Pricing Your Client Plans

Nothing stalls a launch like pricing. It feels momentous, so partners polish spreadsheets for weeks — while the honest truth is that a first price is a hypothesis you will revise within months anyway. This lesson gives you defensible starting numbers in an hour, and the reasoning to adjust them later from data instead of nerves.

Start from the market, not from costs

Your clients already have a reference price, set by the generic tools they know: mainstream link-management plans cluster between $9 and $29 per month at the entry and mid level, with team-oriented tiers above that. Price inside that band and nobody blinks; price far below it and you signal a hobby project; price above it only where your niche focus visibly earns the premium.

Note what is absent from this logic: your costs. Your platform subscription is a flat $49–$399 depending on plan, which means cost-plus arithmetic would push you toward absurdly low prices at small client counts and absurd margins at large ones. Price to the market; your costs determine your break-even, not your price tag. (The full cost picture is the unit-economics lesson.)

Two platform rules bound the range. The minimum plan price is $5 per month — below that, card processing fees consume the payment. And prices are in US dollars in the current release, tax-exclusive: if your clients are in a jurisdiction where you must charge VAT or sales tax, account for it in the price and get advice on filing, because you are the merchant of record.

Three tiers, one job each

Two plans make clients choose between "cheap" and "expensive". Four make them study a comparison table. Three is the standard for a reason — each tier has exactly one job:

• Entry (~$9). Job: make trying you a non-decision. One custom domain, a few hundred links, full analytics. This is the plan your marketing quotes, the number in your ads and directory listings.
• Core (~$19–29). Job: be the plan most clients actually live on. More domains, more links, QR styling, a couple of team seats. Design this one first, for your niche's real weekly workflow, then derive the other two from it.
• Top (~$49+). Job: catch the heavy users — agencies inside your client base, teams, API users — and make the core tier look reasonably priced. Generous limits, API access, priority support if you can honour it.

Anchor effect included: a visible $49 tier makes $19 feel modest. Even if the top tier sells rarely, it earns its place on the page.

Separate tiers with limits your niche actually feels

The dashboard lets you set, per plan: link count, tracked clicks per month, custom domains, team seats, and feature switches (API access, QR styling, targeting, A/B splits, password links, UTM templates, and so on). The art is choosing the one or two limits your niche hits naturally as it grows, and being generous with everything else.

Restaurant clients feel domain and QR limits, never link counts. Affiliate marketers feel link volume and API access. Agencies feel team seats and client separation. A limit nobody hits never triggers an upgrade; a limit everyone hits on day one just irritates. If you do not yet know which limits your niche feels — fine: copy a sensible default now ($9: 1 domain, 500 links / $19: 3 domains, unlimited links, 2 seats / $49: 10 domains, API, 5 seats) and let support tickets teach you.

Trials, yearly billing and the knobs worth turning

Trial. Offer one — 7 or 14 days. You get a 14-day trial from the platform without a card; extend the same courtesy. A trial converts sceptics that no landing page can, and for your manual-payment clients (next lesson) it doubles as the onboarding window.

Yearly. Offer a yearly price at meaningful discount — the platform itself uses 20% off, a sensible default. Yearly clients prepay your costs and, more importantly, cannot churn for twelve months. Push yearly at the moment of visible success (a good campaign report), not at sign-up.

Discounts. Decide your policy now, in writing, even if the policy is "no discounts, ever". Ad-hoc discounts negotiated one at a time are how a $19 plan quietly becomes a $12 average. A written policy — say, "20% for annual, 50% for the first three founding clients, nothing else" — costs you nothing and saves you from yourself.

What you'll get wrong, and how to fix it cheaply

Accept in advance: your first grid will be wrong in one of two boring directions. Signs you priced too low: trials convert at very high rates without questions; nobody ever complains about price; clients casually mention pricier tools they also pay for. Signs you priced too high (rarer): demos go well but trials do not start; the only objection you hear is the number.

The fix is a rule of platform mechanics plus a rule of manners. Mechanics: you can add a new plan and hide the old one from new sign-ups at any time — existing clients keep their price. Manners: raise prices for new clients freely and often; touch existing clients' prices rarely, with notice and a grandfathering period. Your retention (a Money-track lesson) is worth more than the increment.

Checklist

• [ ] Write down your three tiers — name, monthly price, yearly price — inside the $9–29 band for entry and core unless your niche justifies otherwise.
• [ ] For each adjacent pair, name the one limit that pushes a growing client upward. If you cannot name it, adjust the limits until you can.
• [ ] Check the floor: every price ≥ $5/month, in USD, tax treatment understood for your jurisdiction.
• [ ] Set the trial length and write your discount policy in one sentence each.
• [ ] Create the plans in the dashboard and look at your own pricing page as a stranger would. Would you pick the middle one? Good — that was the design goal. Next: connecting the ways clients pay you.