Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / How a Solo Dev Hit 10K MRR With a Pricing Page A-B Test
Transcript
- Lucas: Okay, so today I want to talk about something that sounds almost too boring to matter, but it made one solo developer an extra five thousand dollars a month. Luna: I'm listening. What's the boring thing? Lucas: His pricing page. Specifically, he changed the number of columns and the order of the plans. That's it. No new features, no marketing spend, no pivot. Just a two-week A/B test that doubled his monthly recurring revenue from five thousand to ten. Luna: Wait — doubling MRR from a pricing page tweak? That's not boring, that's every founder's dream. Lucas: Right. And the wild part is, most people would have never run the test because they assume pricing is too risky to touch. This guy's product is a project management tool for small creative teams — think like a lightweight alternative to Asana but specifically for video editors and designers. He'd been stuck at five thousand MRR for about eight months. Luna: What was his original pricing? Lucas: Three tiers in a single column: a free plan, then $19 per month for the 'Pro' plan, and $49 for 'Team'. The free plan was pretty generous — unlimited projects but limited storage and no integrations. His conversion rate from free to paid was around two percent, which is actually not bad for a SaaS. Luna: So what did he change? Lucas: He ran a simple A/B test with two variations. The control was his existing single-column layout. The challenger was a two-column layout — yes, just two columns instead of three plans stacked vertically. In the challenger, he removed the free plan entirely and put the $19 and $49 plans side by side. He also added a third plan at $29 per month, placed between them. Luna: So he went from three plans to three plans, but changed the layout and added a middle tier. Why drop the free plan from the pricing page? Lucas: That's the key insight. He moved the free plan to a separate 'Get Started' button above the fold. The pricing page itself only showed paid plans. His hypothesis was that showing the free plan first was anchoring visitors to zero dollars, making the $19 plan feel like a jump. By removing that anchor, the $19 plan became the lowest perceived cost. Luna: And the $29 plan — that was new. Where did that number come from? Lucas: He picked it almost arbitrarily at first — he wanted something between $19 and $49. But later he told me he'd read about the 'Goldilocks effect' in pricing: when you have a low, medium, and high option, people disproportionately pick the middle. So he created a middle tier that added a few features the $19 didn't have — like priority support and more integrations — but nothing too dramatic. Luna: What happened in the test? Lucas: After two weeks, the two-column layout with the $29 middle tier was converting at 3.8 percent — nearly double the control's two percent. But the really interesting part was the plan mix. In the control, 70 percent of paid signups chose the $19 plan. In the challenger, 55 percent chose the $29 plan, 30 percent chose the $19, and only 15 percent chose the $49. Luna: So the average revenue per user jumped because people gravitated to the middle. That's classic decoy pricing. Lucas: Exactly. The $49 plan acts as a decoy that makes the $29 look reasonable. But the $19 also benefits because it's now the 'bargain' option. And by removing the free plan from the page, he eliminated the zero-anchor. The result: his monthly recurring revenue went from five thousand to nine thousand eight hundred in just two weeks, and it stabilized around ten thousand after the test ended. Luna: That's a 100 percent lift from a layout change. Did he do anything else during that period? Lucas: Nothing. No new features, no ads, no content push. He just changed the pricing page and the order of the plans. Of course, he also updated the comparison table to highlight the differences more clearly. But the core product didn't change at all. Luna: I love that this is so replicable. Any solo dev with a SaaS can run this test. What tools did he use? Lucas: He used a simple A/B testing tool called VWO — Visual Website Optimizer — and he ran the test for two weeks because his traffic was about five thousand unique visitors per month. He wanted at least a hundred conversions per variation to be statistically significant. That's a good rule of thumb: don't end a pricing test early, even if you see big numbers. Give it enough data. Luna: What about the risk of cannibalizing existing customers? Did he grandfather anyone? Lucas: He only tested the pricing page for new visitors. Existing customers stayed on their current plans. That's crucial — never A/B test pricing on your existing user base without warning. He used cookie-based segmentation so returning users saw the control. Over time, he planned to migrate everyone, but he wanted to validate the new pricing first. Luna: Smart. So what's the one takeaway for someone listening who hasn't touched their pricing in a year? Lucas: Run a simple two-column test. Remove the free plan from the pricing page — put it on a separate 'start free' button. Add a middle tier that's roughly 50 percent more than your lowest paid plan. And most importantly, test it for at least two weeks. The upside is massive and the cost is basically zero. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, that really does help us keep doing deep dives like this. Appreciate it. Luna: Alright, so back to the pricing test — one thing I'm curious about: did he ever test a different anchoring strategy, like putting the highest price first? Lucas: He didn't in that test, but I've seen other founders do it. There's a good case study from a guy who sells email marketing software — he put the $99 plan first, then $49, then $19. His conversion rate actually dropped. People saw the $99 and bounced. So the order matters. Typically, listing from lowest to highest works best because it eases people in. Luna: But in this test, the two-column layout with the middle tier highlighted — did he visually emphasize the $29 plan? Lucas: He did. He put a small 'Most Popular' badge on the $29 plan card and made it slightly bigger. That's another common tactic. But he tested that too — one variation without the badge. The badge version outperformed by about 12 percent. So small visual cues can add up. Luna: So the combo of removing the free anchor, adding a middle tier, and using a badge — that's a pretty low-risk experiment. What would you say to a founder who's scared that changing pricing will upset their funnel? Lucas: Start with a small percentage of traffic — like 10 percent — and run it for a month if your traffic is low. You can always revert. The biggest risk is not testing at all. I've seen too many founders leave thousands of dollars on the table because they assumed their pricing was fine. This guy was stuck at five thousand for eight months. One test doubled it. Luna: Alright, I'm convinced. Next time I build a SaaS, I'm A/B testing the pricing page before I add a single feature. Lucas: That's the right order. Features get you users, but pricing gets you revenue.