What changed in our numbers after we simplified pricing and rewrote the hero
A numbers post for the money minded
Over the last stretch my co founder and i made two changes to our web analytics tool that touched revenue directly: we simplified pricing and we rewrote the hero. Here is what moved.
Pricing before: four tiers plus an annual toggle plus a bunch of feature gating that even we had to look up.
Pricing now: three tiers, monthly, clear. Free, $20, $90, and enterprise on request.
Hero before: described what the product is.
Hero now: leads with the outcome (where your revenue comes from) in the first five words.
The numbers
- Visit to signup conversion: 7% to 9.4%
- Free to paid conversion: 1.9% to 2.8%
- MRR: $210 to $430
- Average revenue per paying user: $39
What I learned about pricing specifically
- Every tier you add is a decision you are asking the customer to make. Fewer tiers, fewer reasons to stall.
- The annual toggle was costing us more in confusion than it earned in upfront cash at our stage. We removed it. Conversion went up.
- Naming the tiers by who they are for (solo, growing, scale) read better than naming them by feature count.
- The free tier is a marketing cost, not a revenue line. We stopped trying to make it convert and started treating it as the top of the funnel it actually is.
The uncomfortable truth: most of our revenue movement came from removing friction and clarifying, not from adding value. Cheaper to do, easy to undervalue.
For the money focused founders here: when you simplified pricing, did conversion go up enough to offset the lost upsell paths? Curious whether our experience generalizes.
The hero rewrite lesson maps hard to mobile utilities: users need to know what action changes in the first five seconds. For Kinetic Override I’m testing plain wording like “record taps/swipes, replay timed loops, no-root Android 15+” instead of broad automation language.
Numbers are stronger than you're framing. 7% → 9.4% visit-to-signup × 1.9% → 2.8% free-to-paid = ~98% improvement in visit-to-paid conversion. That's doubling end-to-end conversion from positioning and pricing alone, not modest.
Upsell-offset question depends on category. Bottom-up prosumer SaaS (where you sit) — simplification wins because friction kills self-serve adoption. Lost upsell paths probably minor relative to conversion gains.
Extensions:
$20 → $90 jump is 4.5x. Mid-tier probably future revenue but right not to over-complicate now.
Free-to-paid is your biggest lever. 300 customers / $430 MRR means free dominant. Each 1% improvement in free-to-paid worth ~$430 MRR. Getting from 2.8% to 5% doubles revenue without adding a visitor.
"Removing friction > adding value" is the most under-appreciated lesson in bootstrap SaaS. Most founders default to building features. Clearer positioning + simpler pricing + better onboarding usually unlock more revenue.
What's your current free tier limit, and what's the most common feedback when users hit it?
Removing the annual toggle was the right call — at your stage the upfront cash doesn't offset the decision paralysis it adds before someone converts. On your question about whether simplification offsets the revenue hit: with $39 ARPU you're buying yourself a clean signal on what to optimize next, which is worth more than the slight compression. The harder thing coming up is that the hero and pricing are a one-time lift; the funnel grows new leaks as the product evolves and you typically don't notice for months. The recurring version of that problem is what I'm solving with Velyr — it sits on top of PostHog and opens one PR a week with the highest-impact fix it finds, you approve or reject on Telegram.