Tiers and fences: good, better, best

One price serves one kind of buyer well and the others badly: too much for some, too little for those who would pay for more. Good–better–best tiers solve this with three plans at rising prices, each including more than the one below. Buyers sort themselves by what they want, so you don't have to guess who is who.

Klasna's draft line-up for September 2027:

• Club Lite, 250 a month: the AI practice partner, up to 120 minutes;
• Club, 450: speaking clubs plus the AI partner;
• Club Plus, 650: the Club plus two small-group sessions with a tutor and a monthly progress report.

Most buyers should land in the middle, so the middle plan has to be the one you'd honestly recommend to a typical learner. Each tier must answer a real need, differ in what it includes rather than in a discount, and earn its place in contribution. The rest of this lesson tests those conditions one by one.

A lower tier is for buyers the current price doesn't reach, not a price cut for everyone. Before adding one, check that such buyers exist and what they'd pay.

Klasna's evidence comes from the Club Plus survey. Lapsed members and non-members put the acceptable range for Club Plus at 310–450. Plus is the richer plan, so if even Plus tops out at 450 for them, the Club at 450 sits at the very edge of what these people would pay. Members themselves never called 450 too expensive.

Cutting the Club to 350 would hand a discount to hundreds of members who are happy at 450. Nazar's answer is a separate, smaller plan: Club Lite at 250, the AI partner only, up to 120 minutes a month, no speaking clubs. It opens a door for the people outside without touching the Club's price.

The risk is the other direction: current members walking through the new door on the way down.

A cheaper tier earns money from new buyers and loses money on current customers who move down to it. Moving down is called cannibalization, and it's the first thing to check before adding a lower plan.

Hanna's numbers: a Club member leaves 343.75 a month of contribution on average. A Lite member pays 250, which is 243.75 after the payment fee, and costs only AI minutes, leaving about 195.75. Every member who drops from Club to Lite costs Klasna about 148 a month. Twenty downgrades: 2,960 a month.

So a new tier pays only if the new buyers it brings outweigh the downgrades. To make up for those twenty, Lite needs about 2,960 ÷ 195.75 ≈ 15 members who would never have joined the Club. That's why the next question is about fences: what stops a happy Club member from choosing the cheaper plan?

Price fences are the rules that decide who gets which plan. A good fence is real, easy to check, respectful, and hard to cross for the buyers it isn't meant for.

Between Club Lite and Club, the fence is what's included. Lite has no speaking clubs, the main reason most members stay, and it caps the AI partner at 120 minutes a month. A member who values the clubs won't drop down, and anyone can see the difference on the price page, where the plans and their limits sit side by side.

Leo's idea, Lite only for people who say they can't afford the Club, fails every test: you can't check it, everyone could say it, and asking people to plead poverty is humiliating. Hiding Lite and offering it only to people who try to cancel is worse: it keeps a plan from the buyers it could serve and turns it into a trap.

Fence by what's included, not by who people claim to be.

A higher tier brings more revenue and also more cost. It's worth offering only if it leaves at least as much contribution as the tier below; otherwise every upgrade loses money.

Club Plus costs 650 a month and adds two 45-minute small-group sessions with a tutor. A tutor gets 450 per session, shared by everyone in the group of up to six. So per member:

650 × 0.975 − 95 − 2 × 450 ÷ group size

(0.975 after the payment fee, 95 the Club's own direct cost.) With full groups of six, 388.75, more than the Club's 343.75. With five, 358.75. With four, 633.75 − 95 − 225 = 313.75, less than the Club. Half-empty groups turn the better plan into a worse deal for Klasna.

So the top tier needs an operating rule, not only a price: fixed time slots, groups of five or six, and a waitlist rather than a tiny group. With 31 depositors at launch, Hanna is right to check groups of four first.

For a one-person practice, the honest yardstick of an offer is net income per hour of work: the price after tax, divided by every hour the offer takes, not only the hour on the call.

Dana is a FOP on the single tax: 5% single tax plus 1% military levy, so she keeps 94% of each price. Her single lesson is 600 and takes 1.5 hours with preparation and messages: 600 × 0.94 ÷ 1.5 = 376 an hour. Her draft monthly plan, four lessons plus homework feedback in the messenger for 2,800, takes about 7 hours: 2,800 × 0.94 ÷ 7 = 376 again. At Klasna, a 50-minute lesson pays 500 and, with ten minutes of notes, takes an hour: 470 an hour after the same 6%.

The yardstick shows which offers pay for her time. Counting only lesson minutes would make every offer look better than it is.

Good–better–best works for a one-person practice too. Dana's draft:

• Single lesson, 600: one 60-minute lesson at any free time; for people who want to try or come now and then.
• Monthly plan, 2,800: four lessons at a fixed weekly time within the calendar month, plus homework feedback in the messenger; for steady learners.
• Interview sprint, 6,000: six lessons in three weeks plus two recorded mock interviews with written feedback; for someone with a real interview date.

The sprint takes 12 hours (9 for lessons, 3 for the mock interviews): 6,000 × 0.94 ÷ 12 = 470 an hour, as much as an hour at Klasna, against 376 for the single lesson. It pays better because it's priced on what passing a job interview is worth to the buyer, not on Dana's hours.

Each offer is priced by what it includes, not as a discount off 600, and each has a checkable fence: any free slot, a fixed weekly slot, a three-week window for a real goal.

In a good line-up, most buyers choose the middle plan because it fits them best. People do compare options side by side, and that's fine when every option is real. It turns dishonest when a plan exists only as a decoy: priced so that almost nobody buys it, just to make the middle look cheap. That misleads buyers and damages trust once they notice.

The test is simple: would you recommend each plan to someone? Club Plus is for members who want tutor time; Dana's sprint is for people with an interview. Both earn their place.

A price list that lets people choose in ten seconds gives, for each plan, a name, what's included, the price and the condition that makes it different, with nothing hidden in small print.

How it fits together: tiers let buyers sort themselves, fences keep the tiers apart, and each tier must earn at least what the one below earns. Next: free, trial or guarantee, and what a free first lesson really costs.