I’m in marketing, and when it comes to pricing people need simplicity. If I were CMO at TR I would handle any change to legacy pricing very carefully but also with an understanding that no group is more invested in the long-term success of the product or has more goodwill toward the management team. You can be honest with them. Treat them almost like shareholders in the company. I don’t think very many of us feel permanently entitled to the incredible deal that legacy pricing has become.
I don’t like tiers of service linked to tiers of pricing. It creates an inconsistent product experience and impacts the brand. Plus, everybody hates their cable company and any other company that tries to predict what features are worth extra and which aren’t. Inevitably the temptation is usually too great to put something everybody wants and considers a core feature into a higher tier of price.
What I do think would work is to change “legacy” pricing to Loyalty Pricing. Say you’ve been 3+ years as a subscriber, you enter loyalty pricing at a flat 20 or 25% discount to the current, new subscriber pricing. Not locked, just always lower. Isn’t this what we all wish our cable and phone companies would do? But instead they do it backwards and discount for new subscribers and hope old ones will never notice the price going up and up.
Whatever TR does, I feel confident it will be with the long-term quality of the product and the needs of their user community as the guiding priorities.