Psychological pricing vs. being fair?

Question

We have an app, with pricing plans which depends solely on how many users(which equals how many employees your company has) you have, unlike many other apps, where with bigger plan you get more features, bigger space, whatever, in our app you get all the features, unlimited projects etc.

Now the app is directed for mostly small to medium companies(8-25 employees), but we have a "special" plan for a single user(freelancer), which is basically twice cheaper per user than usual.

Now, I, unlike the rest of my team, think that it's a bad idea to put "Get app name from $9 / month", as the header and the first thing you see on the page. Why? Because unless you are a freelancer, which is not our main target group, it's definitely not gonna cost you $9 / month, but $15 / employee / month!

If I were the user and saw this, and right under it saw a pricing table, which would say something like "up to 15 people / $229" and I did the math, and found out it's actually not $9 I'd be pretty pissed off.

Then again, I have nothing to back this up, what do you think?

Answer 1

The questions you should start with are:

1. Is the header necessary in its current form?

Intuition tells me you may be able to achieve your goals by reframing the header's message, which avoids this problem entirely.

2. Is the plan breakdown sufficiently clear and quickly digestible?

By placing emphasis on the plan titles themselves and a crystal clear breakdown/comparison of the options, attention will be drawn to these details.

With a little research, you'll likely discover that these details are what users are truly sniffing for. Showing numbers at the header levels may not be expected by users, and may work against the business goals if it muddles or misleads users' understanding of their options.

Answer 2

I am with you on this, I would also be annoyed.

Could not you just forget about advertising prices and explain that pricing depends of the number of users (which is the case) then add a get a quote call to action

Sitecore does that way for exemple: http://www.sitecore.net/unitedkingdom/Products/Sitecore-Pricing.aspx

Answer 3

My experience of what work and doesn't work for pricing pages is varied - and often mutually contradictory. So much depends on the context, the product. the audience, etc.

So my meta-advice would be to ignore the advice here, and ignore your own hunches, and ignore your team's hunches - and try some experiments to see which options work better.

You might be right. Your team might be right. You both might be wrong. Rather that waste time arguing about it - try both and look at the numbers.

I think I've seen every opinion that folk have discussed here coming out true for some clients, and false for others. Other options include:

• People finding the per-user / usage based pricing "unfair", because their numbers vary a great deal, or their worried when they're around the tier edges.

• People losing conversions because the prominently displayed "low" price is seen as too cheap for serious usage.

• People gaining conversion because the minimal usage single-user type options are a fantastic source of conversion to higher tiers through word of month, or through people using the single-user option as a trial, or by those single-user people growing up into multiple-user ones, etc.

• I could go on ;-)

I have never seen a company get their pricing / feature / usage breakdown right on the first try. So I'd tend to assume that you won't either ;-) If I were in your shoes I'd be setting up a process so that you could try several options and see which works better.