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You are pricing an annual plan

Show the yearly price as a small per-month number — Acorns quadrupled enrollment this way.

Do this

Preselect annual, display it as its monthly equivalent, and keep the honest yearly total in the fine print. Acorns, the investing app, reframed the identical price from "$150/month" to "$5/day" and enrollment went from roughly 7% to 30%.

THE ACTUAL CHANGE — ACORNSthe experiment behind this card
Before
$150/month
~7% enrolled
→
After
$5/day
~30% enrolled

Same money. Roughly 4x the signups — and the daily frame erased the income gap in who joined.

This is the research itself: a randomized field experiment run on Acorns' real signup flow, published in Marketing Science.
Read the Acorns experiment
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Why it works: annual commitment, monthly-sized number, and the true yearly total still stated plainly.
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How much can you trust this?

Strong — tested on a real product

Not a lab survey: Acorns randomly showed real users different framings of the same price in production. Gourville's original "pennies-a-day" lab work found the same direction two decades earlier — "85 cents a day" beat "$300 a year" even though it was more total money.

Where it stops working

  • Backfires when the daily number stops being trivial — nobody wants rent at "$25/day."
  • State the real yearly total somewhere honest; hiding it is where regulators now live.
  • "$X/mo billed annually" specifically has never been directly tested — it is an extrapolation.
SOLID Hershfield, Shu & Benartzi (2020) Marketing Science · the Acorns field experiment Gourville (1998) pennies-a-day
Show the receipts
Acorns field experiment: "$5/day" vs "$150/month" enrollment ~30% vs ~7%; the daily frame also eliminated the participation gap between lowest- and highest-income users. Gourville (1998): 52% vs 30% agreement for "85 cents a day" vs "$300 a year". Boundary (Gourville 2003): preference flips to aggregate framing once the per-day amount stops feeling trivial.
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