Subscription Pricing Starting Strategy: start high and lower, or start low and raise?

Christian, I was a VP of marketing for major corporations for over a decade and can assure that starting high and going low is much easier than trying to raise your prices after the fact.

The exception is if you announce up front that this is a "one-time offer" an "introductory price" or some other qualifier. If you do that, then you must follow through and, at least for a time, sell the product only at the higher price.

Your credibility, your brand, it at stake.

Final thought, if you continue to add value to your product then starting with a low price and moving up (the value chain) can work. That's what Honda did years ago. They entered the US auto market with low end products and then, over years, began building larger cars with more features, which allowed them to move up the price/value curve.

Raising prices isn't that hard if you're sensible about it. Specifically:

1. Warn existing customers before it happens.
2. Grandfather existing customers with old prices so they don't care.

New customers won't know it was ever less.

Generally lower prices are more honest at first because the product doesn't do much yet and probably has bugs. But it's not dishonest to charge more first either.

A nice middle-ground is to technically charge high but have deals all the time. That way you can just stop having deals whenever you feel like it.

Here's a very good reading on pricing.

“Don’t Just Roll The Dice: A usefully short guide to software pricing”

It discusses at one point about finding the best pricing that will get you the most revenue.

I personally think that increasing the price while adding more features would be the way to go. But it also depends on what competition you have, I guess. Maybe the competition wants to compete on price. Then you'd have to take into account other factors than the number of features.

Joel Spolsky says in his interview from "Founders at Work" that they raised the price of FogBugz quite a few times and each time the number of customers increased.