Are You Underpricing? The Question Is Right. The Answer Depends on Your Business.
MemberPress asks if you're underpricing. Good question. But the answer looks different when it's grounded in your specific membership
Responding to MemberPress's original post.
MemberPress published a useful post this week asking whether you’re underpricing your membership. It walks through four diagnostic questions: whether members tell you the price is too low, whether you’re attracting the wrong crowd, whether your churn is high, and whether comparable memberships charge more. All four are reasonable things to ask yourself.
But reasonable questions still get answered two very different ways, depending on what you know.
The generic answer
Check your churn rate. Survey your members. Look at what competitors charge. If your price is below market and your churn is low, you’re probably leaving money on the table. Test a price increase on new signups and see what happens to conversion.
That’s the direction the MemberPress post points, and it’s not wrong. For someone who’s never thought about this, it’s a decent starting point.
The answer that knows your business
A membership with low churn and below-market pricing isn’t automatically underpriced. Thirteen years of membership business expertise suggests that a low price is sometimes doing structural work the operator hasn’t noticed. It’s suppressing churn in a segment that would leave at market rate. It’s keeping a referral engine alive because members feel like they’re getting a deal and they talk about it. It’s holding together an annual cohort that converts at a rate the monthly tier never matched.
Raise the price and you might get more revenue per member and lose the thing that was quietly compounding.
Conversely, some memberships look fine on churn but are underpriced in the wrong direction: the low price attracts members who use very little, ask for very little, and stay forever. That looks like retention. It’s actually stagnation. No upsell path, no upgrade behavior, no referrals. Revenue is flat and the operator thinks the business is healthy.
Same surface metric. Completely different diagnosis.
The MemberPress questions get you to the right neighborhood. But how many tiers you’re running and how they’re positioned changes which of those questions even applies to you. A single-tier membership and a three-tier membership are not asking the same pricing question, even if both show up as “low churn, below market.”
Knowing whether you’re underpriced isn’t a benchmarking exercise. It’s a structural read on what your price is actually doing inside your specific business.
The question is right. The answer has to be yours.
Worth knowing
My churn is low and my price is below competitors. Isn't that a clear sign I should raise prices?
Not necessarily. Low churn at a below-market price sometimes means the price is doing real work, keeping a referral loop alive or holding a high-converting annual cohort together. Before raising, it's worth understanding what the low price is actually producing, not just what it appears to cost you.
What's the risk of using competitor pricing as the main benchmark?
Competitor pricing tells you what the market will accept in general. It doesn't tell you what your specific members are responding to, or whether your membership's value delivery justifies a different price point in either direction.
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