Three pricing tiers fit nobody well. So Maya builds seven, one for every kind of team.
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Seven Ways To Say No — Volume I, Understanding Humans Before Products · Decision Making · Investigation · Core. Maya expands pricing from three tiers to seven to serve every segment, watches conversion fall, and finds the damage is entirely among accounts seeing the page for the first time
01 · Opening
Three pricing tiers fit nobody well. So Maya builds seven, one for every kind of team.
02 · The setup
Three tiers had been leaving money on the table for a year. Every segment review ended the same way.
Sam: Small teams say it is too much. Large ones say it is too blunt. Both of them are right.
03 · The setup
Maya: So we stop averaging. Seven tiers, one for each shape of team we actually see.
04 · The evidence
Six weeks after the new page ships, the number that matters has gone the wrong way.
Visit to paid conversion — Three tiers, prior quarter: 4.4%; Seven tiers, this quarter: 3.6%; Change: down 18%; Prices unchanged: yes
05 · The evidence
Sam: Roll it back. Seven was always too many.
Maya: Probably. I want to know which seven it was too many for.
06 · The evidence
The headline number is an average across two groups who met this page very differently.
Maya thinks: Someone renewing has seen our pricing before. Someone new has thirty seconds and no map.
07 · The evidence
Conversion change, split by prior exposure — First visit to pricing: down 31%; Existing account, upgrading: up 2%; Share of traffic that is new: 68%; Time on page, new visitors: up 44s
08 · You make the call
The story does not tell you first.
A. That the new prices are too high
B. That seven tiers is too many options
C. That the page has a bug on first load
09 · What happened
Dev: Upgraders are fine and newcomers fell off a cliff. That is not a price problem.
Maya: No. They are spending longer and buying less.
10 · What happened
The cut is the finding. An 18 percent fall says seven is too many. A 31-and-plus-2 split says who it is too many for, and why.
Maya thinks: If it were the prices, the upgraders would have moved too. They did not.
11 · What happened
Every option you add asks the reader to do a comparison. Three tiers is three comparisons. Seven is twenty-one, and the person doing them has never seen your product and has no idea which differences matter.
Someone who already uses the product is not doing that work. They know what they have and they are looking for one row, which is why upgrades held while first visits collapsed.
The fix is not a rule about how many tiers to have. It is noticing that a pricing page has two audiences with different amounts of context, and that a headline conversion number averages them into something that describes neither.
12 · What happened
Maya: Three tiers on the first visit. The other four live behind a link for people who know what they need.
Sam: I keep my segments and you keep your funnel.
13 · What happened
Conversion comes back to 4.6 percent, slightly ahead of where it started, and the four extra tiers keep earning from the people who go looking.
Maya thinks: Nearly deleted four tiers that were never the problem.
14 · Complete
A headline number averages audiences who met the page with different amounts of context, and the cut is usually the finding. Next: what a product owes a customer when it promises two minutes and takes forty.