How do I design tiers so buyers pick the right plan and grow into the next one?
Good, better, best works for about two thirds of SaaS companies because it makes the choice easy, so start there unless you have a strong reason not to. Give every tier a job: one to acquire, one to be the obvious default, one to capture the buyers with budget and requirements. Make it instantly clear who each plan is for, because buyers default to the middle tier when they are confused and you lose money on both ends. Sell a feature as an add-on when it is polarising, appeals to a different buyer, or taps a different budget, and resist gating anything that drives engagement. Map the tiers to the real user journey (individual, team, organisation) rather than to a feature list you invented.
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4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
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Answers the two packaging questions that actually come up: when to bundle a new feature into a tier and when to sell it as an add-on, and how to give each tier a job. Short, and every principle is testable against your own pricing page.
Maps tiers to how adoption actually spreads (casual user, professional, team, organisation) rather than to a feature matrix, using Notion, Databricks, GitHub and dbt. The best argument for delaying monetisation until usage patterns are legible.
Takes the three models most companies use (flat fee, feature tiers, per seat), names how each one fails, and gives specific repairs like price escalators, fair use policies and lite user seats. Diagnostic rather than inspirational.
Varun Shoor built Kayako, a help desk product out of Jalandhar sold to customers worldwide, and he walks through how he shaped plans, what he gated and what he gave away. It is the tier design conversation with an Indian founder's constraints in it rather than a US benchmark chart.
