How do you all approach iteration on your pricing/feature packaging?

Am I the only that only worked at companies where this process is so slow and requires a lot of software engineering time?
Is there a tool out there that you use?

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Well, stripe makes this fairly easy, but yes in my experience pricing ends up being a surprisingly thorny change. I wouldn’t say I’ve struggled with the engineering cost exactly but there have certainly been lots of conversations with engineers to cover the details.

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@Heather, Thanks for your reply!
What part of Stripe are you referring to?
Also, what kind of conversations do you have with eng? Are they more “we need to add feature flags”? or have you ever faced a “we need to move from a standard tier based pricing to usage based”?

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in addition to everything here I’d absolutely devour everything on the outstanding Profitwell/Price Intelligent blog by Patrick Campbell…

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Yeah been reading about it from a strategic perspective, but I feel like the pain in more in the operational aspect and the amount of resources available out there on the topic is pretty light.

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In my experience, pricing is the absolute hardest thing to test, and to do it correctly with meaningful results. Then the worst thing, something in the macro-economics changes and throws a giant wrench into everything you just thought you learned! (Sorry, I know this may not be super helpful, just venting.)

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We’ve built a pretty flexible system where entitlements are controlled via a dashboard (homegrown). So adjusting feature set and pricing is as simple as flipping a few switches for feature entitlement, creating a new SKU, and updating Unbounce for a new a/b on the appropriate landing page. It’s not a lot of engineering time for us to make a change. But is something that’s been honed over the course of several years and in hind sight the investment has paid off.

I should also add; we did try to convert to a usage-based pricing model, which was a 3 month engineering effort to refactor everything from the back end, web, and apps. And it was a big fail. Users did not understand it, caused massive complaints, flooded customer support with calls. And worse it failed to capture the additional revenue as users simply left before paying. We ripped it out eventually and went back to tiers. Not saying that usage base pricing doesn’t work, it just wasn’t a fit for our app and user-base.

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