#1 Re-shuffle Features

We have seen two companies do this recently and Hubspot and Monday.com.

Here’ the Monday example:

They haven’t actually added any new features, they simply moved them around the pricing page.

The main metric that you are optimizing for here is the CTA button click-through rates.

Tip: Promote features that are more relatable to your persona’s pain points.

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#2 Change Copy

Changing copy can have surprisingly big impact. Check out these examples:

Or the difference it make on the CTA…

Tip: for these types of visual changes, you can use a A/B tool like Optimizely that can help you set this up without involving developers.

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#3 Emphasize Annual Savings

Another easy experiment is to cross out the price to indicate annual discount. Here’s an example:

Assuming that you already have an annual discount, this is simply a visual experiment.

This experiment can help you steer more users to choose annual plans, which in turn drives higher LTVs, as customers generally churn lower on yearly plans.

Bonus Tip

You can learn a lot about SaaS monetization from your peers’ and competitors’ pricing pages. Want to automatically receive notifications?

Sign-up for free email alerts from PricingSaaS👇

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Here are the top highlights and what we can learn from them…

Wistia

What happened?

The team at Wistia simply moved the features around on the pricing page. Features that were listed under “all features”, now were moved to the top. This is an easy experiment to run to see if it increases visit-to-trial conversion (i.e. to see if more people click on the CTA).

Codecademy

What happened?

The team at Codecademy increased pricing for one of their plans. This is a good reminder that when raising prices, you can be selective and do it for selected plans. By raising prices for a specific plan, you can mitigate risk and make sure you do not adversely impact other metrics (such as conversion rates and retention).

Mailchimp

What happened?

The team at Mailchimp introduced a Free trial for two of their paid plans. Before, users could only start on a free plan or purchase a paid plan. This is often referred to as a reverse trial and it’s a great way to help users discover the premium features without paying anything first.

Additional Resources

Want to see all the updates? See all changes here (includes free export to Google Sheets).

Let’s Start with the Numbers

We analyzed 3021 B2B SaaS companies since the beginning of the year.

How did we get the data?

We took screenshots of the pricing pages at the beginning of the year and then again around beginning of March 2023. Then manually went through the ones that changed.

12 out of 3021 increased prices so far…

The price increases range has been quite vast (from as little as 3.57% to over 200%).

On average, the price increases were 47.43%. Although, the median was 30.88%.

What’s interesting though, is that companies that raised prices tend to skew towards the ones that are in the range of 11-50 employees.

Now, if we compare it to the overall dataset distribution, clearly 11-50 is the biggest chunk, but 11-50 was still a clear outlier.

PricingSaaS.com Dataset - March 1st, 2023 (n=3021)

Explore Dataset

Some Examples

Biggest price increase: Calendar.com

Smallest Price Increase: glasscubes

For a full list of pricing changes, we put this handy Google Sheet for you.

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Best Practices

OK… so before you rush off and start raising your prices, here’s a few things to consider:

• Model MRR Impact vs. churn and conversion impact. Basically, for every % you raise your prices, you can expect a relative increase in churn and decrease in conversion rates. So figure out the sweet spot for optimizing for MRR and LTV (lifetime value). At the end of the day, it will be a guess, but you can run different scenarios.

• Communicate - externally and internally!

  • For internal folks, make sure everyone is aware of what's going on. Finance needs to know, customer success, sales, etc.

  • For customers, you need to communicate the value your product continues to deliver to them. Netflix does this really well. They are the masters of raising prices, so look at their emails.

• Playbooks - provide your teams with playbooks. Some customers will not be happy. You may also have some prospects mid flight (where they saw one price and will not be presented with a different one). Consider all of these cases and have a playbook(s) for your customer facing teams.

• To grandfather or not - this is a big one. Are you raising prices for new customers only? What happens to existing customers…?

  • If you are keep them on old pricing - this will have smaller impact on overall MRR. Raising pricing for existing customers has immediate meaningful MRR impact.

