Your cheapest plan is telling you something
Four months after launch, the founder of a scheduling tool for physical therapy clinics looks at her numbers. She set up three plans at $19, $49, and $99 a month. Eighty percent of her customers sit on the $19 plan. The $99 plan has two customers, and both are clinics run by friends. She’s also spending $1,500 a month on ads and can’t say which of them, if any, brought in a paying account.
That combination is common in a first year. For many women founders, it’s also more expensive than it looks.
Less Runway, Less Room for Error
All-female founding teams have long received roughly 2 percent of US venture capital dollars. Whatever you think about the causes, the practical result is that a lot of women building software bootstrap, raise small rounds, or fund the early months with consulting work. Revenue has to arrive early, and there’s little room for six months of misread pricing or ad spend going nowhere.
That makes the two questions in this piece more urgent: what goes in each plan, and where customers actually come from.
Tiers Should Follow How Customers Grow
Most first pricing pages are built around a guess about features. Basic gets a few things, Pro gets more, Premium gets everything. Customers then pick the cheapest plan that does the job, which is exactly what the clinics did.
A better starting point is the unit that grows with the customer’s business. For the scheduling tool, that’s practitioners or locations. A solo therapist and a 12-location chain get very different value from the same software, and pricing per practitioner captures that difference automatically.
Feature gating comes second, and this is where most mistakes happen. The rule I’d defend is simple: never lock away the core job. If the cheapest plan can’t send appointment reminders, a solo clinic never sees why the product matters and cancels during the trial. Gate the things larger customers need and smaller ones don’t: reporting across multiple locations, staff permission levels, integrations with insurance billing systems, priority support.
There’s a quick way to check your guesses. Track how often lower-tier users click on a locked feature. If hundreds of $19 customers keep trying to open the same report, either it belongs on their plan or it’s the reason to upgrade, and your pricing page should say so plainly.
When you raise prices later, keep existing customers on their old rate for a while. Early customers who feel punished for trusting you tend to say so publicly.
Finding Out What Marketing Works
Attribution tracking software records which channels a customer touched before signing up: an ad, a blog post, a newsletter, a direct visit. It’s useful, but it has blind spots worth knowing before you trust it.
Browser privacy settings and ad blockers hide part of every visitor’s path. Recommendations passed along in group chats or mentioned on a podcast often show up as “direct traffic,” which tells you nothing. In B2B, where a clinic owner might visit four times over six weeks, first-touch and last-touch reports each credit a different channel, and both are partly wrong.
So pair the software with something low-tech: a required “How did you hear about us?” field at signup, with a free-text box. It’s crude, but it regularly surfaces channels that dashboards miss entirely.
Most importantly, measure revenue, not signups. A channel that produces cheap $19 accounts can look like a winner right up until you compare it against one that brings fewer, larger customers.
When the Two Questions Meet
The physical therapy founder eventually connected her signup data to her plans. Paid ads mostly brought solo practitioners. Two talks she gave at regional clinic owner meetups had brought in four multi-location practices, worth more than all her ad customers combined. She cut ad spend in half, booked more speaking slots, and moved to per-practitioner pricing.
Her $19 customers didn’t disappear. They just stopped being the whole business. The cheapest plan had been accurate feedback all along about who was finding her, and the fix was changing who she went looking for, not arguing with the numbers.
