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Raising subscription prices (Skylight $39 → $79)

How Skylight doubled its subscription from $39 to $79/year with minimal loss of attach or retention — price tests (incl. hardware discount), choosing below the ARPU-max $99, grandfathering existing subscribers, honouring the old price on request.

Updated 2026-10-24·2 sources·monetizationpricingprice-increasegrandfatheringexperiment

Raising subscription prices

TL;DR

  • Two ways to raise ARPU: more payers or higher price. With >50% of buyers already subscribing, price was Skylight’s biggest lever.
  • Skylight tested several price points (and, for hardware, the bundled device discount); $99 penciled out slightly better on ARPU, but they shipped $79 to keep goodwill and leave room to go up.
  • Result: $39 → $79/year with minimal loss of attach rate or retention — called “transformative” for ARR.
  • Grandfather existing subscribers (Skylight’s “Legacy Plus”); don’t announce; quietly honour the old price for anyone who’d been on the fence and asks.
  • Triangulate quant tests with qualitative interviews — they’ll tell you when a price tips into “not worth it” territory.
  • Consider announcing an increase in advance as a buying trigger (untested idea from David Barnard).

Details

Why raise. Skylight’s calendar subscription had launched sharing the same SKU and $39 price as the photo-frame sub (David: $39/yr is a “magic number where people don’t really care”). Asking “what would we charge if we were a calendar-only company?” and seeing that more than half of calendar buyers already subscribe, Mark Ungerer concluded price was the lever and they were leaving value on the table.12

How they tested. They ran variants on both the subscription price and the hardware discount given with the subscription — for hardware those interact (unit conversion, unit margin, attach). The spreadsheet said $99 would make slightly more; they picked $79 because doubling already felt like a lot, they wanted “good vibes”, and “we can always go up.”34 Michael Segal: interviews showed $99 was getting close to “disgust / not worth it yet”; they’ll revisit as the bundle gets richer. The biggest mistake is skipping qualitative research and trusting numbers alone — people say one thing and do another, so do both.45

Rollout. No announcement; existing subscribers were grandfathered into a legacy plan. Because buyers research for months, anyone who reached out saying they’d planned to buy at $39 got the old price. They knew squeezing existing customers was worth “a couple million dollars” and chose not to: be nice to existing customers, build for the next 10 million. Michael notes a PE-owned company needing to double EBITDA would decide differently.67

Outcome. Their biggest win of the year: $39 → $79 with minimal loss in retention or attach.8

Advance announcement idea. David hasn’t seen an app pre-announce a price rise, but a home-gym brand announcing tariff-driven increases made him buy early; he suggests someone test it on a large freemium base.9

Other data point. Natal raised prices while still growing ~20% in Q1 (David cites the growth; Nancy adds they raised prices over that period).10

Disagreements / caveats

  • Skylight’s subscribers bought $300–700 hardware and use it daily, which makes them unusually price-tolerant; app-only products may see more churn from a doubling.
  • Grandfathering forgoes revenue; with a smaller or less loyal base, a staged increase for existing users might be justified — not covered by these sources.

See also

Footnotes

  1. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 17:44 — Michael Segal ↩

  2. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 50:27 — Mark Ungerer ↩

  3. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 51:17 — Mark Ungerer ↩

  4. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 52:03 — Mark Ungerer, Michael Segal ↩ ↩2

  5. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 52:49 — Michael Segal ↩

  6. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 53:37 — Michael Segal ↩

  7. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 54:26 — Michael Segal ↩

  8. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 55:15 — Michael Segal ↩

  9. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 54:26 — David Barnard ↩

  10. How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal @ 28:07 — David Barnard, Nancy Anderson ↩