Three myths about pricing page design

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about pricing page design that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“It only matters for big sites”

Hiding prices costs you more enquiries than it protects. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

“Our platform handles it”

Say what happens after someone picks a plan. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about pricing page design before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Three options is usually the sweet spot — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.