  • If you raise for existing, remember that anyone on annual plan will not see the price increase till their renewal date. So that means it will take you about 12 months to fully roll out this change.

Additional Resources

• PricingSaaS.com - B2B Pricing Tracker. Sign-up to get free email alerts, to get notified when your peers and competitors change their pricing.

• Do you need help with pricing and monetization? Our boutique agency, Buyerson Inc. can help. Our services range from weekly advisory sessions to full blown pricing studies. Get in touch to schedule a free call.

In this week’s newsletter, we’ll go review top pricing models the 7 pricing models used by top 250 SaaS companies across various different software categories. 

#1 Seat Based Pricing

Seat based pricing model is the most common pricing model among top 250, coming in at 37.8%. Under this model, companies charge for access to software by licensing “seats”.

Example: GitHub

See More Examples...

#2 Usage Subscription

Usage Subscription model has multiple tiers with one or more built-in usage metrics. As users consume the product and reach one or more usage limits, they must either upgrade to the next tier or find a way to work within their current tier limit.

Example: Wix.

See More Examples...

#3 Usage Pay-as-You-Go

Usage Pay-as-You-Go pricing model has a usage metric that users “consume” and then pay for it at the end of the billing period (typically after a month). The bill will therefore often fluctuate month-to-month.

Example: Twilio

See More Examples...

#4 Usage Drawdown

This model is similar to Pay-as-you-go, however the main difference is that the usage limit is determined up front and then users consume (or drawdown from it) through out the billing period and then it resets again at the beginning of the next billing period .

Example: TypeForm

See More Examples...

#5 Tiered

Tiered based pricing model is one where the difference among each plan is based solely on features.

Example: LinkTree

See More Examples...

#6 Flat

Flat based pricing means same price for everyone, no matter what.

Example: SurfShark

See More Examples...

#7 Performance Based

Under this model, the users typically have unrestricted use of the product and they only pay for results.

Example: Vendr

See More Examples...

About the SaaS companies in this study:

The study is based on information SaaS companies share on their public pricing pages. It spans multiple software categories across 250 SaaS companies .

Additional Resources:

• All the data is available on pricingsaas.com - check it out for additional help on choosing the right model.

• Feel overwhelmed? Connect with me on LinkedIn to set up a free advisory session.

Usage-based pricing is a consumption-based pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service.

There are two main types of usage based pricing - pay per use and drawdown.

Pay per use, as the name indicates, means that you pay as you go (think AWS).

Drawdown means that you start with pre-paid credits that you draw against every time you use the product (similar to prepaid phone cards).

The alternatives to usage based pricing are tiered based pricing and per-seat pricing models.

Some Examples …

Example 1 - Scraping Bee

Scraping Bee is a SaaS company that scrapes websites. You pass it a URL and it returns the HTML or a screenshot of that page.

This is an example of drawdown usage pricing. You start with X number of “API Credits” every month and then as you use them over time you are “drawing” from them that credit pool.

Since there is a limit to how many API credits you can use, it’s important to consider what happens when you hit that limit. Scraping Bee gives you two options (covered on their pricing page FAQ):

• Upgrade temporarily to the next tier (this works as all of their plans are month)

• Or renew your subscription early (i.e. reset your billing date)

On top of this, it’s a good practice to make it easy for the user to know how close they are to the limit. Scraping Bee has a neat widget right on the main dashboard.

Example 2 - Kobiton

Kobiton is a testing platform and they have drawdown usage pricing. You start with X number of minutes and then you “draw” from them every month as you use the product.

What’s interesting about this pricing implementation is what happens when you hit the limit. Unlike Scraping Bee, you don’t have to change or reset plans, you can purchase additional minutes with an add-on (as explained in their pricing FAQ):

Example 3 - Twilio SMS

Twilio provides developer communication tools. One of their products is SMS messaging. You pay per SMS sent. This is a true pay as you go usage model.

