Should You Offer Pay-What-You-Want Pricing?

Pay-what-you-want fits support that has no deliverable attached — a tip is the clean fit. For anything with a scoped deliverable, like a paid question or a creator service, a fixed price protects your time better. In the field experiments, pay-what-you-want draws fewer buyers than a low fixed price, and the amount each buyer chooses tracks what feels fair for the format rather than what your time costs.

FanBell is free to start with no monthly fee and applies a 12% platform fee only when a fan pays (FanBell pricing).

"Pay what you want" (PWYW) sounds generous — let the fan decide what your work is worth. The published evidence is more specific than the slogan: PWYW held its own on revenue for a cheap, impulse-priced souvenir in the field experiments, and in the same experiments it lost buyers whenever a low fixed price was the alternative — which is the risk that matters for a bounded piece of work you have to actually do.

What does the research actually say about pay-what-you-want pricing?

Field experiments find pay-what-you-want changes both how many people buy and how much each one pays, and the direction depends on the comparison price. Against a high fixed price, PWYW can lift participation. Against a low fixed price, it can lose buyers outright. Average payment tracks what feels fair, not the seller's cost.

The clearest single dataset is the cruise-photo experiment run across 60 cruises. A fixed $15 price sold souvenir photos to 23% of passengers, a fixed $5 price sold to 64%, and pay-what-you-want sold to 55% at an average price of $6.43 (Gneezy, Gneezy, Riener & Nelson, "Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). On profit per photo taken, the same PNAS paper reports $3.50 under pay-what-you-want, $3.45 at the $15 fixed price and $3.20 at the $5 fixed price, and states that the difference between the PWYW and $15 treatments is not statistically significant (Gneezy et al.).

The honest reading of the cruise-photo data is narrow: pay-what-you-want matched a high fixed price on revenue for a cheap impulse item and beat the low fixed price on revenue, but pay-what-you-want lost 9 percentage points of buyers against the $5 fixed price, selling to 55% of passengers versus 64% (Gneezy et al.). The four authors summarize the participation pattern this way:

"Results from three field experiments show that often, when granted the opportunity to name the price of a product, fewer consumers choose to buy it than when the price is fixed and low."

— Gneezy, Gneezy, Riener & Nelson, PNAS (2012)

The framing effect is even sharper in the same paper's theme-park experiment: 8.39% of riders bought the photo under plain pay-what-you-want at an average of $0.92, while only 4.49% bought under a pay-what-you-want plus charity framing but paid an average of $5.33 (Gneezy et al.). Adding a good cause raised the payment nearly six-fold and roughly halved the purchase rate — buyers who felt the "right" price had gone up preferred to walk away rather than look cheap.

Pay-what-you-want payments rise when the reason to pay is goodwill or identity. Pay-what-you-want payments fall when the buyer is quietly comparing your price to what the same deliverable costs elsewhere.

Does pay-what-you-want work for tips?

Yes. A tip is the one FanBell offer built for open-amount pricing, because a tip carries no deliverable and no reply-time commitment to protect. FanBell's tips page describes the setup as enabling tips and choosing a few suggested amounts, such as $3, $5, and $10, with nothing owed in return (FanBell, Online Tips for Creators).

A tip sits in the same behavioral slot as the goodwill conditions in the research: the fan is not buying a defined unit of your time, they are rewarding content they already consumed for free. There is nothing to underprice because nothing was scoped or promised in exchange. FanBell states on its tips page that "Tips require nothing in return — no thread, no delivery," and that there is no follower minimum to start.

The long-run Vienna restaurant data in the PNAS paper suggests open-amount pricing can be durable when the norm is strong: in the three months before the experiment, the median payment at the Vienna restaurant was €5, a €0 payment was observed at most three or four times a day, and a €50 payment — the recorded maximum — was observed once (Gneezy et al.). The same paper notes average payment gradually declined over the observation period while total revenue rose slightly, because customer volume grew.

If you are unsure how to set the suggested-amount presets that anchor a pay-what-you-want tip screen, how much should suggested tip amounts be walks through low/mid/high spacing and the fee math behind it. A recurring paid Discord membership is a different shape of offer entirely, closer to a subscription than an open-amount tip — what to offer paid Discord members covers what belongs behind that price instead.

Should a paid question or creator service ever be pay-what-you-want?

No. A scoped deliverable like a Paid Private Question or a Creator Service should carry a fixed price, because the fan's chosen amount is anchored to what feels fair for the format rather than to your reply time. Your turnaround commitment does not shrink when a fan pays less.

A tip has no boundary to protect: you say thanks and you are done either way. A Paid Private Question or a Creator Service is different, because you commit a reply time or a turnaround window the moment the order lands — and a fan asking about that price beforehand is a normal part of a fixed-price listing, not a sign the price is wrong (is it okay to ask a creator about pricing before booking). FanBell's creator services page describes the format as one where you "set a price and turnaround" yourself, and its how-it-works page states that "a fan pays the full price upfront" before the work starts (FanBell, How It Works).

