How to best handle pricing between MVP and Live phases?

Question

We are planning to launch a new consumer web application with 7 core features and services. While putting together the release roadmap we figured our MVP can be very solid if we included 3 of the 7 core features and have subsequent releases for the rest of the services. Each additional release will probably take 6 weeks to develop and launch. So in total 6 months post MVP, we should be fully live.

From a user experience what would be best when it comes to pricing:

1- Should we show our live pricing from now and subscribe people to it?

2- Should we show our live pricing from now, but give a 25% discount for 6 months?

3- Should we show MVP (Beta) pricing and then change pricing when we are live? We can grandfather MVP users and keep them on the same pricing without increasing their price.

4- Any other ideas?

Any thoughts on this would be tremendously helpful.

Answer 1

If you needed to, you could warn the grandfather MVP that their price will go up, at the most a few months after launch. I don't recommend giving them a temporary discount during beta, since users might understand that as a free-trial type of thing, which doesn't really work in most industries. The free trial model only works in services that users feel they can't live without, unlike most other monthly subscriptions. They'll otherwise cancel, and if they don't, they'll cancel when they see a charge on their card. I've unfortunately seen it too many times.

Just remember to make it clear to the user that the price will go up, by signaling that it's "beta pricing".