Is it time to raise your subscription price?

Many of us stay focused on getting more paid subscribers, but what if the answer is actually more investment from the same people already paying you?

That’s what Tony Mecia, Founder of The Charlotte Ledger, believed.

In February, they raised their prices from $9 to $12 a month and from $99 to $129 a year. Not just for new subscribers, but for existing subscribers too.

I caught up with Tony this week and got the run down of how they set the new price, when they rolled it out to their readers and how it impacted their revenue.

This growth strategy could be a contender for you too, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Tony had some words of caution for anyone considering a price increase.

In today’s issue, we go behind the scenes with The Charlotte Ledger: the good, the bad and the unexpected of changing your subscription price.

P.S. I’m doing a Summer Reader Raise for $5k if you’d like to support my projects but don’t want to become a paid subscriber. Be part of it here.

Is it time to raise your subscription price?

It had been more than five years since The Charlotte Ledger launched and their prices had never changed.

Tony, its founder and executive editor, told me, “We want our work to be accessible to as many people as possible. At the same time, we are a business, and we need to be able to pay people what they're worth or more.”

The Charlotte Ledger is not a solo venture. It’s a small, local newsroom that covers the city of Charlotte, North Carolina with verticals on business, transportation, soccer, real estate, obituaries and the arts. They have six newsletters and a podcast. Subscriptions are 75% of their revenue, with over 5000 paid subscribers. When your subscription income sustains your team, you take growing that revenue very seriously.

What motivated the price change

Increased cost of living (from five years ago until now) was a big motivator for the price change because that impacts the cost to run their operation. They also took into account what competitors were charging along with data from their reader surveys—including a question about how good a deal The Ledger was now and one about annual income—both of which informed where they could safely set the new price.

Before they made this change, Tony talked to Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective, who recommended they only make a price change every couple years (or at least not every year) because it is quite a process, both for your audience and for your financial systems. That’s why The Charlotte Ledger team decided on a roughly 25% increase, because the pricing needs to sustain them for the foreseeable future.

How they rolled out the new price

Once they decided to make this change, they did two things: they planned their communications to subscribers and they reached out to Substack, their platform.

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Tony said that it’s pretty straightforward (inside Substack) if you want to just increase the price on new subscribers, but they wanted to raise prices for renewals too, and that requires some hands on help from the platform team.

This would be true anywhere you host your blog or newsletter, unless you handle your own Stripe integration. You’re basically removing every subscribers current plan and replacing it with a new plan. Don’t try this at home unless you know what you’re doing!

Three weeks out

The first people notified were existing subscribers. Tony sent an email with the subject line “A change to your Ledger subscription” to all paid subscribers.

He explained the reason for the pricing change and emphasized how much the team was producing, and specifically what their paid subscribers were making possible, like “more in-person and virtual events” and “launching a nonprofit that will expand election-related and civic resources for Charlotte.” Monthly subscribers were encouraged to switch to annual and 9 of them did so.

At the bottom of the email, Tony also gave subscribers an out: “If the higher price creates a hardship for you, please drop us a note and we will see if we can figure something out.”

It may seem counterintuitive, but I really like when publishers include stuff like this every once in a while because it creates space for the people who really do not have the extra cash and it’s pretty unlikely that your audience will abuse it. It also makes paid subscribers reflect on whether or not this really is a hardship, leading them to most likely come to the conclusion that no, it’s not an actual problem and they can, in fact, pay it and most importantly, THEY WANT TO KEEP PAYING YOU.

This was validated by the fact that 92% of the people who received Tony’s email are still paid subscribers 5 months later.

One week out

The week before the price change took effect, Tony sent a dedicated appeal to free readers, inviting them to upgrade to an annual plan to lock in the previous rate of $99 for one year.

In this message, he reminded readers of everything they get as a paid subscriber. He also outlined why the coverage The Charlotte Ledger provides is unique and valuable, linking to specific stories they’ve published, like the emergency reporting they did on the hurricane that hit North Carolina late last year.

This appeal drove 20 upgrades, which Tony noted was a lot for them from one email.

They kept this messaging going the week before the change, with a smaller blurb in each newsletter free readers received (which goes out a few times a week.)

The platform price change

On the Stripe side, Substack’s engineer had to remap the old subscriptions to the new subscriptions. This is similar to what happens when you migrate platforms except that it all takes place within the same Stripe account. And if you’ve ever been through it, you know how damn nerve-racking it is!

Tony and the team were a bit at the mercy of Substack on timing, which I can relate to because the same thing happened to me with my Ghost migration. You can send a request for a timeline, but a third party team will schedule it in when they can, while balancing the other engineering requests they have in their queue. What’s hard about this is that you can’t always communicate an exact timing to your audience because you may not know when the other team will finish their side of it. You just have to communicate what you can, when you can.

The Charlotte Ledger has a bunch of their annual renewals in February and March because that’s when they launched paid subscriptions, hence the deployment time of this price change. Their desired go live date was pushed a little bit due to waiting on Substack to finish their part of it, but Tony wants me to tell you they were very responsive and helpful and there were no issues with the subscription swap.

What happened after the price change

It’s been three months since the price was changed and all signs point to this being a great move for The Charlotte Ledger. If you can make a price change and mostly keep your paid subscribers, you’re going to be better off, because you’re making more money and you can expand your work. And that’s exactly what happened for this team.

Churn

Churn appears to be up 1 percentage point, according to Stripe, but Tony and I don’t really trust this number yet because, as you can see in the chart below where it reads 87.05%, pretty much everyone was “churned” off their plan to be added to the new ones. Tony’s going to keep tracking this to see if it recalibrates back to normal or not.

As I already said above, 92% of the people who received the price change email stayed, so the vast majority of existing subscribers are still with them.

New subscriptions

New subscriber uptake year over year is roughly the same, give or take 20 subscribers.

It was a little hard to compare this because there was a major story and a major promotion last year around this time, which bumped subscriptions unusually higher for a couple months, but the trend is looking on track to keep new subscriptions coming in at a similar rate, with a couple of recent months already beating out last year’s numbers.

Revenue

Revenue is up! A lot! March was up 27% year over year. April 25%. May 45%.

Even if new subscribers go down and churn goes up, the revenue increase creates a bit of a buffer. You don’t want those other metrics to go south, but as long as they stay relatively on track, the revenue increase can strongly outweigh any minor or temporary downsides.

What subscribers said

How many angry letters did the team get? Not many!

They actually got several notes about how valuable The Charlotte Ledger is. One reader wrote “You are worth more than you are asking. I am still in.” and another said it was “Still a bargain.”

Some paid subscribers weren’t happy and they said the price hike felt high to them.

No major revolt though, just some feedback the team can take or leave.

Should you raise your prices?

Not so fast. “It might be more complicated than you think,” Tony warned.

His words of caution to his fellow publishers was to go into a price change with your eyes wide open about who your audience is, what they can (or are willing to) pay, and how the process actually works with your platform. It’s not an insignificant amount of work to communicate the price change, have platform engineers assist with the change, track everything and run customer support for your subscribers. It’s also very hard to reverse, should you change your mind once it’s done.

The Charlotte Ledger team did a lot of research before they made this move. Within their readership, within their market, by talking to other publishers and by talking to their platform. It worked out for them because they approached it with a lot of care.

If you want to explore your own price increase, running a reader survey is a great place to start. It’s very likely that you have room to increase—because Tony’s right that journalists are underpricing themselves—the real question you need to answer is when.

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