Acorns Pricing

Acorns offer multiple subscription tiers with various products to meet different customer needs.

Our pricing screens, prominently featured in the Acorns registration funnel and subscription center, provide a clear view of the products and features available in each tier, along with their respective prices. The primary goal is to ensure transparency in pricing and account access.

customer problem

At that time, Acorns' pricing screen employed a dark pattern that obscured pricing tiers, leading to customer backlash.

The Acorns tier selection screen (see below) defaulted users into one of our tiers, while the other tier options were hidden behind a CTA. With only 10% of users viewing the full tier selection screen, this design negatively impacted our churn rate and net promoter score.

After identifying the problem, our primary goals were to display relevant information clearly, provide transparent pricing, enable customers to easily compare tiers and their features, and ultimately help users see the value of Acorns.

experimentation

Guided by research and user-centric principles, we began identifying the information hierarchy.

We started by asking what information users need to make an informed decision, how this information should be presented, and why it matters to them. Iterations were explored in partnership with product, design, and research associates.

At that time, Acorns' pricing screen didn’t clearly indicate the presence of multiple tiers. To address this, we introduced a toggle to make the other tiers more accessible. We styled the bullet points to make it clear what was included in each tier.

The test screen achieved a 50/50 tier selection split (versus the control's 80/20 split), indicating improved user selection. Although transparency increased, the conversion rate remained flat. We hypothesized that placing users in the correct tier reduced churn due to their enhancing understanding of their selection.