I've been through this same exact price confusion with customers. They told us they wanted to pay a la carte, but when we tested it they very much did not.

I think the psychology makes sense. When they told us they wanted to pay on a pay per use basis they based that completely on the past. They did the basic math. Last month I did 16 tickets. At $.25 a piece I would have paid $4! That's what I want to pay!

When faced with a future purchase decision, however, the mindset immediately changed. Now the decision was unbound. What if in three months I get to the point I have 1,000 tickets?!??! My god, now it's $250/month. That's crazy expensive! That fear caused a lot of issues.

So we tried the logical next step. $.25 per use, capped at a certain dollar amount ($25/month). That was too complicated to understand.

So we just started charging a flat $25/month (sales-leads fwiw). That worked really well.

As he said in the post, what a customer asks for and what a customer actually wants can be very different (and by wants he means what they will actually act on). Apparently they didn't act on paying per ticket but they DID act on a single no hassle price.

I started something around the same as Groove and I was told that our users only want to pay per ticket. After doing an AB test, it was clear that a small amount of people actually wanted this option but they were quite vocal about it.

My guess is that is what gives.

To add to this, even when we had implemented this for users, they were our worst customer by far.

Sometimes you have to read between the lines as well.... how many of the customers wanting to pay per ticket had signed up as a direct result of the first promotion which offered the ability to pay per ticket starting at $1?

Plus a chart that shows you significantly cheaper than three competitors is always a good incentive for some people to get the credit card out.

You are not alone in your confusion :/