Building good pricing pages

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Creating a solid pricing page

During the life of an indiemaker you will eventually have to build a pricing page to sell your product.
Here is some advice.

BTW, there’s a video at the bottom of this article that goes in-depth if you prefer that media format over text. Actually it’s got a lot of visual aids that you might enjoy. With that being said..

The most important advice to remember when building a pricing page is: don’t forget to talk extensively with your early customers/audience/beta testers/Twitter followers. It’s such a simple thing to remember, yet people tend to put it off . Basically whomever you’re trying to sell the product to will be the best source of information when packaging your pricing.

For example, if you’re a startup, the first step is to chat with your early users. They might be a business, or a group of people - they might not know how much time you’re saving them by providing them with a service.

That’s your mission: find out how much they’re willing to pay before they think - “no, that’s not worth it!”

Pricing personas

Creating pricing plans comes as a direct result of your pricing personas.

Some questions to ask your group of users to build pricing personas are:

  • What features they most like and want out of the product you’ve built
  • What price would be too high for them to consider purchasing it
  • What price will reflect questionable quality considerations
  • What price would be a good bargain
  • How would they feel if the solution you sell was to suddenly disappear

You should ask your audience these questions in a way that allows you to get some insights. Basically, don’t spoon feed them the answers.

Pricing plans inception

Amazingly enough there are probably other companies out there that are selling something similar to what you’re planning to sell. The best advice I can give after chatting with your audience is to go and check out your competitors.
Analyze all the things:

  • What they offer
  • How much they charge
  • How many plans they have
  • How do they present their USPs
  • What are the limits and features on each plan they offer

When you write the copy for your pricing page, aim to tie three aspects of your pricing strategy together:

  • Align your persona with your pricing page: don’t flood your customers with information they might not need (i.e. enterprise talk to startup consumers)
  • Packaging that shows a mix of features based on customer needs
  • Price points that represent value and what your customers are willing to pay

Showcase your plan options

Consider listing your pricing plans in a way that it makes sense to you.
Most people will have 3-4 plans because of various psychology reasons. where almost nobody goes for the most expensive one when they start out, but also not the cheapest one.
If there is a FREE plan most people will probably use that first.

Mailchimp does pricing the opposite way, they have the most expensive pricing plan first. This is called anchoring the price. That does not mean it will work for you, so don’t just blindly copy.

Localizing, defining and scaling: Pricing details

Localize your pricing. Use a dropdown to show different currencies where possible, don’t just rely on IP geolocalization. If you are selling internationally, you need to include the different currencies but also adjust the price based on how its value may change for customers in different markets.

There is a lot of pseudoscience regarding pricing packaging. Some folks will say that you should consider avoiding rounded numbers to tap into consumer psychology - i.e. listing at $19.99 or $19 instead of $20 p/m. I believe there is some truth in these things, but the effects of this strategy are probably under a single digit performance increase.

Use sliders and scaling sliders in your plans if you do volumetric based pricing, this will help your customers to gauge the best plan for their needs, and it will show them what the costs will be like as their usage of your platform increases.

Use monthly/annual pricing toggles for different plan lengths, and include a discount for annual to incentivize it. This has to do with a thing called hyperbolic discount. Google is your friend if you want to find out more.

Add the features available at each price point, if you have too many that’s where a features comparison table can help.
Don’t overwhelm users, keep it concise above the fold and offer a full feature table further down.

Reducing risk: Pricing paralysis removal

Another interesting take is to always offer a way for people to easily contact you. There might be a lot of uncertainty pre-purchase that you want to eliminate. The best way to eliminate uncertainty is by providing answers. You then use this newly acquired information to improve your pricing page: adding FAQs, rewriting copy, and including more risk reducing data points.

Use clear CTAs on your pricing page and use statements that remove or reduce risk. These are great to remove pricing paralysis. Remove the fear that the product might not be right for the buyer.

It’s important to always include testimonials that resonate with your audience. Humans love to relate to other humans who are taking similar paths as the one they’re on. Use these stories to back up your product’s benefits, removing purchasing anxiety, and highlighting the good outcomes.

Finally, using callouts on your pricing plans, you can highlight the plan you really want people to buy. There’s more psychology here involved, more than I am willing to discuss in this precise blogspot. Typically, having three plans means that there’s always one plan people will pick.

Do include any risk reversal copy such as money back guarantees, secure payment badges, and free trial call to actions, if you have one.

Here’s a long video where I go over all these points by analyzing real pricing pages:

In conclusion: It’s a fine art

Pricing pages are like fine wine or expensive art: you will not own a Picasso outright.
You need to start small, like most things in life, and slowly improve layer upon layer, adding more subtleties to your pricing page.
For example, too much text and you will bore your customers, too little text and they won’t trust that the product is right.
At the start of your pricing journey, your biggest feat will be having users commit to a free-tier plan and at the end of it finally upselling the paid plans.