You’ve finished the template, guide, checklist, or toolkit.
Now you have to put a price on it.
$5? $10? $20?
And if it’s a new product and nobody has bought it yet, how are you supposed to know what people will actually pay?
There’s another way to approach pricing: Pay What You Want.
Instead of setting one fixed price, you let the customer choose how much they want to pay.
On Skynovix, you can use the 0+ format for this. A customer can get the product for free or choose to pay any amount.
That can be useful for more than just making a few extra sales.
Why Give a Product Away for Free?
It’s a fair question.
If someone can get your product for $0, why would they ever pay?
Because sometimes the hardest part is getting someone to try your product in the first place.
Imagine you’ve created a $10 template. Someone finds it, but they’ve never heard of you before. They don’t know if the template is actually good, and they’re not sure it’s worth $10.
They might simply leave.
Give them the option to get it for free, and the decision becomes much easier.
They can download it, use it, and see whether it works for them.
If they like it, they now know your work. They might check out your other products, follow you, or decide to pay for the product after all.
So 0+ can be a simple way to get your work in front of people who might not have paid to try it.
Not Sure What to Charge? Let Customers Decide
This can be especially useful when you’re launching something new.
You might think your template is worth $20. But until people actually use it, that’s still just your estimate.
With a fixed price, you have to pick one number and hope you got it right.
With Pay What You Want, you leave some of that decision to the customer.
One person might pay $0. Another might pay $3. Someone else might pay $15.
Not everyone will pay, of course. Some people will take the free option, and that’s part of the model.
But you can start learning how people respond to the product instead of relying entirely on your own guess about its value.
What If Someone Wants to Pay More?
They can.
That’s one of the nice things about this model.
A customer who gets your product for free doesn’t have to pay anything. But if they find it genuinely useful, they can choose to pay more.
Say you’ve created a set of templates for small businesses.
One person might download them for free just to see what they’re like. Another might use them to save several hours of work and decide to pay $10 or $20.
Same product. Different value to different people.
A fixed price doesn’t leave much room for that. Pay What You Want does.
What Kind of Digital Products Can You Offer?
You don’t have to give away your biggest product.
Smaller, useful products can work well as a starting point:
– checklists
– templates
– guides
– ebooks
– spreadsheets and calculators
– icon packs
– presets
– educational resources
– small tools
– demos or starter versions of larger products
For example, a designer might share a small icon pack. A marketer could offer a content planning template. A developer might publish a useful tool or starter template.
The customer gets something useful, and you get a chance to show them what you can create.
0+ Doesn’t Mean Your Whole Catalog Should Be Free
This is worth keeping in mind.
Pay What You Want is the pricing model. 0+ is one way to use it.
You can still sell most of your products at fixed prices and use 0+ for selected products.
For example:
0+ — a simple checklist
$9 — an expanded template
$25 — a complete toolkit
The 0+ product can be an easy way for someone to discover your work without replacing your paid products.
It Can Help You Build an Audience Too
A digital product doesn’t have to be a one-time transaction.
Someone discovers your work, downloads something useful, likes it, and decides to follow what you create next.
Now, when you publish another product, you’re not introducing yourself to that person for the first time.
For creators, that relationship matters.
A growing audience gives you people who already know your work and may be interested in what you make next.
That’s why a free product can still be valuable even when it doesn’t generate much revenue on its own.
When Does Pay What You Want Make Sense?
There’s no need to use this model for everything.
It can make sense when you:
– are launching a new product and aren’t sure about the price;
– want more people to try your work;
– have a smaller product that can introduce people to your other products;
– want to give customers the option to support your work voluntarily.
You can start with just one product.
Set it to 0+ and see what happens.
How many people download it? How many choose to pay? Do they come back? Do they check out your other products?
Those answers can be more useful than spending weeks wondering whether your product should cost $9, $12, or $15.
Sometimes the easiest way to find out what your product is worth is to put it out there and let customers decide.
