Ask HN: Fixed vs Dynamic pricing.
Let's assume you've got a product that you can sell with two different pricing stratiegies:
A: three-level-pricing: basic - normal - pro
B: Custom pricing: The customer set the complexity (not the single features) on a horizontal slider, and the price adjusts accordingly.
Generally speaking, which one would you adopt?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2010 where @bobo82 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 9 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 5 comments
You should do some reading into the economic theory of bundling.
While custom pricing gives the user the most freedom, it may be confusing, and you may make more money by bundling your services. The classic example of this is movie studios which, when selling movies to theaters, will bundle a hot blockbuster movie with a less popular movie. By bundling these two movies together, the studio ends up with a higher profit than if they sold both movies individually at a higher total price.
That is the important part: by selling goods as a bundle at a lower price than the sum of the prices of the goods sold separately, you can actually increase your total revenue.
Here is a good article to help you: http://livingeconomics.org/article.asp?docId=288 ↗
You should be able to use analytics to get a sense of the utilities that users place on each item within your larger product. From there you can construct the pricing of your bundles to maximize your profit.
Good luck!
Ah difficult.. It kind of depends how that slider would move..
I like basic / normal / pro, but sometimes I like the slider. Assembla, and others do this: They provide a couple of packages, and a 'metered' package, where you pay for what you use.
I would say the tiered pricing is the best. The other method may lead to confusion and lost conversions. Customers want simple, and tiered is simple. They know exactly what they are getting and how much they are paying right up there.