Well, we didn’t. Yet. Stage, I mean. We haven’t rolled out our pricing. But yet another impressive tech company which had enjoyed explosive growth for the past several months just caused massive dismay and churned a number of customers by updating their pricing.

You can read the tweet and replies for yourself. 

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In summary, TripleWhale’s product offering grew in such a way that they were offering a great deal more value to customers. It also grew in such a way that modular pricing seemed to make sense - and they spent months carefully debating a new pricing strategy internally, consulting with highly credible pricing experts, and crafting a strategy that they hoped would allow them to capture more of the value they were providing. 

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What ultimately happened was that existing customers saw vastly different prices, with little communication. The changes rolled out to everyone, all at once, instead of in phases. And there’s no easy way to undo those changes. 

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Prior to this, Reddit, the self-anointed “front page of the internet,” devised and implemented a new pricing strategy which seems designed to quash the ecosystem of third-party clients. They didn’t pilot the new pricing with a subset of API users. They didn’t roll it out gradually. They announced the changes in a bombastic, public, and irreversible way, and doubled down as their userbase revolted. It remains to be seen how the site’s fortunes will change in the coming months. 

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Back in April, much-loved no-code platform Bubble.io changed their pricing structure in a way that caused an “exponential increase in monthly prices” for many customers. They did this after a year of diligent work. 

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At Stage, we believe in a world where pricing changes don’t have to be monolithic, months-long efforts with buyoff by committee. We believe it’s possible to rapidly iterate on your pricing structure, roll out new pricing to new customers while leaving existing customers on old pricing, and make small, controlled changes in a continuous fashion. We believe, in other words, that our software allows you to approach pricing as a science rather than an art. 

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If you don’t want your next major customer email to be an apology for drastic pricing changes, reach out to us, and see how we can help. 

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