Pricing Experiments That Finally Moved My SaaS

I spent eighteen months at the same MRR before I touched pricing seriously. I had assumed pricing was a thing you set once and forgot. Three months of experiments later, MRR is 3.1x.

Experiment 1: Removed the Free Tier

Result: signups dropped 60%, paid conversions tripled. MRR up 25%. The free tier had been a customer-support cost center. Removing it gave me back hours per week.

Experiment 2: Introduced an Annual Plan at 20% Discount

Result: 35% of new signups took it. Cash flow improved meaningfully. Annual customers churn at half the rate of monthly. Single most leveraged change I made.

Experiment 3: Doubled the Price for New Customers

This was the scary one. I had been charging $19/month. I changed it to $39/month for new signups while grandfathering existing customers. Conversion rate dropped from 3.8% to 3.5% — barely moved. Revenue per signup almost doubled. MRR followed.

The lesson I keep relearning: people are not buying the price. They are buying the value, and the price is signal of how much you think it is worth. Almost no business I have advised was overpriced. Almost all of them were underpriced.