FEAR in Pricing Tests

F.E.A.R. - This is the biggest reason as to why startups don’t test pricing as often as they should.

I worked on subscription & payment teams which processed over $1B+ per year. And it’s common that the codes in payments remain the same for years without a single line of code change.

Why? Because they afraid.

They are afraid that a tiny bug would disrupt their entire business models.

They are afraid that their existing customers would angrily respond to the discount you provide to the new ones.

At the same time, if you ask founders why they decided to price their apps at, let’s say, $29.99 per month with 200 credits, they don’t know. They just picked the number because it looks … SAFE.

Pricing is Testing. And no, I didn’t mean just to test different dollar amount.

In the age of AI, pricing has become more complicated than ever (ever heard about the Claude tokens?). And how you offer pricing with different credits and promotions may control the customer acquisitions. It is the single biggest factor to go from user acquisition to paid customer conversion. And yet most AI startups just don’t do it.

It is said “The only constant in life is change”.

The only constant in pricing? It is testing.