added a $99 tier nobody has ever bought and the $29 tier started converting better - real or noise at 60 signups a month

5 versus 9 out of 60 is not a result. With counts that small the interval around your conversion rate is enormous and the two periods overlap comfortably. You'd need months at this volume to separate a real six point lift from noise.

That said, the cost of leaving the tier up is roughly zero and the expected value is mildly positive, so the correct move is to keep it and stop checking weekly. Just don't build a pricing philosophy on it.

The effect is real in general even if your data can't prove it here. But the mechanism isn't magic - it's that a three tier page makes people ask 'which one' instead of 'whether'. The $99 changes the question being asked.

What I'd change: make the top tier something a real customer could plausibly want, name it after a kind of company rather than a feeling, and let it be sold on a call. The first time someone does buy it, that one conversation will teach you more than the conversion bump ever will.

Keep it. Delete the fake features. Look again in six months.

On the honesty question, I think listing features you haven't built is the actual problem, not the price. A tier nobody buys is fine. A tier promising things that don't exist is a refund waiting to happen, and it will happen on the one sale that matters, from the customer who'd have been your biggest.

Take the unbuilt items off and let the tier be thinner. It'll still do the anchoring job.

Something I only realised after doing this: check what the new tier does to your existing customers. I added a higher plan and three people on my cheapest one emailed asking whether they were about to be downgraded. Nothing had changed for them at all, but the page looked different so they assumed the worst.

One line in a changelog email saying nothing changes for existing plans would have saved me three anxious replies and one near-cancellation.