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Monetization and pricingPeople pick the cheapest plan.

The same prices sell differently depending on how they are presented. It matters which plan is selected when the page loads, what period the price is quoted over, and what sits next to it. I test the presentation of plans and prices, and I look at order value and revenue together with conversion.

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Where it shows up

What a project covers

A pricing page review
How plans, terms and prices are presented today, read against what customers pick and where they hesitate.
Variants worth testing
Defaults, price framing, plan order and the option set, designed as complete pages ready to ship.
The test
Run against the current page where traffic allows, and judged on revenue per visitor as well as conversion.
Upgrade paths
Where and when the product asks for an upgrade, and what it shows when it does.

Where I’ve done it

5 Axis Health

Employment, 2024–25. First product hire, then product lead.

An A/B test of plan selection with a three-month default, per-month price framing and an added six-month option raised average order value 76% and purchase conversion 30%.

Read the 5 Axis Health case

Content IQ

Employment, 2021–22. Product manager, monetization.

Experiments on page layout, ad placement, refresh and bidding across more than 20 publisher sites raised revenue per session 50% on mobile and 30% on desktop.

Sharethrough

Employment, 2022–23. Product manager, ad rendering.

Work on latency, load time, render rate and video start rate added $1.8M in annual revenue.

What the research supports, and what it doesn’t

Holds up

  • Whatever is selected by default gets chosen more often. In one experiment 42% agreed to be organ donors when they had to opt in and 82% when they had to opt out.

    Johnson & Goldstein, 2003

  • Quoting the same price over a shorter period can make it easier to say yes. In a field experiment with a savings app, about 30% signed up for a deposit framed as $5 a day and about 7% when it was framed as $150 a month. The total charged should always be shown too.

    Hershfield, Shu & Benartzi, 2020; Gourville, 1998

  • An option picks up share when it becomes the middle choice, though the effect is smaller for price and quality trade-offs than the textbook version suggests.

    Simonson, 1989; Neumann et al., 2016

Doesn’t hold up

  • Decoy pricing as a dependable tactic. It works with rows of numbers in a lab and mostly fails when the options are real products.

    Frederick, Lee & Baskin, 2014; Yang & Lynn, 2014

  • “Prices ending in 9 always sell more.” The effect depends on the first digit changing, and a just-below price can also read as a discount.

    Thomas & Morwitz, 2005

My plan selection test at 5 Axis Health changed the default, the price framing and the option set at once. The research above is why those three were worth trying. The test can’t say how much each one contributed.

References
  • Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives? Science, 302(5649), 1338–1339.
  • Hershfield, H. E., Shu, S., & Benartzi, S. (2020). Temporal reframing and participation in a savings program: A field experiment. Marketing Science, 39(6), 1039–1051.
  • Gourville, J. T. (1998). Pennies-a-day: The effect of temporal reframing on transaction evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(4), 395–408.
  • Simonson, I. (1989). Choice based on reasons: The case of attraction and compromise effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 16(2), 158–174.
  • Neumann, N., Böckenholt, U., & Sinha, A. (2016). A meta-analysis of extremeness aversion. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(2), 193–212.
  • Frederick, S., Lee, L., & Baskin, E. (2014). The limits of attraction. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 487–507.
  • Yang, S., & Lynn, M. (2014). More evidence challenging the robustness and usefulness of the attraction effect. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 508–513.
  • Thomas, M., & Morwitz, V. (2005). Penny wise and pound foolish: The left-digit effect in price cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 54–64.

Which is easier for you, 1 or 2?

Book a 30-minute callPick a time on my calendar. Bring the journey that is losing people.Write to meA few lines about the product and where it goes wrong is enough to start.

Or email david@heyspiegel.com