How many paying subscribers will the company have twelve months from now?

Framing and baseline scale. Because we do not have a specific company name, size, or vertical for this assessment, the dominant uncertainty is sheer scale, not the direction of the pricing effect. I model a generic self-serve subscription business currently selling at $20/month—the most common "structural anchor" price in consumer/prosumer software today 2 sources. Because the company's current scale is genuinely unknown, the baseline distributions span a few hundred to tens of thousands of subscribers, centered in the low thousands. Baseline dynamics assume monthly-billed, no-commitment churn of roughly 3–6% per month 2 sources, offset by gross adds that typically produce modest net growth. The distributions overlap heavily because scale variance dwarfs the pricing effect, but the relative differences between the scenarios isolate the causal mechanisms of your pricing decisions.

Leave the price at $20 a month. Holding the price at $20 maximizes subscriber headcount by avoiding any self-inflicted cancellation events and minimizing friction in the acquisition funnel. The $20 price point sits securely at the edge of the threshold for out-of-pocket expensing without approval newsletter.pricingsaas.com, meaning incremental signups face no new objections. Furthermore, as competitors move up-market, staying at $20 positions the company as an attractive, lower-cost alternative. The primary tradeoff is that ARPU stays flat, leaving the smallest gross margin budget for reinvestment into paid acquisition or product development. While this branch produces the highest expected headcount, it very likely generates the lowest revenue of the three options.

Raise the price to $29 a month for new customers only. Under this grandfathering approach, the existing base is untouched, completely avoiding a repricing churn shock—practitioner data associates segmented pricing changes with materially lower churn than blanket moves getmonetizely.com. The causal effect runs entirely through the gross adds funnel. A 45% price jump typically cuts paid conversion of new traffic by roughly 15–35% in relative terms 2 sources. However, this drag is partially offset over twelve months: the higher revenue per new customer raises the allowable customer acquisition cost (CAC) ceiling to fund faster reinvestment, and higher-priced cohorts generally exhibit better retention 2 sources. Because the legacy base is preserved and continues to compound naturally against baseline churn, the expected twelve-month subscriber count dips only slightly below the status quo.

Raise the price to $29 a month for everyone, including existing subscribers. This alternative stacks the new-customer acquisition drag on top of a one-time cancellation wave among the existing base. By forcing all users to re-evaluate their monthly, zero-switching-cost subscriptions, the company triggers an immediate spike in cancellations. Benchmarks for a 30%+ blanket increase imply roughly 10–25% incremental churn 3 sources, though pricing practitioners note much of this is "accelerated churn" from worst-fit users who would have left soon anyway, muting the long-term impact willingnesstopay.com. The downside risks are most pronounced here, including public backlash and competitors explicitly targeting the base with switch offers to undercut the new price 2 sources. While reinvesting the massive ARPU bump could eventually accelerate growth—and the move is almost certainly revenue-accretive overall—the pure subscriber count takes a definitive 15–18% hit relative to the status quo at the median, with a fatter left tail representing a botched, heavily criticized migration.