The price ladder: subscription, PPV, tips

Three revenue streams, not one

There are three ways to collect money, and they are not managed the same way.

The subscription is recurring and predictable. It is also the smallest in amount, and it has lost its central place in the industry’s economy.

Media sold individually, called PPV for pay per view, is sent in the conversation, locked, and unlocks on payment. It is the line that makes the majority of revenue in a modern operation, and it is therefore what justifies the next two lessons, devoted to scripts.

The tip is unsolicited or semi-solicited. It is irregular, concentrated on few people, and it cannot be planned.

The platform commission applies to all three: OnlyFans’ terms state a commission of 20% of the fan’s total payment, deducted from each payment, regardless of type.

Free or paid subscription

This is the first decision, and it determines everything that follows.

The paid subscription filters at the door. Fewer subscribers, but subscribers who have already taken out a bank card. The conversation starts higher, the volume is lower, and the cost of conversation per subscriber is better.

The free subscription moves the sale into the inbox. Many more subscribers, a majority of whom will never pay. Revenue depends entirely on the quality of conversations and their volume, hence on the cost of conversation. This is the model that made the chatting question central, and it is the one that makes a human team untenable beyond a certain volume.

The choice is not made on preference but on capacity: if you cannot keep up with the inbox, do not take the free model. The first lesson of this module puts numbers on what “keeping up with the inbox” means.

Four tiers, no more

A usable price ladder fits in four tiers. Beyond that, nobody remembers it and it is no longer applied consistently. The site’s PPV price tool calculates what each tier really leaves after commission.

Tier 1 is an entry price. Its role is not to make money, it is to turn a subscriber into a buyer. The first transaction is a psychological threshold more than an amount.

Tier 2 carries the volume. It is the price at which most of the catalog sells. If you have to calibrate a single price carefully, it is this one.

Tier 3 is occasional. Longer content, a complete series, a specific request. It sells to a minority and it often represents a disproportionate share of revenue.

Tier 4 is exceptional. It rarely sells. Its main role is to make tier 3 look reasonable by comparison, and to give an answer to the minority of fans who spend a lot. The 2024 WIRED investigation quotes an agency trainer talking about accounts where a few people “open up their wallet to about $100,000 a month”; that kind of statement must be read as a reported claim, not as a norm, but it illustrates why the top tier exists.

What can be claimed about what sells

A lot circulates about “what sells best”. Almost none of it is public and verifiable. This course therefore sticks to three sourced claims and one method.

First, the unlock ratio is the reference sales indicator. A conversation tool vendor publishes on its presentation page a “43% unlock ratio”, explicitly defined as “of every 100 paid photos or videos the AI sends, 43 are unlocked”, and specifies that it is a cumulative platform statistic since launch, neither an isolated account nor a comparison with human chatters. It is the only sales performance figure quoted in this course because it is the only one whose definition is published with it.

Second, entry amounts are constrained by the payment platform, not by your strategy. On Telegram, the official documentation for payments in Stars describes an in-app currency bought by users through Apple and Google in-app purchases, with a published mapping table between the number of Stars and the net proceeds received by the developer. Module 4 comes back to this.

Finally, the commission applies before your margin. A tier 2 displayed at 25 dollars is not a 25-dollar tier. That is exactly the point of the third step of the exercise.

For everything else, the method is testing, and it is covered in Versions per audience and testing method. A price ladder is validated on comparable cohorts, never on an impression.

The permanent discount mistake

One last point, because it destroys more price ladders than any other practice. A permanent discount is not a discount, it is a new price, and a lower one. It teaches the fan to wait, it makes tier 2 unreadable, and it makes any later measurement impossible.

If you want to lower a price, lower it and own it in the ladder. If you want to create urgency, put it on the availability of the content, not on its price.