This is just a fun thought experiment designed to entertain, spark some ideas, and perhaps share valuable lessons. It's intended to give overworked and lost founders a bit of a laugh while considering pricing and packaging their products for the first time.
Any resemblance to actual companies or their pricing strategies is purely coincidental, I promise!
Step 1: Keep Your Pricing Opaque
Make it difficult for customers to figure out the cost of achieving their desired outcome right away. You can do this by charging differently for features that are essentially similar but slightly varied and by making it hard to grasp the total cost upfront. True experts in this field also ensure that customers exhaust their allotted subscription usage while trying to make the product work for them, but before they actually achieve their goals.
Step 2: Overcomplicate Your Pricing Model
Add a confusing layer of indirection like credits, and create ten different pricing tiers. Stack a seat-based model on top of a usage-based model. Eventually, you might realize that charging for seats limits your growth—but don't worry! Just throw in a special non-linear discount for seats (like the first N seats for the price of 2). To add an insult to injury, add an option for buying one-off credits separately. After all, solving a combinatorics puzzle has got to be a fun prerequisite exercise for your (hopefully very motivated) economic buyer before making a purchasing decision, right?
Step 3: Offer Too Much for Free
Leave all your valuable features outside the paywall, even for paying customers. This way, your free users will have no reason to upgrade, and your paying customers will be left wondering why they are paying for credits they never use. Who needs revenue when your users are (confused but) happy, right?
Conclusion
So, there you have it! Three simple steps to completely f up your PLG pricing strategy. Pricing can feel daunting, but it's one of the most important ways to attract users, showcase your product's value, and build a thriving business. They say smart people learn from others' mistakes. I wrote this to help you be one of those smart people!
