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The pricing page of a website is usually overlooked relative to other portions of your site. You might spend a lot of time on the home or product page while giving the pricing page less thought. After-all, it should just be a few boxes with a list of features right?
Here are a few best practices when it comes to designing a pricing page and some examples from people who have gotten it right to show you how to make a great pricing page in 2020.
First of All, Do I Need a Pricing Page?
“The moment you make a mistake in pricing, you're eating into your reputation or your profits.”
- Katharine Paine
Depending on what you are selling, you might be able to get away with not having a pricing page on your website. For example, if you are selling a very high ticket item, like an extremely niche product that has to be custom-tailored for each customer. We actually don't have a pricing page for this reason.
In this case it might actually harm you to have pricing on your website, since it may cheapen the perceived value of your product. It would instead be better to have the user get in touch with a sales rep from your team.
For all other products, we highly recommend having a pricing page. If you're a SaaS company especially, you should list your rates transparently so potential clients can decide whether or not they can afford your product.
The Best Practices
Don't Overwhelm The User With Too Many Choices
Stick to a few plans (or have the customer contact you for something custom). Too many choices can actually drive users away if it feels like too much work choosing the right plan. Take a look at Slack and Dropbox for example. Each only offers 2 to 3 different plans, with Slack offering a custom Enterprise pricing that requires you to contact a sales rep.
Slack and Dropbox have just enough options that every customer's needs are satisfied without overwhelming you with 5 different choices to have to weigh.
List Out All of The Features That Differentiate The Plans
The feature list should be easily scannable and highlight the differences between each plan or tier.
The best way to to do this would be to keep each unique feature on the same vertical line. This ensures the users can quickly scan horizontally across the plans and figure out the differences for each feature.
Check out how Slack does this above. If a particular feature is important to a user, for example file storage, they can quickly look at the "File storage" row and look across the row to see what each plan offers.
Go in Order of Pricing/Amount of Features Offered
This is really helpful from a usability standpoint so that the user can gain context and lessen the chance of feeling overwhelmed. If you list your plans in order of increasing cost and features, it could also help you save space by adding a "All the benefits of the previous plan plus..." such as Slack does below.
Name Your Pricing Tiers Intuitively to Help The User Self Identify at a Glance
Slack did another great job here by giving each of their pricing tiers a user persona to actually let the user figure out which tier they should be identifying with. "For small- and medium-sized businesses" will likely cover most people coming to this page and they can quickly know that this is the plan they should consider.
Highlight The Plan You Want The User to Choose
If you have a specific plan you want the user to choose, you can use some UX tricks to get the user to subconsciously be more inclined to pick this plan. For example, Box.com visually distinguishes their Business plan and tells the user that it is the "Most Popular" plan, which automatically makes a user start by looking at that plan.
Have a "Contact Us" Plan
Most companies do this for their enterprise plans so that clients can negotiate better rates. Notion does this by removing the dollar amount and replacing it with a link to the sales contact page. If you expect to have clients with large user-bases or more demands, consider adding a Contact Us plan.
Conclusion
There are a lot of ways to go about structuring your pricing page and a lot of it will depend on what type of service/product you are selling.
Regardless of what you are selling, it is a good idea to follow these best practices. They will ensure that your offerings are clear, quickly scannable and don't overwhelm the user with too many choices. Although the pricing page is often one of the last pages that is designed and built, it is often one of the first pages that users end up clicking on when considering your product.
