Why we lowered our pricing near the height of inflation

Key takeaways

1. Yip raised prices with each major feature launch until signups slowed at $8 per month, then used discounts and a final increase to $10 per month, and only new subscribers saw the increases.
2. Pay-what-you-want worked in part because people chose to pay more: only 10% of legacy users switched to a lower price, and the 37% of users paying above $100 annually account for over 60% of revenue.
3. Average revenue per user fell, but Yip reports that subscriber lifetime value is trending up and margins stay high.
4. Letting users pause a subscription and keep their data instead of canceling coincided with better churn and trial conversion rates.
5. Yip says the experiment was affordable because Lunch Money is bootstrapped and profitable, web-first, and runs with a lean part-time contractor team.
6. The results are hard to attribute cleanly, since Mint shut down a few months after the change and sent many new users to Lunch Money.