As you can see from all the footnotes, there are quite a few exceptions. On top of it, they have different prices for text vs. picture vs. local vs. toll-free numbers… so the complexity grows quickly.

If your pricing is this complex - you should likely consider a tool to management software (opposed to building a home grown solution).

Example 4 - Shopify

Shopify, the e-commerce giant, has pay-as-you go pricing with a twist. They charge a base subscription (e.g. $29 for Basic) and then you pay a % of amount spend.

This model ensures that as a SaaS business, you have a “guaranteed” MRR every month, even if the merchant does not run any transactions that month (unless they churn all together of course).

Additional Usage Pricing Examples

Choosing the Right Model for You

Ultimately, you need to determine if your product is a “consumption” based product. This will be dictated by the pricing metric that you select (see our guide to Pricing Metrics here).

If your pricing metric is Members, Users, Seats, Location, etc… then usage based pricing is not for you. You are doing Seat Based Pricing.

If your pricing metric however is Minutes, Gigabytes, Contacts, Site Visitors, Credits, etc… then you are effectively doing usage based pricing. Then it’s a matter of determining the Pay-As-You-Go or Drawdown approach.

“Drawdown” Usage Pricing

• Good when usage can be bucketed (think small, medium, large)

• More predictable revenue

• Requires an upgrade path when user hits a limit

“Pay-as-you-go” Usage Pricing

• Suitable for infrastructure products with direct underlying costs (e.g. cell network cost to send an SMS, credit card network to process a transaction)

• More fluctuations in revenue

• 3rd party usage billing software is a must (unless you are prepared to invest a ton of money building your own in-house solution)

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Summary

• Usage based pricing is very closely tied to your pricing metric - i.e. you need something that can go up or down based on product consumption

• There are two main types of usage pricing: (1) pay-as-you go (2) drawdown

• The main consideration for pay-as-you-go is billing infrastructure software

• The main consideration for drawdown is what happens when user hits the limit

Additional Resources

• Check out pricingsaas.com where you can find 1000s of pricing examples, including a ton of usage based pricing

• If you need help with pricing or monetization, we offer advisory services at Buyerson Inc.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn

By definition, every PLG company has to have a public pricing page. This is because “PLG” means that customer can do a self-serve checkout and therefore, customer needs to know what they are buying and how much it will cost.

There are two types of PLG companies. “Pure PLG” - everything is done through self-serve and “Hybrid PLG” - companies that have both self-serve and sales assisted sales. Then of course, there are non-PLG companies (booooo) that only have a sales option available.

These pages are hosted on he marketing page, where site visitors can view them without having to create an account or without having to log in.

Example - Typeform

Typeform is a “Hybrid PLG” company. It supports self-serve and a sales motion.

On their pricing page, Typeform has two entry points - one for self-serve users, the other for people who wish to speak to sales.

Self-serve takes you to an account creation page:

And the “Contact Sales” CTA takes you to … a Typeform :)

The Typeform is used to collect information to qualify the prospect and route them to the proper sales rep in the right priority order.

Example 2 - Gong

Here’s another example - Gong. They use their Pricing Page as a lead-gen form. Not PLG (booooo), but I think they are one of the best ones that I’ve seen, so let’s take a quick peek:

• Step-by-step form makes it less jarring than a boring old form with lots of fields

• They start with an easy question (How big is your team)

• The FAQs and copy are a nice touch as well

Getting it Right…

When designing pricing pages - think about it as a conversion optimization exercise (opposed to a features or a product demo page).

Keep in mind that the website pricing page is about getting the user to take the next step - either start a trial/freemium or get in touch with sales.

Note that sometimes users will reference the pricing page to compare plans before making the purchase or when thinking about upgrading. This however is a secondary use case (as that information should be contextual as part of in-product checkout flow), so it should not be the primary focus.

