my pricing page made the middle option look stupid

right at the start of a call today i caught something on my own pricing and said it out loud before i could stop myself.

"just realized that the pricing on sunny ray kind of doesn't make sense because it's like for one it's 10k, for two icp is 13. and then for three it's 20."

read those numbers again. ten, thirteen, twenty.

the jump from the first tier to the second is three thousand dollars. then it leaps seven thousand to the top. the middle option looks like a small upsell, and the top looks like a cliff.

if you're figuring out how to price service tiers with a good, better, best setup, this is the trap i walked into. tier gaps aren't just math. they're a message.

the general guidance you'll find says tiers are usually spaced twenty to forty percent apart, and the top tier exists to anchor the middle. it's the expensive bottle on the wine list that makes the second most expensive one feel sensible.

my gaps did the opposite. the uneven jump made the top tier feel like a different product, and the middle felt like a trick to get you one rung up. nobody trusts a ladder with a missing rung.

so the note i wrote down was to move toward something like ten, seventeen, twenty. now the top tier becomes the obvious choice... for three more you get a lot more. and the middle can still land lower in practice when someone qualifies for a discount, so nobody's getting squeezed.

i also noted we might need an entry tier under ten thousand. not to sell a lot of it. to make the first step feel approachable for someone who's never worked with us.

then there was a smaller mistake hiding in plain sight. nowhere did it say clearly whether those numbers were monthly or total. a founder seeing 20k with no label has to guess, and when a buyer guesses about price, they always guess the scary version. the fix is one word on the page. total.

and the call itself taught me the second lesson.

the person i was talking to runs fundraising events. halfway through, he stopped me. "but now you just said we do fundraising... that's the part i got confused."

he couldn't tell if we were selling go to market through podcasting or help with a raise. it's both, and it's one motion underneath. but if i can't say that in one sentence, it's two products to the buyer.

in the end he said it wasn't a fit, and he was right. we agreed to do an episode together instead, no commercial arrangement forced. i'll take an honest no and a good conversation over a confused yes.

two lessons from one call. your tiers tell a story whether you mean them to or not. and if a smart buyer is confused about what you sell, the problem is the sentence, not the buyer.

it's like a menu with three sizes of coffee where the medium costs almost the same as the small and the large costs double. everyone orders the medium and feels a little cheated.

the funny part is you stop seeing your own numbers when they're yours. it took saying them out loud on a call to hear how they sounded.

long term, pricing is positioning. every number on that page is either building trust or spending it.

you can see how we lay out the offer now on the spotlight engine page.

so open your own pricing page tonight... which tier is it quietly telling people to pick, and is that the one you want them to buy?