Ledgerly annual plan: offer redesign
Diagnosis
"Save 17% with annual billing" is a discount, not an offer. It's about two months free against the $228 monthly total, and it only lowers the price. It does nothing about what a freelancer actually worries about when prepaying $190: "Will I get my books in order, or will this sit unused until tax time?"
I scored the value equation from the information you gave me, so treat these as hypotheses:
| Lever | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dream outcome | 5 | "Bookkeeping app" is a feature. The real goal is being tax-ready without dread. |
| Perceived likelihood | 4 | The 30-day refund exists but isn't framed as a guarantee. |
| Time delay | 4 | Nothing promises a first win. |
| Effort and sacrifice | 3 | Setup, importing history and categorizing are the real cost, and the page ignores them. |
Effort is the binding constraint. Your onboarding capacity of 40 a month is the best asset you have. It lets you remove that effort for a limited number of people, and the limit is real.
The redesigned offer
Name: Ledgerly Tax-Ready Year
| Component | What it is |
|---|---|
| Core | Annual plan, $190/yr. Price unchanged, and no coupon. |
| Bonus (the scarce part) | A done-with-you setup session. We connect your bank, import your last 12 months, set up categories for your type of freelance work, and leave you with a first clean month. |
| Bonus 2 (low-cost, unlimited) | A year-end tax-prep export and checklist, so the annual plan pays off at tax time. |
| Guarantee | Your 30-day refund, made specific and conditional: "Finish setup in your first 30 days. If your books still aren't up to date, email us for a full refund." |
| Scarcity | "We onboard 40 new customers a month. When the month's slots are full, you can still join. Your setup session moves to next month." |
| Price framing | $190/yr, which is $15.83/mo. Show that against $19/mo billed monthly, stated as a fact rather than "17% off." |
Draft pricing-page copy
Ledgerly Tax-Ready Year: $190/year
Your books set up with us, not by you, and ready for tax time.
✔ A 1:1 setup session: bank connected, 12 months imported, categories built for your work
✔ Year-end tax export and checklist
✔ Set up in 30 days or full refund
7 of 40 setup sessions left for October. ← only if the number is live
Why these choices
- I didn't discount to win new customers. People who come in on a discount churn at roughly twice the rate, and a bigger "save %" badge would anchor Ledgerly as cheap. The 17% annual-versus-monthly gap can stay as a small line of supporting text. Pushing your existing monthly customers to annual is the one place a discount is legitimate.
- The scarcity is real. The 40-a-month cap is a true capacity limit, so the counter must reflect actual bookings. If you can't keep the number live and honest, drop the counter and keep the line "we onboard 40 per month." Don't add countdown timers or fake "only 3 left" messages.
- Don't cap the plan itself. Limit only the setup session. Selling a software plan on a quota you don't enforce is a lie.
- The guarantee is conditional on setup. It has one condition and a clear outcome. That filters out people who never engage, and those people are your refund risk and your churn risk.
Risks to check
- Refund exposure. Stress-test a 10% refund rate. On $190, that's $19 per customer sold, which is probably fine. Check it against your actual refund history.
- Capacity versus demand. If the offer works and you get more than 40 buyers a month, the overflow gets a delayed session. Decide now what they receive in the meantime, such as a self-serve setup video, so the wait doesn't turn into refunds.
- Facts I assumed. I assumed Ledgerly can import 12 months of bank history and generate a tax export. Cut or reword any bonus the product can't deliver today.
Projected lift
A single-component change like this usually moves conversion 10–40%. A realistic range is the low-to-middle of that, since I'm estimating without your funnel data. Run it as an A/B test on the pricing page and compare annual conversion and 90-day refund rate. Don't judge it on conversion alone.
Next steps
- Use the copywriting skill to turn the draft above into a full pricing-page section.
- Use the pricing skill if you want to test a monthly-versus-annual anchor or a higher annual price.
Share your current trial-to-paid rate and monthly-to-annual split, and I can tighten the projection.
Real run in an isolated folder with only this skill installed. Only the Skill and Read tools were enabled, so nothing was fetched from the web and no file was written. The example is fictional. The model opened three of the skill's reference files. The product and numbers are invented.
What it does
Works on the offer itself rather than the copy around it. It uses a value equation (dream outcome, likelihood of success, time to results, effort and sacrifice) and describes the anatomy of a complete offer. A reference library covers bonus stacking, guarantee design (including an honest case for having no guarantee), real scarcity and urgency, offer formats, SaaS offers, a set of worked examples and offer anatomy. A diagnostic loop finds the weakest part (most weak offers lack bonuses, a guarantee or real scarcity), and it lists when not to use offer tactics and a banned vocabulary. It is explicit about ethics: fake countdown timers and invented "only 3 spots left" claims are ruled out, and projected lifts are kept realistic.
How it works
- It asks about the product, price, audience and capacity.
- It diagnoses the current offer and rebuilds it component by component, with honest projections.
Good for
Founders and marketers who need a better offer, not just better wording.
Low risk: pure instructions with no scripts, no network access and no file writes. Offers create commitments: guarantees, refunds and limited-availability claims must be real and honoured, and consumer-protection and advertising rules apply in many places. The skill itself rules out fake scarcity and warns that unconditional "100% guaranteed" wording is risky, but it is not legal advice. Its lift figures (for example 10-40% from one change) are rules of thumb, not promises. The model opens several reference files, so answers can be long. Tried once on an invented product.