22 active subscriptions at $19, all from the first year. New price will be $39 and I am confident about it for new customers.
What I cannot decide is the existing cohort. Grandfather them permanently, grandfather with an end date, or move everyone and eat some churn? And practically, what does the billing side of this look like - I have never changed a price on live subscriptions.
Mechanically this is less scary than it feels. Creating a new price does nothing to existing subscriptions - they keep billing the price object they were created with until you explicitly change them. So step one is just: make the new price, point checkout at it, done. The old cohort keeps paying $19 with no action from you.
Two traps. First, do not archive the old price if you might still want to use it, and do check what your payment links and any hosted pricing table are actually pointing at - it is very easy to 'raise prices' and keep selling the old price for a month because a link still references the old id. Second, when you eventually do migrate someone, set the proration behaviour deliberately. The default will prorate mid-cycle and generate credits and small invoices you did not plan for. Migrating at the renewal boundary avoids the whole mess.
Shape I would use: old rate holds for twelve months, announced now, then a move with at least 30 days notice.
The payment link thing bit me exactly as described. I announced a price rise, updated the site, and kept selling the old price for five weeks to everyone who came through a link in an old newsletter. Grep your codebase and your marketing for hardcoded price ids before you announce anything.
Grandfather them and stop thinking about it. $418 that costs you nothing to keep, from the only people who took a chance on you when the product was bad. In two years, if things go well, this cohort is a rounding error you never spent a single anxious evening on, and you have twenty-two people who tell other people you are decent to deal with.
It stops being free the moment the old plan constrains the product. Grandfathered price, fine, forever. Grandfathered plan with unlimited anything in it - seats, usage, storage - is the one that comes back and hurts, because the cost of serving those accounts grows and you have promised it away. If the old tier has an unlimited in it, put an end date on the plan even if you keep the price.
Did it in two steps, $19 to $29, then $29 to $39 eight months later. The second raise churned noticeably less than the first, which I did not expect. My read is that people had already seen a rise happen, seen the product get better afterwards, and stopped treating it as a betrayal. If you are nervous, two smaller steps is a real option.
New price for new customers today. Decide about the old cohort in six months with data instead of now with anxiety. The two decisions are not actually coupled.
The email matters more than I expected. Mine was three short paragraphs: the price is going up for new customers, yours is not changing, here is what the extra money is paying for. No apologies, no long justification. Two of fourteen replied - one to say thanks, one to ask whether they could switch to annual at the old rate, which I said yes to instantly because a year of prepaid cash at $19 is better than a monthly at $39 that might churn.
@muslin_mira · 3mo ago
22 x $19 is $418. Moving all of them up is $858 if nobody leaves, and nobody-leaves is not a thing. At 30% churn on that cohort you land around $600, so you are still ahead on paper.
What the spreadsheet does not show: those 22 are your entire pool of testimonials, references, feature feedback and word of mouth. The delta is $180 a month. One introduction from a happy early customer is worth more than that. I would not run this as a revenue decision at these numbers.
Reply
Report