One price, no countdown

One price, no countdown

These days I sell things on the internet. Alongside client work, we make small design kits at Mindfull Studio: the Anti-Slop kits that teach AI coding agents to build clean, consistent UIs, plus an Agent UX kit and one for EU AI Act disclosure screens. And MIZE, our minimalism coach app, goes to Product Hunt on 8 October.

So this week involves as much shopkeeping as design.

Today we took a hard look at our own kit listings. Some of them had a launch price with an end date, and a higher price promised for later. That's exactly the kind of thing an anti-slop studio should be flagging in a client's checkout, not running itself.

The usual tradeoff

Open almost any digital product page and you'll see it. A crossed-out "was" price. A timer ticking down. "Launch price ends Friday."

The case for it is simple. Urgency sells. People put things off, and a deadline nudges them to decide.

The case against it is that the urgency is usually made up. The end date exists to create pressure, and the "was" price may never have been charged by anyone. It works because the buyer has no way to check.

For a studio whose whole pitch is using AI to go faster without losing care and quality, that's hard to square.

It isn't a choice between pricing that sells and pricing you'd be happy to explain out loud.

What we changed

Every kit is moving to two tiers, Solo and Team, and each tier gets one fixed price. The listings are switching over one at a time.

• No launch prices and no end dates on prices.
• No "was" prices and no struck-through numbers.
• Solo means one person. Team means one company and the people working on its projects.

The tier describes who uses the kit, nothing more. Nobody should need to decode a pricing table.

The price as a design decision

Pricing pages are interfaces. They have hierarchy, copy, defaults and states, and they can be clear or they can be manipulative. A countdown is a design choice, and so is leaving it out.

If our kits exist to stop AI tools producing generic, careless UI, the page that sells them should pass the same test.

Where urgency is fine

Urgency isn't bad by itself. A real deadline is just information. If a conference ticket really does go up on Sunday, saying so helps you plan. The problem is pressure that isn't true.

And a fixed price isn't a frozen one. Prices can change. When they do, the change starts that day, not as a threat dangled to close a sale.

Will this cost a few impulse sales? Possibly. That's the tradeoff, and it's the one we've chosen.

Related, and more on it soon: we've been working on how products should tell people they're talking to an AI, which the EU AI Act now asks for. It reads like a legal problem, but most of it ends up on a screen.

The price should just be the price. If someone buys a kit, the kit should do the convincing, not the clock.