Best practices:

• Keep it simple: mention a couple of key features or benefits per plan. Do not list every single feature under the sun. If you feel compelled to do so (e.g. for SEO or for support purposes), do it in a separate section below the fold or make it collapsable.

• Address objections: add an FAQ and/or copy to address common objections to move the user through this part of the funnel. This includes questions about billing frequency, trial duration, currency, etc.

• Speak to buyer personas: oftentimes your visitors will use the pricing page to determine if this product is for them. Add copy such as “Best for individual designers or best for 5-10 person design teams” to address this question.

• Clean CTAs: what do you want the user to do next? Start a trial, book a demo, book a meeting - make it clear.

Example - Codecademy

Codecademy has gotten a lot of things right on their pricing page:

• Clean design - keeping the top section very succinct (they don’t even list features - they list benefits in their top 3 cards)

• Objection handling - can I afford this, do I pay monthly, can I trust it, etc.

• Finally, a clean set of CTAs - with the most prominent one being “Try Pro for free”

The page is primarily optimized for CTA button clicks. It contains all the right information to help visitors make that decision without overwhelming them with too much detail.

Example - SquareSpace

SquareSpace recently updated their pricing page. They used to have one big table view (with all the features), but you can see below that they have now simplified it and moved it to a collapsible section hidden behind “Compare Plans”.

The benefit of having a feature comparison table is that it can bring in additional SEO traffic and it becomes a point of reference for customers when chatting with support, but this is a secondary use case. Pricing pages that live on the marketing site should be optimized for CTA conversions - that’s their primary purpose.

See More Pricing Page Examples...

Summary

• The main purpose of pricing pages is to get site visitors to take the next step in their buyer journey - enter self-serve or book a demo / get in touch with sales

• Optimize pricing pages for conversions (CTA clicks) by addressing common questions while avoiding cognitive overload

• Ensure pricing pages speak to your buyer personas - if you sell to students or small creative agencies, this is the perfect place to state it

Additional Resources

• Check out PricingSaaS.com where you can find a over 2000 pricing pages examples

• Want a free audit of your pricing page? We offer it as a service at Buyerson Inc. - get in touch.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn

A pricing metric is a unit of something that measures how much each one of your customers is going to pay for your product (e.g. number of “seats”).

There is another related pricing term, called a value metric. These terms are related. A value metric measures the amount of value your product is generating for customers.

They can be the same (e.g. pay per lead) or different. There is an excellent article by Steven Forth on this topic here, if you’re interested in more details.

Most SaaS companies have a pricing metric as part of their monetization model, but it’s not a requirement.

Example - Factorial HR

Pricing metrics can be pretty much anything. In this example Factorial HR uses Employees as their pricing metric.

For HR software, it makes sense to price per employee, as it’s a good proxy for value the customer gets from the product (always a good thing in SaaS pricing).

See Top 10 Pricing Metrics...

Choosing the Pricing Metric

In general, a good pricing metric is:

• Simple to understand and explain

• Easy to measure

• Scales along with product consumption

• Correlates to value

Let’s take at a look at a couple of examples…

Example - Shopify

The “unit of something” in case of Shopify is revenue. Customers with small amount of revenue will pay Shopify less, than customers who have lots of revenue.

Now, let’s test it out in terms of best practices:

Revenue:

✔️ Simple to understand - every retailer knows how much they make

✔️ Easy to measure - yup, al the data is flowing through the Shopify platform, as they collect payments

✔️ Scales with consumption - it works, assuming that the more money you put through the system, the more you use the product.

✔️ Correlates to value - it’s a fair proxy for value, assuming retailers see Shopify as ‘cost of doing business’.

Overall, Shopify has done well choosing revenue their primary pricing metric. Now, I say “primary”, as Shopify has what’s known as secondary pricing metrics.

Shopify’s secondary pricing metrics are “staff accounts” and “inventory locations”

As a best practice, you should avoid having multiple pricing metrics, as they add pricing complexity.

