How do you test a price point without scaring away your early adopters?
When we launched our software year we set the price at nine dollars a month because we were afraid that nobody would pay more for an early‑stage tool. Signups came in fast. Our support costs soon grew faster, than our revenue and working late nights became unsustainable.
Of raising the price on the entire public landing page we ran a quiet experiment with new visitors. We added a forty‑nine‑dollar tier that included priority setup support. We expected the conversion rate to fall to zero. Surprisingly twenty percent of new users chose the higher tier.
The higher price attracted serious users who needed less hand‑holding and who valued the software’s core utility. Our monthly recurring revenue tripled, even though the customer volume was cut in half proving that underpricing was our bottleneck.
How did you find the courage to raise your price. How did your early users react?
Replies
Courage is easier when the test only touches new people. My paywall is served from the server through a placement that can split new users between variants, so a test never requires an app update and existing subscribers keep exactly what they bought. The part that needs discipline is waiting: a paywall test needs a few hundred conversions per variant before the result means much, which for a small app is weeks, not days. Stopping the moment one side looks good is how you end up with a price chosen by noise. Your 20 percent on the higher tier sounds like a real signal, though, especially since it came with fewer support hours.