Deciding when to raise your prices

The signals that a price is too low

Not one of these is about your costs. Members do not care about your costs, and I have never seen an increase justified by them land well.

1. Nobody hesitates. If almost nobody asks about the price, and refunds are rare, and cancellations are almost all about time rather than money, the price is under the line.
2. You have quietly added a lot. Three years of extra material, a community that now runs, sessions you never planned. The membership someone bought in 2022 is not the one you are delivering.
3. You are rationing yourself. If you catch yourself thinking that a member paying this little cannot expect a proper answer, the price is already doing damage to the work.
4. The good members are the cheap ones. When your longest standing, most engaged members pay the least, every new member is subsidising your history.

What is not a signal: a slow month, a competitor charging more, or a spreadsheet that says you would make more money. That last one is arithmetic, not evidence.

How much, and how often

Small and regular beats large and rare. An increase of somewhere between ten and twenty per cent, no more often than once a year, is a change people absorb. A jump of fifty per cent after five years of nothing is a different conversation, and it will be treated as one.

If you are a long way under, get there in two steps a year apart rather than one. The second step is much easier than the first, because by then people have seen that the first one did not come with a decline in what they get.

Existing members

You have three options and they are not equally good.

Grandfather everyone, permanently

Kindest, simplest to explain, and it costs you more every year. It also creates the situation in the fourth signal above, where your best members pay least. I still recommend it for sites under about three hundred members, because goodwill at that size is worth more than the difference.

Grandfather for a fixed period

Existing members keep the old price for twelve months, then move. This is the option I use with most clients. It is fair, it is finite, and it gives people a year of notice for something that is going to happen anyway.

Move everyone at once

Only defensible if the increase is small and the notice is long. If you do this, the note has to say plainly that the price is going up, when, by how much, and what happens if they do nothing.

Never announce a price increase and a change to what members get in the same message. One of them will be read as the excuse for the other.

Writing the announcement

Short, early, and without apology. The shape that works:

1. The price is changing on a date. Give the date.
2. The new figure, and the old one, in the same sentence.
3. What it means for them specifically, including the exact date of their next charge.
4. How to leave, stated plainly, with a working link.
5. A short line on why. One sentence. Not a defence.

Point four is the one people want to remove. Leave it in. A member who has to hunt for the exit does not stay, they leave angry and tell somebody.

Send it at least thirty days ahead. If you bill annually, send it before anyone renews into the old price, or you will be issuing adjustments for a year.

What actually happens

In the increases I have watched closely, the pattern is consistent enough to plan for. There is a small burst of cancellations in the first week, mostly from members who had already stopped using the site and needed a prompt. There is a quieter second wave at the next renewal. And there is no third wave.

Some of what looks like churn from an increase is not. Cards fail at renewal for reasons that have nothing to do with price, and if you are watching a single number you will misread it. That is worth separating before you draw conclusions, and failed payments and the churn nobody chose explains how.

When not to do it

Do not raise prices in a month when you are behind on publishing. Do not raise prices in the same quarter you change the platform, the format, or the community rules. And do not raise prices to fix a retention problem. If people are leaving because the site is not worth what they already pay, a higher number makes the maths worse, not better. Start with reducing member churn instead.

What I would do first

1. Check the four signals honestly. If fewer than two apply, wait.
2. Pick a rise of ten to twenty per cent and a date at least thirty days out.
3. Decide the grandfathering rule before you write a word of the announcement.
4. Write the note with the exit in it.
5. Do not touch anything else about the membership for the following quarter.