In case of Shopify, the pricing team now has additional work as they need to decide whether Basic/Shopify/Advanced users can buy additional staff accounts or inventory locations, the price per additional location or staff account, volume discounts, etc… you can see how this starts to complicate things quickly.

The only time this additional complexity is justified is when you have a very diverse set of customers and you think that you will be leaving significant money on the table (i.e. primary pricing metrics does not let you subsegments customers sufficiently).

Example - 7Shifts

The “unit of something” in case of 7Shifts is locations. The more restaurants you have, the more locations you have, the more you pay.

I would think this works well for 7Shifts for the most part.

Per location pricing is easy to understand and measure. The pricing metric also correlates to value, as the more restaurants you have, the more complexity you have to manage.

The one shortcoming is “scales with consumption”. Imagine a single restaurant with 50 employees vs. 5 restaurants with 10 employees each. The first is free, the second one pays 5 x $29.99. They might be leaving some money on the table here.

I am sure there were a lot internal of debates around using employees vs. locations as their pricing metric, as they are both good candidates.

See Top 10 Pricing Metrics...

Summary

• Pricing metric is a key pricing element that helps you charge customers different amounts for the same product to avoid leaving money on the table

• Good pricing metric is (1) easy to understand (2) easy to measure (3) scales with consumption (4) is a good proxy for value

• You should aim for a single pricing metric whenever possible to minimize pricing complexity; only introduce additional pricing metrics if you are leaving significant money on the table

Additional Resources

• Check out pricingsaas.com where you can find a ton of pricing examples

• If you need help with pricing or monetization, we offer advisory services at Buyerson Inc.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn

Let’s start with the definition...

Reverse trials are a PLG user acquisition tactic that combines two other PLG acquisition tactics - freemium and free trial.

In a reverse trial, users get access to all the features included in the given tier (the one that they are trying out) and at the end of the trial, they either have to (1) pay to keep it or (2) downgrade to a freemium plan.

Example - PandaDoc

PandaDoc leverages reverse trials along with freemium plans. On the pricing page, users are presented with a choice to pick a freemium plan or try either Essentials or Business.

Getting it right…

When implementing a reverse trial, the two main considerations are the Entry Point and End of Trial stages.

1. Entry Point Stage:

Entry point is the stage where user has the opportunity to activate the reverse trial:

Entry Point Considerations

• Does the user have the ability to start on a freemium plan right away or will everyone start with a trial?

• Is there multiple plans users can try or only one trial?

• Does the user need to enter a credit card to start the trial?

Example - Vidyard

Vidyard gives users the choice to either start a reverse trial or sign up for their Free plan from the start.

Unlike PandaDoc however, Vidyard only has one trial (for their Pro plan). PandaDoc gives users the choice to try either their Business or Essentials plan.

Both companies however ask the user for a credit card up front when they start the trial. This will likely increase conversions to paid at the end of the trial, but will lower the number of people who start the trial.

When asking for a credit card up-front (to start the trial), keep in mind some of these best practices that PandaDoc has implemented:

• Highlight $0 cost during the trial period

• Specify the date when the trial period is over

• Add FAQs to address any objections or concerns

2. End of Trial Stage:

The end of the trial stage is a key consideration to maximize trial to paid conversions. The main consideration is whether use will be automatically converted to paid or downgraded to freemium.

End of Trial Considerations

• Does the user automatically get converted to a paid plan or a freemium plan?

• What happens if you don’t collect payment details at the beginning of the trial?

• When downgrading to a freemium plan, what happens to the trial features/data?

• How do you notify the user about the change?

Example - Vidyard

Vidyard automatically converts trial users to a paid plan at the end of the trial period. This is where asking for a credit card up-front really helps.

If you do not ask for a credit card, you will either have to pause / suspend the account until they do or automatically downgrade the user to a freemium.

Since Vidyard is asking for a credit card up-front, they put in extra work to put the user’s mind at ease by letting them know:

• They will be notified by email before they get charged

• They can cancel with ease

• The fact that the trial is Free for 14 days

Is Reverse Trial for Everyone?

