“One of the things a Spotify and a Disney Plus can't do because they are such a big brand is actually test the price increase on new users before they actually raise a price on existing users — if you're not a brand name, if people don't know your price offhand, you can go ahead and see first what the impact is on new subscribers.”

Small Apps Can Test Price on New Users Before Rolling It to Existing Subscribers

Big-brand price changes are immediately noticed and covered by press, making quiet testing impossible. Smaller subscription apps have an advantage: they can quietly raise the price for new signups, measure conversion and retention impact, find the elasticity ceiling, and only then roll it out to the existing base. This new-user testing approach converts a scary all-or-nothing decision into an iterative experiment.