Messaging: Replay pricing announcements

[joethreepwood]

Messaging

Context

As per https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/227 we need to send two emails about the replay pricing.

One is for existing users on a legacy plan who we want to grandfather. These users will get the new pricing and keep the 15,000 free replays.

The other is for existing users not on a legacy plan, or who will not be grandfathered. These users will get the new pricing.

There's a third group -- people using the product who are not subscribed to anything -- and they'll be excluded from both comms. In the event they do subscribe, they'll see new pricing then.

We'll send one email to each group, giving them two weeks notice of the price cut. We'll aim to start sending these comms on July 22nd.

@pauldambra will run an export of the two user groups (I need emails or Org_IDs, please!) and @annikaschmid will approve the comms.

Previews incoming.

[joethreepwood]

An early first draft for feedback.

A challenge here is that while we are decreasing prices generally, we're actually increasing them at lower tiers -- which is what will instantly jump out to anyone comparing the new and old plans. I think people have a poor sense of scale and will therefore focus on this and start to question the value.

The position I'm inclined to adopt instead is to use the art from https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/issues/8977 in place of the table and pivot the messaging to focus more on us vs competitors.

Open to feedback @andyvan-ph @annikaschmid

[andyvan-ph]

1. Agree. Probably better to use competitor comparison.
2. Just made me realize we should include our "old" pricing in the comparison chart as well. Will update that issue.

[andyvan-ph]

@joethreepwood actually, your pricing table is incorrect... you're missing a decimal place on the 5-15k tier.

I don't think this changes what we should do, but we could do both – i.e. lead with the graph, but include the table as well.

Current

New

[andyvan-ph]

New version that replaces Open Replay with our old pricing:

[annikaschmid]

One is for existing users on a legacy plan. These users will get the new pricing and keep the 15,000 free replays.

Almost correct, sorry this is so complicated 😅 Not every user on the legacy plan will keep their 15k free plan. If they have high volumes and are already saving money with the 5k free plan, they will not be grandfathered.

The messaging can stay the same though, I will double-check with Paul that we create the correct cohorts.

For the 15k email, it can look pretty much the same, with the difference that the 5-15k bucket will also be $0. And maybe we can highlight this somehow so that those customers will know they get a special treatment.

[joethreepwood]

One is for existing users on a legacy plan. These users will get the new pricing and keep the 15,000 free replays.

Almost correct, sorry this is so complicated 😅 Not every user on the legacy plan will keep their 15k free plan. If they have high volumes and are already saving money with the 5k free plan, they will not be grandfathered.

The messaging can stay the same though, I will double-check with Paul that we create the correct cohorts.

For the 15k email, it can look pretty much the same, with the difference that the 5-15k bucket will also be $0. And maybe we can highlight this somehow so that those customers will know they get a special treatment.

Yep, that all is the plan!

[joethreepwood]

OK, just waiting on art now, but here are some updated drafts.

For non grandfathered users

For grandfathered users

[andyvan-ph]

Love the tone of this. I think we can pretty much copy and paste this for social.

Suggestions:

• US date format, so should be July XX, rather than XXth July
• Comma after date
• "cutting prices" instead than "cutting costs"?
• "50% less" instead of "50% cheaper"
• "similar" instead of "alternative" (I'm sure, somewhere, there is a cheaper replay tool, but without feature parity)
• Is "reflect the actual value" right? I think it's more about charging based on real cost to us, rather than "actual value".

[joethreepwood]

[joethreepwood]

Now with the @lottiecoxon effect

[joethreepwood]

Discussed with @pauldambra and realized we needed a new version for people who are losing the 15k tier. So, I've added a new email that includes this extra para:

If this looks good to you @annikaschmid then I can finalize the cohorts tomorrow and get this sent tomorrow AM.

[annikaschmid]

@joethreepwood

Feedback on the new email:

A user would get their free tier reduced from 15K to 5K at roughly 50,000+ monthly recordings. At this volume, their bill on the legacy 15k pricing is the same as their bill on the new 5k pricing. Any volume higher than this, the new pricing will be cheaper. Any user with lower volumes will stay on the 15k free tier.

I think your wording sounds unnecessarily worry-inducing, e.g.

• "Don't worry you can use billing limits to stay beneath the allowance" -> They are already paying us $175/month plus. They have proven they are comfortable paying us, and telling them they can set billing limits to stay below 5k allowance doesn't fit here
• We should include a sentence that their bill will stay the same or they will save, so they focus on that and not the reduced limit, which doesn't have any practical implications for them, unless they reduce their volumes a lot going forward
• If we want to mention to them they can set limits at all, we should point out the ingestion controls, not the billing limits. We've launched those for this audience in March or so, so they might not be aware of this yet and it's a pleasant surprise. Something along the lines of "If you want to make sure you only send the most valuable recordings to PostHog, you can use our recently released sampling and minimum duration controls" instead of "Don't worry, you can use billing limits to stay beneath the allowance if needed."

[annikaschmid]

I am curious as to why this has just come up now:

Discussed with @pauldambra and realized we needed a new version for people who are losing the 15k tier.

I walked you through the rules last week, and we decided then it's fine if this group also gets the 5k email. Did I not explain the rules clearly enough, so this slipped through? Is it a terms and conditions obligation for us that we tell people when they lose something?

[joethreepwood]

Asynced with Annika, but this is on me introducing a last minute complication by trying to keep up with some fast-moving complications. Very much my error!

We'll roll back to the original two-email plan and move forward as-was. 👌

[joethreepwood]

[joethreepwood]

Reopening this so we can deal with the follow-on notifications in context.

We have a bunch of people who were improperly migrated, and so got the wrong email. Here's the list of orgs.

I'm going to work shortly on getting this into a C.io segment, and building out a 'Whoops' message to let them know they will keep the 15k.

[joethreepwood]

So, we need three new email broadcasts.

Restarting the 5K announcement

We stopped the 5K announcement at 15,000 sends, so we need to restart that. I've added exclusion criteria so users won't get this email if they had the previous email, OR if they were incorrectly migrated to the 5K plan. Copy is otherwise unchanged from above.

Restarting the 15K announcement

There are some (45) users who should have got the 15K announcement but were incorrectly migrated. These users were going to get the 5K announcement, but we stopped it before they did. So, they need to be updated. We need to exclude both the 5K people and the people who got an incorrect message, and the 15K segment that was used to target the fully-sent previous 15K email. Copy is otherwise unchanged.

Apology to users who got the wrong message

I also have an apology email (copy coming soon) targeted to users who were both incorrectly migrated AND got the previous 5K announcement. That's just 160 people, which is good. A target that small can be compensated.

[joethreepwood]

Apology email copy, for when we're ready