Question 1: is your product and company ready for a freemium plan?

[skip this section if you already have one]

Having a freemium plan implies that the product must give some value away for free. This could be a whole feature (like eSignature) or limited feature (like Vidyard freemium - up to 25 videos). Your company needs to be prepared for the high volume of users, additional support costs and infrastructure costs.

Question 2: is your pricing and packaging compatible with a reverse trial?

Consider the fact that you will have a freemium plan that gives away some value, but also a set of features that you can gate behind a trial (e.g. templates or Zapier integration).

If your product is purely usage based, like Scraping Bee, where you get simply get higher limits with paid vs. free plan, there is really nothing to try.

Bonus: Reverse Trials for Paid Users

Reverse trials do not have to be limited to new users. You can apply reverse trials to allow paying customers to try features in higher tiered plans. This is especially impactful when you have features in those tiers that you want users to experience before commiting to a purchase.

Summary

• Reverse trials bring the benefits of trial and freemium acquisition tactics

• The main considerations are Start and End of trial experience

• If you already have a freemium plan and have gated features in paid plans - you are likely going to benefit from implementing a reverse trial

Additional Resources

• Check out pricingsaas.com where you can find a ton of PLG pricing examples

• If you need help running a pricing study, we offer it as a service at Buyerson Inc.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn

Let’s start with the definition...

Feature gating, in the context of PLG monetization, implies restricting access to a certain set of features and only making them available to customers who purchase (or upgrade to) higher tiered pricing plans.

Example - Hubspot

Hubspot leverages feature gating throughout their plans. For instance, the Professional plan includes features ranging from “Omni-channel marketing automation” to “Phone Support”, which are not available to customers on the Starter plan.

Getting it right…

Here’s the important step to making this work. There are two key steps:

Step 1: Provide a contextual CTA (Call-to-Action)

In the Hubspot example, they leverage the menu to indicate that there are additional features, along with icons and tooltips.

Step 2: Add Feature Discoverability

Feature discoverability lets the user experience the feature (or learn about it), before asking them to pay for it.

In Hubspot, this is done through a trial. You can try the gated features for 14 days to determine if they are right for you. In other cases, companies may have a landing page with screenshots or video walkthrough of the feature.

Note: you can apply this to both freemium users as well as paid users on lowered tiered plans.

Which features should you gate?

When restricting access to specific features, you have to make sure that the product can still deliver value without them. The extra (gated) features should be the ones that open up new use cases or enhance existing ones.

Alternatives to Feature Gating

The alternative to feature gating is usage gating. This monetization tactic puts a limit on feature usage based on some quantity and prompts the user to upgrade, once they hit that limit.

Example - Zoom

Aside from the core video conferencing capability, Zoom offers a feature called Whiteboard. Instead of restricting access, they restrict the number of Whiteboard available in each plan (3 vs. Unlimited).

This give the user ability to try Whiteboards and once they create 3, they will be prompted to upgrade.

The benefit of usage based gating is that users do not have to opt-in into a trial and are more likely to try the feature.

Common Gating Mistakes & How To Fix Them

1. No feature discovery: if you simply add a bullet point to your pricing plan and hope someone will upgrade based on copy alone, you are likely going to see fewer upgrades or potentially disappointing users if they pay and learn the feature did not meet their expectations. At minimum, consider creating a video that explains the feature to educate them on what to expect.

2. Plan misconfiguration: if your user just wants that one feature, but you force them to pay for a bunch of other features that they have no interest in, they will either stay on the current plan or feel like they are overpaying if they upgrade. If you notice these signals, consider offering the feature as an add-on or changing your plan configuration.

3. Wrong price point: to get someone to pay more for a feature (or a set of features), your users must see the additional value. If the price does not justify the added benefit, they will stay on the current plan. If you notice friction at this stage, consider running a Van Westendorp or Gabor Granger survey to find the right price point or simply experiment with discounts or different price points.

