Your pricing page is losing you customers

0:00There's a flight deals company called Going. It used to be called Scott's Cheap Flights. They changed only two words on their pricing page. Sign up for free became trial for free. Trial starts increased 104%. This is just two words that they changed on the same page, same product. They didn't do anything else, but it doubled conversions. Your pricing page is the highest intent page on your entire site and most SaaS

0:31companies have never tested a single thing on this page. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. Think about who visits your pricing page. This is not someone browsing your blog, not someone who clicked a social post and definitely not someone who is not interested in your product or service. This is someone who already looked at your product, understood what it does and then they went back to check the price. So they're at the bottom of the funnel, they're ready to buy,

1:01or if they don't like it, they're very ready to leave. And what do they find? On most pricing pages that I've seen, it's just a basic three column layout, a bunch of feature checkmarks, some dollar amounts, maybe there's also a toggle to switch between monthly and annual plans. That's it. Less than 10% of SaaS companies regularly test their pricing page. The page closes to the sale and almost nobody is optimizing for it. Meanwhile, customer acquisition costs have gone up over 60% in the last 5 years.

1:34So you're spending more to get people to your site, but then you're kind of handing them down this page that hasn't changed since you launched. There's a number from McKinsey that sticks with me every time I look at a pricing page. A 1% improvement in pricing optimization leads to an 11% increase in profits. But this is not revenue I'm talking about here. It's actual profits. So this is the math you're ignoring when you don't take your pricing page into consideration when you're doing any sort of page optimizations.

2:08I already told you about goings to work change. They meet the change to try for free instead of sign up for free. And this difference matters because sign up sounds like some sort of commitment, while trial implies that it's temporary. So the buyer feels safer, they know it's still the same free tier, it's just different framing. Selected something bigger. Most SaaS tools charge per seat, so you buy 50 seats and you pay for them, even if only 20 people are using it right now,

2:41and most of the other ones never logged in properly. Slack introduced what they call a fair billing policy. You only pay for users who are actually active. If someone on your team stops using Slack, you stop paying for their seat. Conversions on their pricing page went up 30% after they made this change. And of course, it's not really a design change. It's just a trust signal. The buyer reads that and thinks, oh cool, they're not trying to lock me into seats I won't use. It removes the biggest objection before the buyer even raises it.

3:14And they put it right on the pricing page. It's not buried somewhere in the FAQ and it's not hidden in terms. It's the front and center where the buyer is making the decision when they're looking at the price. Intercom took the opposite approach. Substraction. The pricing page had mandatory form fields, something like name, company, email address. You couldn't even see the full pricing until you filled all of those out. They removed the mandatory fields and conversions went up 32%. Also, lead quality stayed exactly the same.

3:45The friction wasn't protecting anything, it was just costing them customers. DocuSign found a problem they didn't know they even had. The pricing page worked fine on desktop, on mobile it was a hot mess. Comparison tables required scrolling sideways, buttons were way too small to tap on, so they had to rebuild the entire mobile version with swipable tables and touch-friendly buttons. And this is when mobile The conversions jumped 59%. What I want you to do now is to pull up your pricing page on your phone.

4:16Is it hard to read or hard to tap on anything? Then you're losing some people like DocuSign was. 37 Signals ran one of the cleanest tests I've ever seen. They added a photo of a customer to their high-rise signup page. This is not a testimonial and not a case study. It's an actual photo. So signups went up 102.5% afterwards. They also tested a longer version of the same page with the same photo. That one only lifted 22.7%. So the photo worked.

4:51The extra length didn't really make any difference, which means that it's better to be concise than comprehensive on a pricing page. Dinesh Agarwal runs RecurPost, which is a small social media scheduling tool. When he A-B tested pricing at $30 versus $29.99, the $29.99 plan converted 8.4% better over one month. He said, Perception can often take precedence over logic in purchasing decisions.

5:24It's just one penny. 8.4% more customers though. Your buyers don't do the math. They see a number that starts with a 2 instead of a 3 and it just feels cheaper to them. It isn't really, but it just feels that way. And on a pricing page, feelings close off to the deal. But it's not always about going lower. Peter Lewis, CMO of Strategic Pete, tested $47 against $49 for a digital product. The $49 price converted 14% better.

5:56$47 felt like a discount bin price, while $49 felt deliberate. Highlighting a recommended plan increases conversions by up to 35%. Just visually calling out that a specific price tier is most popular or best value already does the job. So you're not really tricking anyone here. You're just reducing decision fatigue for them. Three identical looking columns make the buyer just work harder because there are three things they have to choose from.

6:27But if you highlight one of them, that's a good thing for them to start with. Let's talk about hidden fees for a second, because 81% of users say unexpected fees are the main reason they don't complete a purchase. This doesn't really have anything to do with the pricing page itself. It's actually a trust problem. Because if the final price is different from the one they just saw on your pricing page, then you've broken trust at the worst possible moment. This is exactly what also the company Going thought.

6:58It's the same product, the same tiers, same pricing. They only changed two words and doubled their trial starts. The pricing was already fine, but the page itself and the story behind it wasn't. We don't have enough traffic to A-B test. This is something SaaS founders often say, but you don't need a split test to apply proven patterns. Just highlight your recommended plan, remove any hidden fees, and make sure the mobile layout actually works.

7:28Near the CTA, try adding a human face. These aren't really experiments that you're doing here. The table stakes that most pricing pages just still don't have, but they are proven to work. Another thing I hear is our dev team has bigger priorities. I mean, on a pricing page, a small change can increase your trial signups while keeping your trial quality the same. So most of these changes take you a few minutes to implement,

8:00like just changing the copy of the trial button. In case of DocuSign, it was a bit more complicated because they had to change their CSS and the layout. out. Some people, like BaseKit, completely redesigned their pricing page, they made it a bit bolder, added testimonials, they clarified some currency options. Still, it was worth it because they saw a 25% lift in trial signups. So what these are in the end are just marketing projects. It's not something your development team has to do as a sprint.

8:32And the final thing SaaS founders are afraid of is changing anything related to pricing is very risky. You're not changing the price here. You're just changing the page about your pricing. Nothing about the product changes. It still costs exactly the same. You're just changing the way, you just change the way you present the pricing. And that's the only thing that's broken. Companies that revisit their pricing presentation regularly grow 30% faster than those that just adjust maybe once a year.

9:04So the risk in this case isn't changing the page, it's just leaving it alone and not having any benefit from it. Next I want you to open your pricing page and run through the following scenario. Can a visitor tell which plan to choose within five seconds? If you have the classic three-tier columns and they all look the same, then they have a decision problem. You should highlight one. Pull up the pricing page on your phone. Can you read the comparison table? Can you tap the sign-up button without zooming in? Are there these little information

9:38icons that on desktop show you more information, but on mobile they don't really work? If nothing works properly, then you're losing visitors on the device most of them are using. Is the price on the page the actual price they will pay during checkout? Are there any surprise fees? It shouldn't say starting at, because that usually turns into something else. And 81% of buyers bail when the numbers change at the end. And finally, is there a human anywhere on the page? Any face? A testimonial from someone who chose this plan? A customer quote who

10:12switched from a competitor? Or if you have some kind of demo or onboarding help that you offer afterwards, someone from the support team can also be the face of the company. Once you've gone through all these four checks fix the worst one first and then go through all the other ones your pricing page gets the most motivated visitors on your side so I highly recommend that you pick one thing from the order that I talked about and fix it this week this is Before They Buy I'm Deian see you next week.