I raised prices by 40% and lost zero customers, here's the exact email I sent
I'd been putting this off for eight months. Every time I opened the pricing page I closed it again. Last month I finally did it 40% across all plans, grandfathered existing users for 60 days, and sent a plain-text email to 312 customers.
Zero churned. Three replied thanking me. One asked why I hadn't done it sooner.
The email wasn't clever. It was four paragraphs: what's changing, when, why (I was honest support load had tripled), and what stays the same. No "exciting news" language, no discount code to soften it.
I'm posting because I see a lot of "should I raise prices" threads and almost no "here's what actually happened" threads. So: what actually happened, with numbers.
My question to you: if you've raised prices, what did your email say and did you grandfather existing users or rip the band-aid off? I keep wondering if the 60-day window was too generous.
Replies
Thanks for posting the numbers. Not a price rise, but a related change on my side, removing a free trial from my app's weekly plan, and I came to the same instinct as your grandfathering: trials already running were left alone, only new ones stopped. The other detail that made it painless was where the copy lives. The "3 days free" line in the app comes from the store offer itself, not from text in the app, so when the offer was removed the line disappeared with it, no app release and no stale promise on screen. If you ever change prices again, check that every place showing the old price reads it from one source, so the email is the only thing you have to write by hand.