Being bombarded with products all the time, we all find ourselves on a pricing page from time to time. Right?

“Oh wow! What a great pricing page. It shows all the information I need, in good time and order. Wow, I want to try this out.” — said nobody ever.

Actually, today I did. Sitting in front of my m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶ computer amidst the coronavirus outbreak, I came across this great pricing page that stood out for its quality of information & presentation. So instead of reading just about corona and remote, I thought we can make better use of these times. Let’s dive into this!

How do people consume pricing pages, anyway?

I hate to break it to you, but most people don’t care about your great product. What people care about is value — what can this quirky site do to make my life easier.

To give you a bit of background, I observed my own process of evaluating whether to go ahead with a product, seconds after I have gone past that initial “I am interested in this product” phase:

1. I will never try out your product, unless I know what I’m agreeing to. To decide to try it, I need to know what are its benefits (features), as well as the compensation for them: free or paid, what’s the price? To this end, for me, call-to-actions such as Free trial or, better, One-month free trial are a huge deal-breaker: it just makes me feel like all you care about is hooking me up on this, only to take advantage of my vulnerability once I have invested time and resources into using the product for a period of time.
2. You get 3 seconds to lead me to the information I need. Once I am invested enough with curiosity about the product, I search the page (cltr+F) for 4 specific keywords: price, pricing, plan(s), free. I expect to find a link to that pricing page within the time it takes to type these search phrases in. If none of those lead to a hit, I am already heading out to Google to find a better replacement for the interest you have inspired in me. Even though I may be an outlier in this category, bear in mind the 15 second rule: this is the amount of time people will spend, at most, to find this type of information at this early stage of the customer journey. If you don’t provide the content within that timeframe, don’t expect the conversion rate to fly.
3. On the pricing page itself, I am looking for 3 things: the different options, their prices and their features and limitations. But bear in mind, this is more than just a listing of plan-price-features. For example, I am a student, so I always check for educational licenses or student discounts. I used to work for a non-profit: so I will need to know if you cater for such types of customers. Some people are freelancers, they have different needs than employees. Others want a product to help with open-source development, again different needs. Depending on where you live, some payment options may not be available, so choice of payment types can be decisive. The point is, all of this needs to be neatly and readily available for your visitor to learn. People like to feel in control of the situation, especially when making decisions: information is a key part of creating this of control as well as in building trust.

The Miro case study: here’s why I loved their pricing page

Miro is a visual collaboration tool: it helps you and your team share and work together on visual mindmaps, graphs, mockups, etc. But what we are interested in is its pricing page:

The 7 things I liked about this page (see below for annotated screenshot)

1. Hits my “pricing” search straightaway
2. Immediately shows my 4 available options + I can see the number of people each plan is best suited for
3. High-level feature comparison + it is clear that the next plan includes everything from the one before. This is too often overlooked, according to research.
4. Caters to different customers: big and small teams, freelancers as well as non-profit and educational institutions (check the FAQs)
5. Detailed feature matrix is both informative and educational. Make sure to use plain English, or explain terminology to show empathy to novice users. Did you notice that each feature is clickable? Discoverability is key to making the matrix educational: the tooltips will help your users with explanation of what “SCIM User Provisioning & Deprovisioning” means.
6. 10 FAQs: enough to cover the genuinely frequently asked questions, but not too overwhelming to make reading through them a burden
7. Long and detailed footer, again hitting those keywords we are all searching for

So, this is it. Explaining a great pricing page is not merely as hard as building one. But, understanding brings you one step closer to true mastery :-)

If you want to learn more about pricing pages, here is a great study.

More from Ivo Valchev on Medium:

Thank you for getting all the way down here! I appreciate and value your time.

Till next time. 😉