Tiered Pricing Builder — SaaS 3-Tier Pricing Card Generator

The outer tiers exist to sell the middle one

Three editable tiers, a monthly price and feature list each, one shared annual discount, and the middle one highlighted. The layout encodes an argument, and it is worth making the argument explicit rather than leaving it as a convention.

Faced with three options, people tend to avoid both extremes and take the middle. That is the compromise effect, sometimes called extremeness aversion — and it is a different mechanism from the decoy effect, which needs an option that is worse than a rival in every respect. Three genuine tiers are not decoys. The middle wins because it reads as the safe choice between two positions the buyer can characterise, not because either flank is a trick.

The consequence is the useful part: you build three tiers in order to sell one. Put the plan you actually want people on in the centre, and treat the other two as instruments.

What each flank is for

The starter has to be visibly insufficient for a real team. This is where three-tier pages most often fail: a starter generous enough to be genuinely adequate becomes the default, and you have simply priced your product cheaply while keeping the extra columns. Its job is to be recognisably not enough for anyone with plans — which also makes it honest, because the buyer it does suit is a buyer you are happy to have there.

The top tier sets the upper anchor and serves the buyers for whom price was never the deciding factor. It does not need volume to be doing its job. If you find yourself designing it to sell, you have probably built a two-tier page with a decoration on the end.

At the defaults — 19, 49 and 99 — the outer two are positioning the middle rather than carrying the revenue.

Tier on something that grows

Split the tiers on a dimension that rises with the customer's own success: seats, volume, usage, scale. Then a customer who grows pays more without anyone reopening the contract, and your revenue tracks the value they are getting.

Two ways this goes wrong. Splitting on features a growing customer will never need leaves them on the entry price forever no matter how much they rely on you. And paywalling something basic — an export, a second user, the ability to leave — reads as punitive and makes the starter feel like a trap rather than a plan, which poisons the whole page.

The annual discount

It defaults to 17%, and the number is not arbitrary: two months free out of twelve is about 16.7%, so 17% lands on a framing everyone already understands.

The trade is real in both directions. You take less per customer and receive the money up front, with a year in which they have no renewal decision to make. Note that prepayment is not the same as a guarantee — refunds and cancellations still happen — so treat it as strong retention rather than certainty.

Under each tier the builder shows the annual total and the effective monthly rate, which is annual divided by twelve. That second figure is the one a buyer will hold up against a competitor's monthly price, so it is the number worth putting in your own copy.

Writing the feature lists

Short enough to scan, and written as what someone can do rather than what the feature is called internally. "Export to Excel" beats "CSV pipeline v2".

The test that matters: the difference between two adjacent tiers should be obvious in one read. If a visitor has to compare lists line by line to work out what changed, the page has already failed, and no amount of price adjustment will fix it.

This is a mock-up and comparison rather than a checkout — nothing is processed and nothing is saved. Once the tiers hold together, the bundle pricing calculator covers packaging several things together.