Pricing a membership without guessing

There is no correct price. There is a price that is obviously too low, a price that is obviously too high, and a wide comfortable band in between where the number matters far less than what you do with it.

This chapter is about finding that band quickly and then leaving it alone.

Anchor on what your viewers already pay for

Your viewers already have a mental price for "supporting a streamer I like", and it was set by the platforms they already use. Twitch subs, Patreon tiers, YouTube memberships — whatever those cost where your audience lives is the number in their head.

Sit your first tier at or slightly below that anchor. Not because undercutting is clever, but because the first tier is a decision people should be able to make without thinking, and anything above the anchor makes them think.

Set the price in gems, and sanity-check what that is worth in money before you publish. Do it once. It is the only conversion you need to do.

Space the tiers far apart

If you have more than one tier, the gap between them should be obvious — a factor of two or three, not twenty per cent.

Tiers that sit close together create a decision. Tiers that sit far apart create a self-selection: people who want the cheap one take the cheap one, and people for whom money is not the constraint take the expensive one because it is clearly the "I really like this channel" option. Nobody agonises.

A workable three-tier shape:

• Entry. At the anchor. Contains one genuinely good thing. Most members live here.
• Middle. Two to three times the entry. Everything in entry plus the thing you can only give a smaller group.
• Top. Five to ten times the entry. Bought by people who want to fund you, not people who want more content. Keep its benefits light — they are not why it sells.

That top tier does real work even when nobody buys it: it makes the middle look reasonable. Do not delete it because it is unpopular.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Underpricing and then adding benefits to justify the price.

It goes like this: nobody joins, so you assume the price is wrong, so you add more to the tier. Now you have the same number of members and more work each month. The problem was almost never the price.

When nobody joins, the likeliest causes, in order:

1. Nobody knows it exists. You mentioned it twice, three weeks ago, while concentrating on a boss fight.
2. The benefit is not legible. People cannot tell what they would get, because the lines are nouns instead of sentences.
3. There is no reason to act now. Nothing about this week makes joining this week better than joining eventually.
4. The price. Genuinely last.

Work down that list before touching the number.

Say the price out loud, on stream, calmly

The single highest-leverage pricing change most streamers can make is mentioning the thing in a normal voice, in a normal sentence, more than once a month.

Not a pitch. A fact: "There's a members post going up tomorrow about how I set the overlay up — that's the three-euro tier if you want it." Then carry on playing. People need permission to spend money on you, and permission sounds like you being relaxed about it.

Changing the price later

You can. A few rules that avoid bad feelings:

• Existing members should not be surprised. If you raise a price, say so before it happens, and say it in the members channel first. Being told last is what people actually resent.
• Raise prices on the way up, not on the way down. A price rise reads as confidence when the channel is growing and as desperation when it is shrinking.
• Do not run discounts on memberships. Discounts on recurring products train people to wait, and they devalue the tier for everyone paying full price. If you want a sale, sell something one-off — a post, not a tier.

What to measure after a month

Two numbers only:

• Joins. Not members, joins. It tells you whether new people are finding the thing at all.
• Cancellations inside the first month. If this is high, the tier is not delivering its first-month promise — which is a benefits problem, not a pricing one.

If joins are low and first-month cancellations are low, your price is fine and your marketing is quiet. That is the most common situation, and the fix is on stream, not in the settings.

Next: the income that does not depend on anyone subscribing — posts, tips and one-off sales.