🧪 The $1 Pricing Experiment

At Postly, we help teams manage and publish to hundreds of social media channels — from Facebook pages to LinkedIn profiles, YouTube channels, and more.

We’ve always believed in transparent, fair pricing. So earlier this year, we decided to try something bold:
Let customers pay per active channel, starting at $1/month.

It felt logical.
It felt generous.
It felt like the kind of thing a customer would love.

We were wrong.

🔁 A Quick Timeline of the Chaos

• December 2024
  We were on bundled plans ($14, $30, $100) — users got fixed numbers of social accounts and unlimited channels. But we were dealing with bugs, and we couldn’t tell if the issue was product-related or pricing confusion.

• January 2025
  The bugs were mostly fixed. It's time to experiment with pricing.

• February 2025
  We introduced per-channel pricing:

  • $3/channel (Professional plan, 3 users)

  • $7/channel (Business plan, unlimited users)

• March 2025
  To test price elasticity, we dropped it further:

  • $1/channel on Pro

  • $3/channel on Business

  That’s when the chaos really began.

🧠 What I Learned from Charging $1

Here are the key lessons — behavioral, strategic, and brutally honest:

1. Low Price Attracts the Wrong Crowd

When someone is paying $1/month, they’re not necessarily grateful. In fact, we got:

This person was paying $1, and still wanted a discount.

At this level, we attracted:

• Low-intent users who barely used the platform

• High-support volume for minor or non-issues

• Card testers and fraud attempts

The overhead of managing these users cost us more than they paid.

2. Customers Don’t Always Know What They Want

We assumed customers would love the flexibility to choose how many channels to pay for.

Instead, they got confused, overwhelmed, and hesitant.
Decision fatigue set in. They wanted clarity — not control.

3. Pricing Is a Trust Signal

Here’s the paradox:
The lower your price, the less people trust your product.

Even though the product worked beautifully, some users assumed something was wrong — because it was too cheap to be real.

4. There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair” Price

We tried to be fair. We optimized for transparency. We built pricing that scaled with usage.

But we learned: Customers don’t want fair. They want simple, familiar, and valuable.

Changing pricing models is hard — not because of logic, but because of habit.

5. Cheap Isn’t Scalable

Our support team was buried in low-level tickets. Churn was high. MRR was stagnant.

Meanwhile, high-quality customers — the ones with teams, budgets, and actual publishing needs — were confused or turned off by the noise.

✅ What We Did Next

In April, we made a hard decision:
Go back to bundled plans. Simple. Predictable. Familiar.

Our new pricing starts at $16/month for 8 social accounts and scales from there — including generous limits and multiple user slots.

Subscriptions are up. Support volume is down. Customers are clearer.
Sometimes, going “back” is actually going forward.

🎯 The Bottom Line

Pricing is product.
It’s not just a number. It’s a signal. A filter. A story.

We thought $1/month would unlock growth. Instead, it exposed us to chaos, confusion, and customers who weren’t the right fit.

The next time you’re tempted to drop your price to be “accessible,” ask yourself:

• Will this attract my ideal customer?

• Will this scale support-wise?

• Will this signal the value I actually offer?

You might be better off charging more — and dealing with less.

Warm regards,
Paul Onu
Founder, Postly