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hicks-law-pricing

Use this skill when designing pricing tables, plan pickers, tier selectors, or any conversion surface where the choice itself is the conversion event. Trigger when laying out 3-tier or 4-tier pricing, when arguing about whether to add a fourth plan, when designing the "Choose your plan" step of onboarding, or when fixing low conversion on a pricing page. Pricing pages are a special Hick's Law case: the decision is the entire purpose of the page, and decision fatigue equals lost revenue. Sub-aspect of `hicks-law`; read that first if you haven't already.

plugins/HDeibler/universal-design-principles/plugins/cognition-and-learnability-principles/skills/hicks-law-pricing/SKILL.md

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# Hick's Law on pricing pages

A pricing page is a Hick's Law surface where the decision *is the page*. Every option you add increases consideration time and abandonment risk; every option you remove may push some users toward the wrong tier. The right number of tiers is one of the most studied design decisions in conversion-rate-optimization research, and the answer is consistent: **fewer is usually better**.

## The standard answer: 3 tiers

The 3-tier pricing layout (often labeled Starter / Pro / Enterprise, or Free / Pro / Team) is the convention because it works. Three options:

- Lets users compare meaningfully (anchoring effect: the middle option looks reasonable against both extremes).
- Stays inside the easy-Hick's-Law range (log₂(4) ≈ 2 — minimal decision time).
- Maps cleanly to user mental models (small / medium / large).

Adding a fourth tier rarely helps. It increases consideration time, splits revenue across more buckets, and dilutes the framing of the middle tier as "the obvious choice." Companies that ship 5- or 6-tier pricing tables usually do so because internal consensus couldn't agree which features belonged where, not because users wanted more choice.