem? Curious whether this generalises or whether I just got lucky.