Tiered pricing: good-better-best examples and how to set tiers from research

Tiered pricing, often called good-better-best pricing, offers the same product in a few packages at rising prices, usually three or four. Each tier is built for a different kind of buyer, and what separates the tiers is chosen so that buyers who get more value pay more. The public pricing pages of well-known software companies show the common patterns. The harder part, deciding where your own tier boundaries go, comes from customer research, not from copying those pages.

What three public pricing pages show

We read the pricing pages of GitHub, Notion and Slack on September 30, 2026. Prices change often and several of these include promotions, so check the live pages before relying on any number.

A few notes on the numbers. GitHub marks its Team and Enterprise prices as applying "for the first 12 months." Slack lists lower annual prices ($7.25 for Pro and $15 for Business+) and was showing a 50% discount for the first three months. Notion's page offers up to 20% off for yearly billing.

Four patterns are worth noticing:

• A free tier for individuals or small teams. All three start at $0, which lets people adopt the product before anyone approves a purchase.
• Price per person. All three charge per user or member, so the bill grows with the size of the team.
• Security and administration features mark the upper tiers. Notion puts SAML single sign-on in Business. GitHub lists SAML single sign-on and audit log features under Enterprise. These features matter to the IT or security team at a larger company and rarely matter to a five-person team, which makes them a clean dividing line.
• Usage allowances grow with the tier. GitHub includes 2,000, 3,000 and 50,000 CI/CD minutes a month across Free, Team and Enterprise.

The top tier is usually "contact sales." That is where large buyers negotiate, which is also why competitor list prices can be hard to find. How to research competitor pricing covers that problem.

Why three tiers rather than one

One price leaves money on the table in two directions: small buyers find it too high, and large buyers would have paid more. Tiers let each group choose.

The middle option is also often said to benefit from buyers avoiding extremes, and the "decoy effect" is cited as a reason to design tiers carefully. Be cautious with this. Wikipedia's summary notes that some research found the effect does not appear in more realistic purchasing situations, and that even its original authors say it depends on narrow conditions. Design tiers around real differences between buyers, not around a decoy.

A worked example: scheduling software for dental practices

Suppose you sell appointment scheduling and reminder software to dental practices. You have one plan at one price and want to move to three. This example is hypothetical and used throughout the page.

Step 1: Group your buyers by how they differ. Interview 10 to 15 people across practice types: a solo dentist who manages the front desk herself, an office manager at a four-dentist practice, and an operations lead at a group running several locations. Ask what they use today, what breaks, who approves new software and how the purchase happened last time. Ask how their work differs from other practices, rather than which features they want. How to interview B2B buyers, users and champions covers who to include.

Step 2: Find the features that separate the groups. Suppose the interviews point to three patterns. Solo practices care about reminders and almost nothing else. Multi-dentist practices need shared calendars and insurance checks. Groups need reporting across locations and control over who can see patient records. The features that only the larger groups need are your tier boundaries.

Step 3: Pick the unit that grows with value. Per-dentist or per-location pricing might track value better than per-user pricing if front-desk staff change often. Usage-based pricing covers how to choose this unit.

Step 4: Put the features in tiers and draft prices. Entry tier: reminders and one calendar. Middle tier: shared calendars and insurance checks. Top tier: multi-location reporting and access controls. Set each price from what that group gets and what it pays now for alternatives, not from your costs. Value-based pricing walks through that calculation.

Step 5: Test the tiers with real buyers. Show the three-tier page to new prospects in each group and ask them to pick one and explain why. Watch for two warning signs: most people choosing the entry tier when they clearly need more, and a feature people want badly sitting in a tier they would never buy. When you have enough prospects, test prices with real quotes.

Mistakes to avoid

• Too many tiers. Every tier needs a clear kind of buyer. If you cannot name who a tier is for, remove it.
• Holding back the core value. If the entry tier cannot do the basic job, trial users never see why the product is worth paying for.
• Dividing lines nobody cares about. Limits such as "10 projects" work only if the buyers who need more are also the ones getting more value.
• Copying a competitor's tiers. Their boundaries reflect their buyers and history. Use their page to see how buyers in your market compare offers, then build from your own interviews.

Your next step

List your current customers by type and write one sentence on what each type needs that the others do not. If you cannot fill that list from what you know, schedule interviews before you redesign the pricing page.

When you need buyers outside your network, Instant Expert can find people who match a description you write, such as "office managers at multi-dentist practices." You review who it finds, it sends your invitations, and you pay only for calls that get booked. The directory pages for operations professionals in dental services and product professionals in enterprise SaaS are one place to start.