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13 Comments

Pricing pages - what issues have you had?

Hey ya'll!

I'm contemplating a product to help enable companies to make better decision about pricing pages.
In order to better do so, I want to understand the difficulties and issues associated with pricing pages.

My baseline but-yet-to-be-fully-developed idea is to create a SaaS products that via third-party javascript can render a pricing page/component on the users website.

However, to give my users the best possible experience with such an app, I would like to first understand what issues I'm dealing with.

Any and all inputs are appreciated! 🙏

If you prefer some pre-defined questions to get the old noggin going, here are a few:

  • What was your biggest headache in the process?
  • How do you measure the effect(s) of your switch (ie. do you use an A/B tool?
  • What encourage you to change it (data, you had a tip, you saw a better one, you felt like it, etc.)?
  • On a scale of 1-10 how difficult did you find the process?
  • (If you haven't started such a process) What's stopping you?

Thank you in advance, for all your inputs! 👏

on October 3, 2022
  1. 2

    I too was thinking in the similar lines , where dev doesn't have to keep on change the pricing page each time and see if it worked. Ping me if you would like to discuss

    1. 1

      Cool!
      I'm always happy to engage in further conversation @gimli_gloin, what do you mean with "dev doesn't have to keep on change the pricing page each time and see if it worked", exactly?

      Are you referring to the ability to meaningfully measure the output of any changes a developer may make on a pricing page? As in, seeing if it performed better than before the change?
      Or were you thinking of something else?

      1. 2

        Yes exactly . What I am thinking is to have insights which should tell the user that if the pricing change was warmer or colder than previous one. After seeing the pricing page what's the user's behaviour ? does he/she closed that tab right away or did some other actions which could be constructed to a meaningful behaviour . It should help the dev/pm to run meaningful experiments with price and determine the impact .

        1. 1

          Interesting approach!

          I like the idea of cold/warm as a 'scale measurement' , but unless there exists a lot of data in the platform it would be hard to provide it real time.

          Additionally, I did not actually think that developers would be my target audience. I am not entirely sure who will be, but I was thinking about solopreneurs / marketing people / freelancers (that help clients provide landing pages, websites and/or pricing pages).

          1. 2

            Generally I saw people who are in B2C does the price experiments. Some times it's done by a PM who focuses on the growth. Not necessarily dev but it should help all decision makers to fix some price with help of some data.

  2. 2

    Pricing is hard, but it's good to remember that it isn't fixed in stone, it can (and should) change.

    Some of the difficult decisions are:

    • What is you onboarding strategy? Get users in for free, get lots of monthly payments, get yearly payments (and use this money for advertising), etc.
    • How many plans to have
    • What to name the plans
    • How to price each plan
    • How much to charge for additional features/usage
    • How to price monthly and yearly plans
    • How to highlight the plan you want most people to purchase
    • What features to have in each plan
    • How to show the differences between each plan
    • What discounts should there be
    • Should you offer a free plan
    • Should you offer a free trial
    • Should you offer a money-back guarantee
    • Which payment provider will you use
    • Which method of payments should you use (PayPal, Bitcoin, Cronos, etc.)

    Once you have version 1 in place and you have customers, you should then start testing changes to each aspect of the pricing page.

    1. 1

      Great reply, thank you @OKZest!
      Thankfully, I think a lot of the options you are going over here, are somewhat decided by best practices. At least to my knowledge, but certainly worth looking into again.

      What I mean is, that mostly it is proven that certain names, or visual presentations (even including the number hereof) of the pricing options, have strong basis in psychology and can help persuade prospects to select one option over another.

      At least are some of the pains I hope to solve by presenting a SaaS product! 😄

  3. 2

    Issues I've seen/experienced:

    • Not having enough info
    • Not being able to track how far they went into the funnel
    • Having a confusing page. For example, not making it clear if it's per year or per month.
    • Not being able to show ROI correctly on the page.
    1. 1

      Thank you for the input @that_guy_iain!

      By "Not being able to show ROI correctly on the page.", are you referring to the ROI of the product for the customers? Or the ROI effects on the company making changes to the pricing page?

  4. 2
    1. For me, one of the biggest issues is defining a clear business model tied directly to the value users get from the product. Once a logical, simple model is defined the pricing page gets a lot easier.
    2. Paid upgrade conversion rates (this is more for measuring business model updates, not necessarily the pricing page)
    3. alignment with industry best practices, reducing support requests from "tire-kickers", improving LTV/CAC, responding to competition
    4. For the pricing page itself: 3
    5. implementing a new business model requires a considerable amount of business logic within the product, even for a pretty basic model (i.e. multiple tiers with monthly/annual options).
    1. 2

      This is a really good answer.

      Pricing is a science in itself.

    2. 1

      This is insanely specific feedback (and very helpful, thank you!) @brandonc.

      Great contemplations to have for this process.
      It's also interesting to do "end-to-end pricing page tests", which to me includes business analysis from a high level of changes to sign up flow (free trial or not? self-signup or not? credit card or no?) conversion-window (when should we expect new prospects to start paying) and MANY more metrics.

      Having such a high level enables business owners to make accurate decision on how a pricing (and business model) should look, but that's too complex for an early version of the problems I think I can help solve.

      Interesting and fascinating for sure, but too complex 😄