You can do the A/B testing only on the pricing page. For ex, A would display $5 and B would display $10. When the user get to the checkout display always the lower price and tell the user he got a discount. You can measure the % that get to the checkout and the bounce rate at the checkout.
If you need to drop the price back down then drop the price for all existing users too. If you're charging monthly this is easy.
I was referring to the difficulty when I:
1. Raise prices too high
2. Conversion rate and revenue is harmed, so I then revert to the lower price
3. I now have a bunch of old users paying a higher price, and they might be annoyed when they see the price has gone down. At a minimum I'd need to alter their payment plans to give them the new cheaper price in future
I guess it wouldn't be that difficult. Still, it wasn't long ago since the last price rise and for now I'd rather focus on growing and retaining the customer base.
An example transition plan:
* switch new users to a free trial -> sign up to $5/month for continued access * observe conversion rate from trial users to paying customers * perform `conversion rate x existing active user base` calculation * send apologetic email to existing users pointing out that free != sustainable, with offer to grandfather in free access to any who feel strongly enough to send you a personal email about it
Also what kind of marketing are you doing? Often with projects that one is passionate about the drive is to build more features as opposed to build a user base. I think your product is developed enough feature-wise (I am certainly looking forward to trying it now that I have heard of it), and so I wonder what you are doing to build your user base. Off the top of my head I would suggest talking to people in language learning forums & communities, creating a newsletters / reminders to keep your existing users engaged, and possibly running targeted advertisements if you haven't already.
It is much, much easier to convince a user who is already paying you money to pay more than it is to convince a brand new person to start paying you at all.
The trick is that most people won't be happy paying more for the same product - so you need to find ways to up-sell new products and features to your existing userbase.
This is another place where "business" accounts could be useful. If you were to launch a more expensive product aimed at businesses, you could market it to your existing individual users. The chances are some of them would be able to convince the company they work for to shell out - and a testimonial from an existing employee is going to be much more effective than a cold-call sales process.
Just put them back on the cheaper plan and refund them the difference, if this ever happens. It's an easy fix.
Also the on-boarding is a bit difficult, I should be able to see a few words / phrases before I install a plugin. FYI I have never installed a plugin other than an Adblocker
- Increasing price. Yes, it started at only $10/year, and I've gradually increased it as the product has improved. It's very difficult to know the optimal price. I use split testing for some things but it feels wrong to do this for price, and with current conversion rate it would take ages to get meaningful results anyway. I'm hesitant to push price too high because lowering it back down would be tricky. Existing users paying a higher price would be annoyed. Also, at this stage I think increasing the user base would be more valuable long term compared to milking the current users for more money. I've been wondering if I could add a higher priced tier in future for more advanced features.
- Yes! I definitely want to recommend texts to people based not only on difficulty, but also on interest. This is something that will become more valuable with more users and a larger, higher quality library of texts. It isn't highest priority right now, but hopefully in future.
- Yes. I developed some features to target at teachers managing a class of students: http://blog.readlang.com/2014/02/12/readlang-for-teachers.ht.... I got a bunch of teachers using it with real classes but decided to abandon the idea because: 1. The response was positive but usage wasn't what I'd hoped. 2. Focus. As one guy I've got enough on my plate making an awesome product for self motivated individuals. Diluting my focus and the focus of the product seems like a very bad idea.