Good-better-best pricing

Good-better-best pricing presents three bounded versions of an offer: a credible entry option, the option that fits most buyers, and a premium option with more scope, speed, access, or risk removed. The surrounding choices give the client a comparison inside your proposal instead of making your single number compete with doing nothing.

Reach for it when clients differ in ambition or support needs but the underlying service is repeatable. Design the middle package first, then remove outcomes to make good and add genuinely costly value to make best. Keep the package names concrete and the differences countable: pages, concepts, workshops, response times, or revision rounds.

Gotcha: building three unrelated custom scopes. That triples estimating work and makes comparison impossible. A fake premium tier is just as bad: buyers notice when best is the middle package plus decorative extras. Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational opens with The Economist selling web-only at 59 dollars, print-only at 125, and print-plus-web also at 125, where the pointless middle option existed to make the bundle look free. It worked on a subscription page nobody interrogates. A client reading three service packages side by side will ask what the difference is, and you have to answer. Price anchoring can frame value, but it cannot rescue weak package logic.