Spent three months building a reporting module. 140 customers at 29 a month, mostly small teams. The two options in front of me are a 10 add-on that existing customers can buy, or folding it in, keeping everyone where they are and moving new signups to 39. I have no feel for what fraction would ever buy an add-on and I only get to do this once.
Fold it in, raise new signups, grandfather the existing 140 explicitly and tell them you are doing it. I did exactly this and the email announcing that existing customers keep their price and get the new module free was the best received thing I have ever sent. Two replies asking to pay more, which I did not take, and zero churn that month. You get the goodwill now and the higher price forever on new business.
If you do go the add-on route, the mistake to avoid is mine: I launched it with a blog post and an email and no in-app surface at all. Four sales in three months. The people who would have bought it did not know it existed at the moment they needed it, which is the only moment that matters. An add-on with no upsell path inside the product is a feature you have hidden behind a paywall and then hidden the paywall.
Simple test I use: if fewer than about a third of customers would use it, it is an add-on. If more than about two thirds would, it is a price rise. In between, ship it to everyone and raise new prices, because the packaging complexity is not worth the marginal revenue.
The argument against add-ons that nobody makes until they have lived it: every SKU you add multiplies your billing surface. Mid-cycle additions produce prorations, cancellations produce credits, annual plans with a monthly add-on produce alignment questions, and every one of those becomes a support ticket that you answer personally.
I have two SKUs and they generate more billing confusion than the product generates product confusion. One price is a feature.
Worth adding that this compounds with annual plans. Somebody adds the module in month seven of an annual term and now you are hand-calculating five months of proration for eight pounds.
One price is a feature. I have a note above my desk now.
One more consideration for a solo product: which of these can you undo. Raising new prices is reversible next week if signups collapse. Selling 140 people a separate SKU is a decision you are still administering in three years. Prefer the reversible option when you are guessing.
@weekend_margin · 3mo ago · 3 replies
I did the add-on version and the number that matters is attach rate, which was 18 percent for me and I had privately assumed 40.
So the arithmetic on 140 customers: an add-on at 10 with an 18 percent attach adds roughly 250 a month. Folding it in and moving new signups to 39 adds nothing this month and adds 10 per new customer forever, which at even fifteen signups a month passes the add-on inside a year and keeps going.
The add-on also has to be sold, repeatedly, in-app, forever. The price rise is sold once, on the pricing page, by itself.
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@signup_bonus_sy · 3mo ago
Attach rates in that range are common for a module that is genuinely optional. The ones that get high attach are the ones people needed to do the core job, and those should not have been add-ons in the first place.
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@leaky_bucket_ed · 3mo ago
Eighteen percent against an assumed forty is exactly the kind of number I needed. That flips it.
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