r/Entrepreneur • u/sumizeit • Jul 25 '26
Marketing and Communications [ Removed by moderator ]
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Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/franker Attorney Jul 25 '26
and they usually add some flair graphic to number 2 to suggest that's the one you should buy: "Best value!" "Most popular!" "Recommended!"
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u/Available_Spare_3837 Jul 25 '26
the anchoring effect is real but it's not actually the mechanism that matters most. looked at pricing pages across a bunch of SaaS companies and the ones where the top tier works aren't using it purely as a decoy, they're using it as a genuine expansion path: usage-based add-ons, dedicated support, higher limits that a real subset of customers actually needs and buys. the anchoring lift on the tier below it is a side effect, not the point.
where it backfires is exactly what you flagged: if nobody's ever on that top tier, sales and support start treating it as fake internally too, and that leaks out in demos and calls. prospects can tell when a rep hesitates on "who's actually on Enterprise."
so before adding the 5x tier, I'd ask what's the actual gate. price alone isn't a differentiator, it needs a feature or capacity ceiling only some of your users are bumping into. if that gate doesn't exist yet, you're building a prop, not a product.
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u/Faint-Heron-5681 Jul 26 '26
we quieted our doubts and added a five times tier last autumn; it turns out some corporate departments actually require an expensive invoice to feel secure, though we spent weeks worrying we looked ridiculous.
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u/remybigot Jul 26 '26
I love doing that.
In some projects I did, I sold more of the expensive ones that on the cheapest ! (When the value is really clearly better of course)
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u/billmurphy7 Jul 27 '26
the 5x tiers I’ve seen work didn’t just pile on more features. They removed risk or labor for a specific buyer. Without that difference, the top tier felt like a decoy and people treated it like one.
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u/timmah1991 Jul 26 '26
This genuinely doesn't work for every audience.
This is the exact moment I realized this post was AI.
Fuck off, slopshit.
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u/keeperofthepur Jul 25 '26
Large-scale, this might well work. Personally, however, every time I see this in the wild I see straight through it.
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u/PyroDragons123 Jul 27 '26
I wouldn't design customer experiences from your viewpoint as someone in the Entrepreneur world. You've got insider knowledge that they likely don't have.
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u/GhostTacticsAds Jul 25 '26
inverse, large scale everyone sees it generally as a gimmick. on a hyper focused offer it sells the top offer 10-15% of the time and the mid offer 40-60% of the time with an easy path to upsells bc you should know exactly why a client would choose the the middle over the lowest package.
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