There's a one-cent difference your buyer's brain refuses to treat as one cent. Drop a price from the round number to the .99 just below it and something disproportionate happens to how it reads.

So the ending is a positioning decision, not a default. Cheap-and-cheerful leans on .99, premium leans on round, and the only way to know which fits your audience is to put both in front of them.

About 70% of carts get abandoned, and the top trigger is surprise, not a high price: unexpected costs appearing at checkout drive more than half of those walkaways (Baymard).

So show the real, all-in price early, while trust is still intact. Putting full cost up front on the page has been shown to cut late-stage drop-off sharply.

💡👇 Alex Hormozi sells a $599 offer by listing $4,351 worth of stuff on the page. Same product either way. The difference is how it's presented, and it's a lesson most course creators never learn. Here's the move, straight from his book $100M Offers: Most people sell their offer as one thing. "The Course: $599." One name, one price, and the buyer has exactly one question to answer: is this single thing worth $599 to me? That's a coin flip you don't control. Hormozi does the opposite. In the book, he takes a weight-loss offer, breaks it into its individual deliverables, assigns each one its own value, and stacks them until the total reads $4,351. Then the price lands: $599. To make that concrete, a stack like that might look something like this (our example, not his exact list): → The core program ($997 value) → The meal plan library ($248 value) → Weekly accountability check-ins ($1,200 value) → The grocery shortcut list ($118 value) Now the buyer isn't asking "is this worth it?" They're asking "how is this only $599?" You've changed the question, and the question is most of the sale. Why does this work? Hormozi's whole framework runs on what he calls the Value Equation: people buy based on the outcome they want and how likely they believe they are to get it, weighed against the time and effort it'll take. A single vague product name communicates none of that. A stack does. Every named component is proof of another problem you've already solved for them, which raises the "likelihood this works for me" number in their head with each line. One warning, because this gets butchered constantly: the stack only works if the parts are real. Padding it with "Bonus: a PDF of the slides ($500 value)" trains people to distrust the whole page. Each item has to solve a problem the buyer knows they have. If you sell courses or digital products, you already have a stack hiding in your offer. Your templates, your community, your feedback calls, your bonus modules. They're just buried under one product name. Pull them apart. Name each one. Then rebuild your sales page around the stack in Thrive Architect, and if you're delivering through Thrive Apprentice, bundle the bonuses right into the course so the stack on the page matches what's inside. The product stays the same. The offer is what changes. (Source: Alex Hormozi, $100M Offers, 2021)

‼️Hiding your pricing behind a "contact us" button costs more than you'd guess. In one G2 study, 89% of SaaS buyers preferred companies that show their pricing upfront.

And the ones who can't find a number don't all email you, they just leave. Hiding pricing has been tied to conversion drops of 23 to 40% versus showing it openly.

The Economist once ran a pricing page with an option almost nobody would buy. It might be the smartest pricing decision I've seen. Three subscription options: → Web-only: $59 → Print-only: $125 → Print web: $125 Read that middle one again. Print alone costs the same as print AND web. Why would anyone choose it? They wouldn't. That was the point. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely was so puzzled by this page that he tested it on 100 MIT students. With all three options on the table, 84% chose the $125 combo. Only 16% took the cheap web-only plan. The print-only option got zero takers. Then he deleted the "useless" option and ran it again with a fresh group. The results flipped. 68% now chose the $59 plan, and only 32% paid for the combo. Same products. Same prices. The only difference was an option nobody bought. Here's the lesson: your customers don't evaluate your price in a vacuum. They evaluate it against whatever you put next to it. The print-only option existed to make the combo look like a steal, and it worked, because $125 for "print web" feels obvious when "print alone" costs exactly the same. Most creators price their offer like it lives alone on the page. One product, one price, take it or leave it. Which means the customer has nothing to compare it to except a gut feeling about whether it's "too expensive." You're leaving the comparison up to chance. The Economist didn't. You can run this exact play on your own site. Build a pricing table with a deliberate anchor option in Thrive Architect, then put it head-to-head against your current page with Thrive Optimize and let your actual audience vote with their clicks. You don't need an MIT lab. You need two page versions and a few weeks of traffic. (Source: Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 2008)

Here's a number that reframes pricing: opt-in free trials convert to paid at around 18%, but opt-out trials, where a card is required upfront, average closer to 48% (First Page Sage).

And taking on that risk is a signal all by itself. You only offer a strong guarantee when you expect people to be happy, and buyers read it the way you'd hope they would.