Pricing
How to design good/better/best pricing tiers
Three tiers isn't a cliché — it's a mechanism. Done right, tiers capture more willingness to pay and steer buyers toward the plan you want them on. Done wrong, they just confuse.
Good/better/best is the most common tiering structure because it works: it captures the top of your willingness-to-pay range, serves the middle, and gives the price-sensitive an entry point — all at once. But tiers only work if each one has a clear job and the gates between them make sense.
| Tier | Job | Gate on |
|---|---|---|
| Good | Entry — land the price-sensitive | A meaningful-but-limited core |
| Better | The anchor — where most should land | The features most users need |
| Best | Capture high willingness to pay | Power, scale, or premium support |
What to gate, and what not to
The art is choosing what separates the tiers. Gate on a dimension that grows with value — usage, seats, advanced capability — so upgrading feels like paying for more success, not paying to remove an artificial restriction. Gating on something customers resent (throttling core functionality, hiding basic features) breeds churn, not upgrades.
And design the anchor deliberately: the middle tier should be the obvious choice for most, with the top tier making it look reasonable by comparison. Tiers are a nudge, not just a menu.
Building your tiers
Cadenly's Pricing Strategy workflow designs the tiers on top of your chosen value metric and model — concrete price points, what gates each level, the anchor, and the free-tier call — grounded in the competitor research and your willingness-to-pay segments, so the structure is deliberate rather than copied.
- Good/better/best captures top, middle, and price-sensitive at once.
- Gate on dimensions that grow with value, not artificial restrictions.
- Design the anchor — the middle tier should be the obvious pick.
Design tiers that do a job
Cadenly builds your tiers on your value metric and segments — gates, anchor, and price points.
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