Pricing Pages
Sales keeps hearing the same sentence from people who eventually call: I could not work out which plan I needed.
A confusing pricing page costs sales. Hear how to fix it on your commute.
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The page has three columns and forty rows. The plan names are Starter, Growth and Scale, none of which describes a company. The prices are monthly amounts that are only true if you pay for a year, and the third column says Contact us.
So the page is answering a question nobody asked, which is what the plans contain. The question people arrive with is which one is for me, and the page has no sentence anywhere that answers it.
A pricing page is the highest-stakes page most products have, and it is designed less carefully than almost any other. The reason is that it looks like a table, and a table looks like a solved problem.
Anatomy of a Pricing Page
A pricing page is a small set of components repeated per plan, plus three things that sit across all of them.
The Plan Card
Six parts, in the order people read them.
The plan name. The audience line, one sentence saying who it is for. The price, with its billing period. The call to action. And a short feature list carrying only what distinguishes this plan from the one beside it. The audience line is the part that decides the most and appears the least, because naming an audience means excluding one.
What Sits Across the Plans
Three components serve the whole page.
The comparison table, holding the full feature list row by row. The billing toggle, switching between monthly and annual. And the trust row, carrying logos, numbers or quotes. Below those, a frequently asked questions block usually absorbs everything nobody could fit into a cell.
The Plans That Break the Grid
Two entries in almost every pricing page do not behave like the others.
The free plan, which has no price and a different goal, and the enterprise tier, which has no number and a form instead of a button. Both sit in a layout designed for priced, self-serve plans, and both are covered in article 6.
What Each Part Is Answering
Every component maps to a question somebody is holding.
Which one is for me, answered by the audience line. What will I pay, answered by the price and the period together. What do I get, answered by the feature list. Can I trust this, answered by the trust row. A page that answers three of those four sends the fourth question to sales.
Pro tip: Open your pricing page and look for a sentence naming who each plan is for. Most pages have plan names instead, and a plan name is a label rather than an answer.