Why & How To Add A Yearly Subscription Plan To Your Pricing Page

Do you sell a monthly subscription for your product? No matter if you’re in SaaS, running a membership site or a productized service, you should consider creating an annual payment option.

Monthly payments is the default billing option for most subscription businesses. This is great for customers as it gives them the flexibility to cancel their subscription anytime. On the other hand, in particular during the early stages of a business, cashflow is incredibly important. Many software startups end up raising funding because it takes a lot of money to break even.

Allowing annual billing – getting paid for an entire year upfront – does wonders for your cashflow. Not only that, people on annual subscriptions have more “skin in the game”, meaning the chances of them successfully onboarding and using your product are much higher.

How to present annual billing on your pricing page

Option 1: Yearly Plan Only

This option is mostly found with companies targeting the enterprise market. These companies employ sales teams and often don’t let people sign up with a single click. An example of this is HubSpot.

Option 2: Yearly Plan Default

By defaulting to yearly billing on your pricing page, you’re trying to drive as many annual signups as possible.

An example of this is LeadPages, which is pushing their annual option quite hard – they offer a whopping 38% discount if you pay annually. They have neat toggle (or “switch”) on their pricing page that lets you select monthly, yearly and bi-yearly.

 

Option 3: Monthly Plan Default

With this approach you mostly rely on monthly revenue. You still give your customers the option to sign up for a yearly pricing plan if they choose to do so.

Active Campaign defaults to monthly on its pricing page, but gives users the option to select annual billing for 15% off. Like LeadPages, they have neat toggle that lets users switch between yearly and monthly.

 

Option 4: Monthly Plan Only

This is the standard Software as a Service pricing table. An example of this is Xero. Mature companies that are well-funded or very profitable might go down this route.

How to build a pricing table with a monthly/yearly toggle

Now that we’ve discussed the merits of annual pricing, I’ll show you how to build such a table without coding using our WordPress plugin – Easy Pricing Tables. The key to this is a feature called pricing toggle.

First, build a pricing table featuring your monthly plan. There’s plenty of instructions on how to do this here.

Here’s what I’ve just built – the whole process took about 3 minutes:

Next, I’m going to copy the table and create a yearly variation of it.

Here’s what I came up with. Note how even though the pricing grid says “Paid Yearly”, the price is still displayed per month. This is a psychological trick – $34/mo sounds much lower than $408 per year.

Adding the pricing toggle

Now that we have a monthly and a yearly table, it’s time to add our pricing toggle.

Go to whichever WordPress post or page you want to add the pricing table to, and click the “Insert pricing table” button.

Now choose “Insert a pricing toggle”. Since I wanted to display yearly pricing by default, I’ve selected my yearly table as “Default Pricing Table” and my monthly table as “Alternate Pricing Table”. Set up a title – “Yearly  (30% Off)” and subtitle – “Pay Yearly And Save 30%”- and you’re good to go.

Here’s my result:

Pretty cool, huh? Building these type of monthly / yearly pricing toggles is a breeze using Easy Pricing Tables. We even have support for bi-yearly toggles:

Wanna build annual / monthly pricing toggles without coding? Click here to learn more about Easy Pricing Tables.