The Pricing Tier I Deleted and What Happened Next
I had a $9 Starter tier on one of my tools for eighteen months. Deleting it was the best pricing decision I made last year. Here is the math, the customer impact, and the lesson I am now applying to every other product.
Gagan Deep Singh
Founder | GLINR Studios
For about eighteen months one of my SaaS products had three tiers: free, $9 Starter, and $29 Pro. Every pricing post I read at the time said you should have three tiers. Psychology. Anchoring. Getting people into the door at a low price. I had absorbed the advice and shipped it.
Last September I deleted the Starter tier. Revenue went up. Support load went down. I should have done it a year earlier.
What the Starter tier actually looked like
The Starter tier was $9 a month. It included the core features with some caps: ten projects instead of unlimited, email support instead of Slack, basic analytics instead of the full dashboard. On paper it was a reasonable on-ramp. In practice it was the worst segment in the business.
Here is what the numbers looked like before I deleted it:
| Tier | Price | % of customers | % of revenue | % of support tickets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 71% | 0% | 24% |
| Starter | $9 | 22% | 17% | 58% |
| Pro | $29 | 7% | 83% | 18% |
The Starter tier was a fifth of the customers and well over half of the support load, for 17% of the revenue. Every dollar of Starter revenue cost me roughly ten times the support time of a Pro dollar.
The pattern made sense once I looked at it. Starter users were people who needed the product enough to pay, but not enough to justify the serious price. That middle ground is also the ground where expectations are highest and the willingness to read docs is lowest. They wanted the full product for a tenth of the real price, and when the caps bit, they filed a ticket.
Why the tier existed at all
I put it there because the playbook said to. Every SaaS pricing article said "have a low entry tier to anchor the Pro tier." The theory is that the $9 price makes $29 feel reasonable. The theory is not wrong. The theory assumes the low-tier customers are low-cost to serve, which is a pricing-theorist assumption that does not hold for most real products.
The $9 tier also felt ethical. I liked the idea that someone could use my product for a small amount of money if a free tier did not quite fit. What I had not considered was whether the $9 tier was actually better for those users than a generous free tier. It was not. The caps made Starter users constantly bump against limits, which is a worse user experience than being on free forever with broader caps and no expectations.
What I replaced it with
After the deletion, the pricing became free and $29 Pro.
The free tier got more generous. Three projects instead of one. Full analytics rather than basic. Email support capped at a reasonable SLA rather than paid-tier priority. The goal was to make free actually useful so that people who were not ready for Pro had a real product to use, not a crippled demo.
Pro stayed at $29. No changes to features. No bundle reshuffling.
That was it. Two tiers. One free, one serious. No middle ground.
What happened to the numbers
Four weeks after the change:
- Starter customers from before the change either upgraded to Pro, churned, or moved to free. Roughly 40% upgraded, 35% churned, 25% moved to free.
- New signup rates for Pro doubled in the first month. The Pro tier no longer had to compete with a cheaper option from the same seller, and the anchoring that pricing theorists talked about turned out to be less valuable than the clarity of "one paid option, this is it."
- Support load dropped by roughly 40% in aggregate. The 58% of tickets that were coming from Starter disappeared, and the Pro users who came from the Starter churn did not file tickets at anywhere near the same rate.
- Total monthly revenue dipped 4% for two weeks, then recovered, and was up 11% by week six.
The dip was real and I did not pretend otherwise. The recovery was also real and the trajectory kept going up. Six months later the product was doing noticeably better by every metric that mattered.
The lesson I am applying to other products
Pricing is not about revenue maximization directly. Pricing is about filtering the customers you want.
A cheap tier attracts the customers most willing to demand a lot and pay a little. Those customers are not your target market. They are a tax on it.
The right question is not "how do I get more people to pay me something." The right question is "who is willing to pay me a serious amount, and how do I reach more of them." The free tier serves the top of that funnel by letting people trust the product before committing. The paid tier serves the people who have already decided the product is worth real money. Anything in between becomes friction.
Where this does not apply
Before I generalize too hard: there are products where a middle tier makes sense.
- Products with very high marginal costs per user (compute-heavy APIs, video processing) need a tier structure that matches cost structure. A $9 tier that uses $2 of compute is still profitable.
- Products with strong network effects benefit from more paid users at any price, because each paying customer generates value for others.
- Products sold to larger organizations sometimes need a tier that a manager can buy without procurement, typically under the $10-15 threshold. Killing that tier locks you out of a specific expansion motion.
None of those applied to my product. The product sells to individual developers. Marginal cost per user is low. There are no network effects. Managers are not buying it on a corporate card. The Starter tier was there because I had absorbed advice without checking whether the advice applied.
What to ask before you delete a tier
Before killing a pricing tier, run through these:
- What percent of revenue does this tier generate?
- What percent of support load does this tier generate?
- What is the ratio of those two numbers?
- If existing customers on this tier were forced to choose between free and the next paid tier, what would the split look like?
- Are the features in this tier valuable enough at a higher price, or were they cripples to justify the lower price?
If the revenue-to-support ratio is unfavorable and the tier's features do not survive on their own at a higher price, the tier is not serving your business. Delete it. Your customers will adjust faster than you expect. Your calendar will thank you.
The unpopular version of the advice
Most pricing advice on the internet is written by people who have never had to personally answer a Starter-tier support ticket at 11pm. If they had, the advice would skew toward fewer tiers, more generous free tiers, and serious paid tiers with a real gap from free. Less anchoring theater, more clarity.
Three tiers might be right for your business. Check the math first. If you have one tier that generates far more support work than revenue, cutting that tier probably beats optimizing it.
Delete the middle. Watch what happens. Adjust from there.