Summary

• Feature gating can provide great revenue expansion opportunity

• PLG patterns such as free time based trial can be used to enable feature discovery

• Adjust pricing & packaging as needed to make this work

Additional Resources

• Check out pricingsaas.com where you can find a ton of PLG pricing examples

• If you need help running a pricing study, we offer it as a service at Buyerson Inc.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn

In SaaS, you can acquire, monetize or retain customers by leveraging your sales team, marketing or your product (or a combination of the three).

PLG (or product led growth) is one of the three motions (sales and marketing being the other two) and monetization is the process of converting product value to revenue.

Elena Verna, has done an excellent job laying it out in a matrix, where she breaks down the responsibility of each:

To expand on this, the scope of PLG Monetization includes:

• Pricing pages 

• Checkout flows 

• Plans and prices (i.e. pricing & packaging)

• Paywalls and upgrade flows

• Freemium and Free Trial flows

• Reverse Trials flows

In a nutshell, PLG Monetization is anything in the self-serve product experience that helps in converting a free user to a paid customer or gets them to spend more by increasing their product usage.

Pricing Pages

Pricing pages live on the marketing site and they serve two main purposes in PLG:

1. Get website visitor to try the product for free

2. Get free user to convert to a paid user

Pricing Page Example - Octane AI:

Take a look at the pricing page below. If you are trying to decide if you should start a trial, it communicates:

• Product features you can expect (Quiz, Opt-ins, etc..)

• Price points (i.e. is this in my budget?)

• Target persona with revenue brackets (i.e. is this for me?)

• Social proof (i.e. can I trust / rely on this vendor?)

• It then wraps it up with a clear CTA - Start free trial

More Pricing Page Examples

Pricing Page Example - ConvertFlow

ConvertFlow prices their product per number of monthly visitors. For customers, who have been in trial, this is a tool to estimate their monthly costs and help them make a decision if they should subscribe.

More Pricing Page Examples

Tips:

• Pricing pages are a great place to run a/b experiments. They typically have a fairly large amount of web traffic, so you test different CTAs, copy, layouts, etc., to optimize for conversions.

Checkout flow

Checkout is the very bottom of your acquisition funnel. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the lead that you worked so hard to acquire and experience your product is ready to convert.

The purpose of the checkout is to:

1. Move user as smoothly as possible from hitting Upgrade to payment collected

2. Up-selling and cross-selling higher tiers or additional products (i.e. maximize ARPU)

Checkout Flow Example - Format

Format, a website builder for creatives. It offers a 14 day trial. To get into the checkout flow (at any time during the trial), there are multiple CTAs to active the checkout flow.

Once you are in the checkout flow, they present users with options to purchase domains and other add-ons. Notice the clear Plan Summary details on the right.

Everything is clearly laid out to ensure the user has no reason to abandon the cart.

Tips:

• Consider adding social proof in the checkout flow

• Consider what happens when trial expires and how to user into the flow then

• Consider deep linking support, so that you can run email campaigns to bring them right into checkout

• Consider support for discount codes in the checkout - but make sure they do not disrupt the flow (you don’t want users to abandon the cart just to Google for a discount code for you product)

Plans and Prices (i.e. pricing & packaging)

Ultimately, product monetization is built on top of your pricing and packaging.

The purpose of pricing and packaging is to:

1. Ensure that plans have the features that buyers want (according to customer segmentation)

2. Enable up-sell and expansion opportunities

3. Priced such that customers convert easily, but you don’t leave money on the table

The most common pricing structure in SaaS is what’s called good-better-best, where you typically see 3 tiers of plans, starting with lowest to highest price.

This does not have to be the case though. In fact many companies are moving to usage based pricing, where pricing is tied to some usage metric (e.g. per GB or per minute).

To get an idea of different pricing structures, checkout Top 10 Pricing Metrics.

