How to announce a price increase
This is the announcement people bury, and burying it is what turns a routine adjustment into a churn event. The reader has one question, it is a number, and the usual draft answers it in paragraph three if at all.
The reader wants the opposite of what you want
Every other announcement here is at worst neutral for the person reading it. This one is straightforwardly bad news for them and good news for you, and both parties know it. That adversarial structure makes the usual techniques actively harmful: warmth reads as manipulation, framing the increase as an investment in their experience reads as being told that paying more is a gift, and delay reads as an attempt to slip it past. What survives contact with a sceptical reader is the opposite of a communications strategy. State the amount, state the date, state what they can do, state why, and stop. Customers forgive price rises routinely. They do not forgive discovering one on a statement.
The rule for this one
The old number, the new number and the date all appear in the first sentence. Everything else is optional.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
We are writing to inform you of an upcoming adjustment to our pricing, effective next month. This change reflects our continued investment in the platform and enables us to deliver an even better experience going forward. We remain committed to providing exceptional value and thank you for your continued support.
The version that obeys the rule
The Pro plan goes from 19 to 24 a month on 1 October. If you are on it today, your price is held at 19 until March. Nothing about the plan changes. We put it up because storage costs doubled and we would rather charge for it than quietly cut the export limit.
The word adjustment is doing the work of the word increase, there is no figure, and there is no date. A reader who has to hunt for the number learns that you hoped they would not find it.
7 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 3 | 4 | Yes |
| Words | 50 | 49 | Yes |
| Average sentence, in words | 16.7 | 12.2 | Yes |
| Longest sentence, in words | 20 | 21 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | No | No |
| First person (we, our, us) | 5 | 2 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 3 | 2 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 82 | 86 | Yes |
| Contains a stock phrase | No | No | No |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The exact figures and the exact date, before any explanation.
- What existing customers get, if anything, and for how long.
- The real reason, in one sentence, even when the real reason is that the old price was too low.
When not to post it at all
There is no skipping this one, which is the point. The only alternative to announcing it is having it discovered, and discovery costs more than the increase ever earns.