# $10 vs $12.50 vs $14.95 monthly price: +33% revenue at $10

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Pricing page (SaaS)
- Elements: Price
- Date shared: 2005-10
- Test run by: [MarketingExperiments](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/marketingexperiments/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://marketingexperiments.com/a-b-testing/price-testing
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/subscription-site-monthly-price-points/

Cutting a subscription site's monthly price to $10 brought in 33% more revenue than the next best price, $12.50, and more than double the orders of $14.95. MarketingExperiments (MECLABS) ran this four-day A/B/C price test for a paid-subscription website and published the numbers in a research brief. The only thing that changed between the three landing pages was the price.

## Result

**+33% revenue at $10**

- $10/month: 156 orders and $1,560 in revenue, the best of the three on both counts.
- $12.50/month: 94 orders and $1,175 in revenue. The $10 price earned about 33% more revenue than this.
- $14.95/month: 74 orders and $1,106.30 in revenue. The $10 price had about 2.1 times the orders and about 41% more revenue.
- With equal ad spend of $808.02 per page, the reported return on ad spend was 93% at $10, 45% at $12.50 and 37% at $14.95.
- These are first-month figures. The brief's longer-term revenue numbers are projections, not measured results.

## Control

The landing page offered the subscription at $14.95 per month, the highest of the three prices tested.

## Variant

Two identical landing pages showed $12.50 and $10.00 per month. Paid search traffic was split evenly across all three pages.

## Why it likely won (our reading)

- The extra orders at $10 more than made up for the lower price per order, so volume won the revenue race.
- Paid search visitors often compare options quickly, so a lower monthly number may have cleared their mental price limit.
- For a subscription, each extra subscriber can pay again next month, which makes order volume worth more than it looks on day one.

## Caveats

This was a four-day micro-test with 324 orders in total and no significance figures shared. The data dates from 2005, and the brief's lifetime revenue figures are modelled rather than measured.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we lower our monthly subscription price, then total first-month revenue will rise because the gain in sign-ups will outweigh the lower price per subscriber.
- Primary metric: Revenue per visitor (orders x price, divided by visitors) for each price point
- Guardrail: Churn or cancellation rate by price cohort
- Guardrail: Refund rate
- Guardrail: Customer acquisition cost per paid subscriber
- Who should test it: Subscription and SaaS businesses with steady paid traffic and enough volume to read results quickly. It fits less well when you sell to a few large accounts or when price is set by sales negotiation.

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Credit: MarketingExperiments ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/subscription-site-monthly-price-points/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.