🤑Pricing Experiments

Learnings from studying the top 100 grossing apps

Hey Friends 👋🏾,

Three things are guaranteed in life: death, taxes, and subscription products increasing prices.

About 6 months ago, I conducted my first pricing research by studying the top 100 grossing apps on the app store. The research gave me 7 pricing and discount heuristics that I shared.

Today, I am building on that initial research by examining how the top 100 grossing apps adjusted their prices over the past half-year.

Here is what I learned:

Insight #1: The average price increase was ~27%

~20% of the top 100 apps tested a price increase in the last 6 months.

Insight #2: About a third of price tests were designed to push more people to the annual plan

Most companies maintained the standard X10 ratio between monthly and yearly plan prices (2 months free if you buy yearly) when testing price increases.

However, about a third tested pushing users into the annual plans by hiking monthly prices more than the annual ones.

Insight #3: Lifetime and weekly plans were the most robust to price increases

Insight #4: Not all pricing experiments were winners
About 10% of the pricing experiments tracked were not successful.

This is it for today,
Ali Abouelatta