Tips:

• Consider monthly vs. annual plans and associated discounts. Annual plans tends to be better for retention, but monthly plans convert better.

• Invest in good subscription infrastructure so you can experiment with pricing easily

Paywalls and upgrade flows

Feature monetization is a great way to drive additional revenue. The principal is pretty straight forward - any paid feature user has no access to on their current plan is an upsell opportunity.

Paywalls and upgrade flows work together:

1. The purpose of paywalls is to make timely and contextual prompts to upgrade

2. The purpose of upgrade flows is similar to the checkout flow - smoothly move the user along from upgrade to upgrade completed

Paywall Example - Spotify

Notice the copy on this screen - it implies user was clearly trying to engage with this feature before getting the prompt (i.e. make it timely and contextual).

More Pricing Page Examples

Tips

• Paywalls are your sales opportunity - consider using images, video, social proof or any other form of media to help you convey the value of this new feature

• Leverage payment method on file, to make the upgrade as smooth as possible (i.e. user should not have to re-enter their billing and credit card information)

• Instead of showing full price, consider showing them the difference in price - for example, if someone is on a $12 and the new plan is $18, consider saying “for an extra $6 you get….”

Freemium and Free Trial flows

By definition, a PLG company allows users to try the product before buying. There are two ways to do this - either by offering the user a free trial or a free plan (or both - more on this in the next section).

The main goals for these flows are:

1. To get user to see product value as quickly as possible and develop usage habits

2. To get users to hit some limit to prompt them to upgrade to paid

The main difference between freemium and free trial is that trials have a time based on usage based limit, therefore it will force the user to make a decision at the end of the trial.

Freemium Example - API Flash

API Flash lets developers capture screenshots of sites using their API. The freemium tier has 100 screenshot limit per month. It resets each month.

They do a great job informing users where they are with respect their monthly quota on the screen below. They also do it via the API calls themselves, returning an error message when they reach the quota. When they hit the limits, there screen provides a link to get users into the checkout flow.

More Pricing Page Examples

Tips

• Experiment with trial duration - typical trials range from 7 to 30 days, but ultimately it’s about finding what works for you business

• For freemium, instrument usage metrics, so you can measure how your freemium limits are performing - if you are giving away too much, users will never convert

• For trial, consider collecting credit card information before the trial or at the end. This will change the dynamics of your funnel, so you may need to experiment to see which option is best for you.

Reverse Trials flows

Reverse trial flow combines freemium and trial. Basically, you start a user on a trial with access to paid only features and when the trial is over, you let them either keep the paid features by subscribing or you downgrade them to a freemium plan.

Reverse trials are also a great mechanism for paid users to experience features that they don’t have access to. For example, if you have a paid users on a Basic plan and you want to upsell them on the Pro plan, you can let them try Pro for no additional cost for 14 days, and then they will be charged the full price (unless they downgrade back to Basic).

Reverse Trial Example - Vidyard

Vidyard, a video hosting platform, has both free plan as well as a Pro plan. You can sign up for either.

Tips

• Consider the downgrade experience. What happens when you downgrade to freemium. Do they lose data? Can they get it back if they upgrade again?

• Consider billing implications - more specifically, what happens at the end of the trial - do users have to opt-in or do they automatically get charged the new rate

Conclusions

• Monetization is a powerful lever for increasing MRR - but it has a lot of pieces that need to come together to make it work well

• PLG Monetization is ripe with opportunities to run experiments (in different flows, testing pricing, testing discounts, etc.)

• PLG Monetization takes work - but it has direct impact on MRR, so it’s worth it if you are optimizing for revenue growth

Additional Resources

• Check out pricingsaas.com where you can find a ton of free resources on monetization and pricing page examples

• If you need help running a pricing study, we offer it as a service at Buyerson Inc.

• We love connecting with people in the industry to generate interesting content - if you are up for a podcast or an interview, just connect with me on LinkedIn