Good-Better-Best

Good-better-best pricing is a packaging structure that groups features into three graded plans at rising prices, each aimed at a segment with different needs and willingness to pay. The entry plan opens the door, the middle plan carries most of the business, and the top plan captures high-value buyers and sets price perception for everything below it.

Potio’s founder built Toggl’s tiers as a sequence of jobs. The first tier tracked time. The next added invoicing clients. The top tier added analysis of team performance. Each step up solved a new problem the customer met once the previous one was handled.

Potio’s take: Tiers are earned through product depth. Spreading features arbitrarily across three plans confuses the message, and customers end up in an entry plan when they needed the premium one. Watch the logo split: roughly 30% in good, 60% in better and 10% in best is healthy.

How this plays out

Value has to grow logically across the tiers, and in practice that takes one of two shapes:

• Same job, more power. Every customer does the same thing, but with different needs for scale, speed or admin control. Canva and Airtable work this way, and it needs a solid value metric to scale without arbitrary limits.
• Stacked jobs. Each tier unlocks the next job in a sequence, as in the Toggl example.

Revenue skews heavily towards the top, often with half of revenue coming from a tenth of customers. That is why logo distribution is the more useful health check. More than 30% of customers in the entry tier usually means underpricing or missed upgrade paths, because the entry plan should convert users rather than sustain the business. More than 15% in the top tier usually means the middle tier is leaving money on the table or enterprise needs are not segmented properly.

The compromise effect and decoy pricing help steer buyers into the middle plan. Sorting features with the Feature Value Matrix decides what goes where: core features in every plan, value drivers defining the tiers, niche features sold as add-ons.

A familiar failure is throwing enterprise features into the top plan without understanding what that segment values. The result is heavy discounting and shelfware, with customers paying for features they never use.

What is the ideal customer split across three pricing tiers?

About 30% of customers in the entry tier, 60% in the middle and 10% at the top. Revenue will not follow that split, because the top tier earns far more per account.

Should I use good-better-best or modular pricing?

Use good-better-best for large markets with similar needs, where deal speed matters more than finely tuned prices. Use modular packaging when you sell to very different industries or use cases, because three fixed tiers cannot fit them all.

When does good-better-best pricing fail?

It fails when the product is too simple to differentiate three tiers, when customer jobs are too scattered to group, or when willingness to pay is flat across the market.

More on this: Good Better Best Pricing for SaaS: A Strategic Guide

Related terms

• Feature Value Matrix

Also called: GBB, three-tier pricing.

Updated 29 September 2026