The folks over at Creately recently ran an experiment to help them figure out how to price their service. In it, they allowed customers to choose their own price – from $1 all the way up to $100 – and used the data from the experiment to validate and set their ongoing prices. This is really similar to the pick your price setup that Radiohead did for their 2007 album, but Creately is a recurring service rather than a single purchase product.

Of particular interest to me in the context of Spreedly was this quote:

Another very interesting point that stood out from our experiment is the difficulties that so many of our users faced with completing their subscriptions with PayPal. The complaint emails as well as large percentage of abandoned transactions – forced us to work on alternate payment methods.

While Spreedly doesn’t currently support a “pay what you want” plan, we’ve already seen a need for ad-hoc plans, and hearing about this experiment makes them all the more interesting. We definitely want to give you the tools to experiment with your billing, and this could be a really powerful one. Look for more on this topic in 2010.

In the meantime, definitely check out Creately’s experiment, and let us know if you’ve heard of other good ways for subscription businesses to experiment with pricing.