Three tiers at 19, 49 and 99, solo B2B tool, and about 90 percent of customers sit on the middle one. The top tier currently has two features I built because a prospect asked and nobody has ever bought it. I cannot work out what belongs up there without it feeling like I am holding back things people need. What is your rule for what gets gated?
There is one category that genuinely belongs at the top and it is the things a company buys rather than a person: audit logs, role permissions, single sign on, data retention controls, an invoice instead of a card. Nobody who is buying with their own money wants any of them, and companies will not deploy without them.
Moving those upwards got me six upgrades in a quarter from accounts that were already paying and had been asking their IT department for permission. It did not remove anything from anyone, which is the test.
I gated CSV export on the cheapest plan and it went badly. Three refund requests in a fortnight, one public review that mentioned it specifically and still comes up, and I reversed it a month later. The revenue from the handful who upgraded rather than left was smaller than the churn. Whatever you gate, do not gate the door out.
Stop gating features and start gating scale. Pick the thing that grows as the customer gets more value out of you, and let the tiers be amounts of that thing rather than lists of capabilities.
For my tool it is projects and connected accounts. Everyone gets every feature. The 19 plan is a freelancer's volume, the 49 is a small team's, the 99 is an agency's. Nobody has ever been annoyed at hitting a limit that exists because their business grew, and everybody is annoyed at a padlock next to a button.
The side effect is that upgrades happen without a sales conversation, because the customer upgrades when they are already succeeding.
Annoyed at a limit you grew into versus annoyed at a padlock is the distinction I have been missing for a year.
Works beautifully until you have one customer whose usage is enormous and whose willingness to pay is not, which is when a usage axis needs a ceiling and a conversation. Rare, but worth planning for before it happens.
I got this by asking rather than guessing. Twelve customer calls, and the question that produced the answer was not what would you pay more for, it was tell me about the last time you nearly stopped using this. Four of them described the same scaling wall, which turned out to be the axis. Nobody mentioned either of the two features I had built for the top tier, and one person had not noticed the top tier existed.
Disagreeing with gating collaboration and export, which is where a lot of people reach first. The people who invite colleagues and pull data into their own reports are the ones who make you spread inside a company, and charging them for it slows down the mechanism that grows the account. Charge for volume, charge for the corporate requirements, and let the evangelism features be free.
Strongly agree on export specifically. Gating export also makes you look like you are holding data hostage, which is the single worst impression to give a buyer who is evaluating whether to depend on you.
@signup_bonus_sy · 6mo ago
Three tiers, one axis. If you cannot name the axis in a sentence, you do not have three tiers, you have one product and a menu.
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