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> I use split testing for some things but it feels wrong to do this for price

You can do the A/B testing only on the pricing page. For ex, A would display $5 and B would display $10. When the user get to the checkout display always the lower price and tell the user he got a discount. You can measure the % that get to the checkout and the bounce rate at the checkout.

That's a simple but great idea! I've pondered the difficulty of A/B testing price before and had not come across it (or thought of it myself). Thanks.

Glad I could help, its not my idea tho... credits to: http://www.abtestingbook.com/

Why not grandfather current users in at the current price and only increase the price for new users?

If you need to drop the price back down then drop the price for all existing users too. If you're charging monthly this is easy.

Yeah, this would be my recommendation as well. Others have taken this approach and it just makes people like you even more because they get to feel like early adopters who are being rewarded - and you actually then lose nothing at all.

I always grandfather users. And it's easy when raising prices. The old users get to keep the old cheaper price and are happy.

I was referring to the difficulty when I:

1. Raise prices too high

2. Conversion rate and revenue is harmed, so I then revert to the lower price

3. I now have a bunch of old users paying a higher price, and they might be annoyed when they see the price has gone down. At a minimum I'd need to alter their payment plans to give them the new cheaper price in future

I guess it wouldn't be that difficult. Still, it wasn't long ago since the last price rise and for now I'd rather focus on growing and retaining the customer base.

Yes, alter the payment plan. Old users find out their subscription price has dropped -- that's a happy surprise not an annoyance. Assuming monthly billing. Yearly might be more complicated; perhaps extend the subscription length.

Forgive me for jumping in with yet more unsolicited advice, but I can't help thinking that all your users should be paying at least $5 per month.

An example transition plan:

* switch new users to a free trial -> sign up to $5/month for continued access * observe conversion rate from trial users to paying customers * perform `conversion rate x existing active user base` calculation * send apologetic email to existing users pointing out that free != sustainable, with offer to grandfather in free access to any who feel strongly enough to send you a personal email about it

I second the price increase idea - or perhaps another tier for usage. Ideally the free tier should be enough for a very casual users, or enough to test, but once they get serious they are incentivized to purchase something. You could try doing a timed trial too - 30 day for free usage perhaps. As others have mentioned I wouldn't worry too much if you need to lower prices in the future - as long as you reduce the monthly fee that your older customers get I am sure they will be happy.

Also what kind of marketing are you doing? Often with projects that one is passionate about the drive is to build more features as opposed to build a user base. I think your product is developed enough feature-wise (I am certainly looking forward to trying it now that I have heard of it), and so I wonder what you are doing to build your user base. Off the top of my head I would suggest talking to people in language learning forums & communities, creating a newsletters / reminders to keep your existing users engaged, and possibly running targeted advertisements if you haven't already.

"Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. "

It is much, much easier to convince a user who is already paying you money to pay more than it is to convince a brand new person to start paying you at all.

The trick is that most people won't be happy paying more for the same product - so you need to find ways to up-sell new products and features to your existing userbase.

This is another place where "business" accounts could be useful. If you were to launch a more expensive product aimed at businesses, you could market it to your existing individual users. The chances are some of them would be able to convince the company they work for to shell out - and a testimonial from an existing employee is going to be much more effective than a cold-call sales process.

>Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed.

Just put them back on the cheaper plan and refund them the difference, if this ever happens. It's an easy fix.

I am sure you have thought about it, but how about pricing it per language? It might be a good idea to price it at $50 per language.

Also the on-boarding is a bit difficult, I should be able to see a few words / phrases before I install a plugin. FYI I have never installed a plugin other than an Adblocker

You considered a trial where you keep a low price for 3-6 months then a higher one? They see both in the beginning with no trickery. Just a clear indicator they try it cheap and keep it inexpensively.