The cruise-photo number is the direct analogy for a bounded task: even the generous pay-what-you-want condition settled at an average of $6.43 against a $15 anchor (Gneezy et al.). A souvenir photo costs the seller almost nothing once it is taken. Your reply time costs you the same 20 minutes whether the fan paid $30 or $3, which is why opening the price on a scoped offer moves the underpricing risk entirely onto you.

What's a middle option between a fixed price and full pay-what-you-want?

A minimum-price floor with an open top end is the standard middle option: a floor removes the near-zero tail while still letting generous buyers pay more. The published research finds a stated minimum also drags average payments down, and FanBell has no floor setting on paid questions or services, which are each published as one fixed price.

The specific study on floors is Johnson and Cui, who tested three external reference prices inside pay-what-you-want — a minimum price, a maximum price and a suggested price — and found that stating a minimum price reduced the amounts consumers chose to pay, because the stated minimum works as an anchor (Johnson & Cui, "To influence or not to influence: External reference price strategies in pay-what-you-want pricing," Journal of Business Research 66(2), 275–281, 2013). A floor therefore buys you protection against $0 orders and costs you some upside from the buyers who would have paid more.

On FanBell, the closest native equivalent for a scoped deliverable is publishing a few fixed-price tiers — a quick note versus a full review — so the fan still chooses their level of spend while you still know your minimum before committing any time. FanBell's pricing page lists "Every interaction format (you set your own prices)" in the free plan.

Does letting fans "name their own price" attract more buyers?

Not reliably. Whether pay-what-you-want attracts more buyers depends on the fixed price it replaces and on whether a posted-price alternative is visible nearby. Against a high posted price, pay-what-you-want usually lifts participation; against a low posted price, pay-what-you-want can lose buyers who would rather skip the purchase than seem cheap.

In a monopoly setting, participation under pay-what-you-want is close to total: 96.7% of buyers bought the product in the base treatment of the laboratory markets run by Schmidt, Spann and Zeithammer (Schmidt, Spann & Zeithammer, "Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets," Management Science 61(6), 1217–1236, 2015, LMU open working-paper version). Adding a competing seller with posted prices erodes that near-total participation: the same paper reports that 10% to 25% of buyers then buy at the posted price or do not buy at all (Schmidt, Spann & Zeithammer, Management Science).

Sellers themselves vote against pay-what-you-want once they can see the payoffs. When subjects in the Schmidt, Spann and Zeithammer experiments were free to choose their own pricing strategy, 85% opted for posted prices rather than pay-what-you-want. The authors state that finding plainly:

"When offered a choice, the large majority (85%) of sellers choose posted prices."

— Schmidt, Spann & Zeithammer, Management Science 61(6) (2015)

That 85% seller preference is the closest the cited literature comes to a verdict for a creator deciding how to list a scoped offer in a market where competing creators already post fixed prices.

Treat pay-what-you-want as a volume lever, not a revenue lever. Pay-what-you-want is the right call for a low-stakes, high-volume ask — a tip, a "buy me a coffee" moment — where more transactions is genuinely the goal.

Why did Panera Bread scale back its pay-what-you-want cafes?

Panera Bread wound down its Panera Cares pay-what-you-can cafes because voluntary donations never covered operating costs. Panera opened the first donation-based cafe in 2010 and closed the last one, in Boston, on February 15, 2019, telling trade press that continued operation was no longer viable; Nation's Restaurant News counted five Panera Cares locations in total.

Nation's Restaurant News reported that five Panera Cares locations opened and closed across Clayton, Missouri; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Dearborn, Michigan; and Boston, with the Boston cafe scheduled to close on February 15, 2019 (Fantozzi, "Panera Bread closes last pay-what-you-can restaurant," Nation's Restaurant News, February 7, 2019). The company gave its own reason in an emailed statement:

"Despite our commitment to this mission, it's become clear that continued operation of the Boston Panera Cares is no longer viable."

— Panera Bread, statement to Nation's Restaurant News (February 2019)

The shortfall at Panera Cares was concrete rather than philosophical. NPR's Planet Money reported that the manager of the last Boston cafe said the location covered about 85 percent of its cost, with Panera making up the remaining share, roughly nine years after the 2010 launch (Gonzalez, "What Happened When Panera Launched A 'Pay What You Can' Experiment," NPR, January 24, 2019). Panera founder and former CEO Ron Shaich told NPR: "I fundamentally believed that there were enough good people in the world, that they would do the right thing" (Gonzalez).

Panera Cares served full meals at a suggested donation price, betting that customers who could pay more would offset those who paid less or nothing. A charitable cafe carrying a real food-and-labor cost base is a materially different setup from the Vienna restaurant in the PNAS paper, which paired open pricing with a strong local norm and ran open pricing as its permanent business model rather than as a philanthropic pilot. The lesson is not that pay-what-you-want always fails; the lesson is that pay-what-you-want needs either a genuine goodwill framing or a floor to stay sustainable once real per-unit costs are involved.

How do you decide, offer by offer, whether to use pay-what-you-want?

Decide by asking whether the offer has a deliverable to protect. No deliverable, no reply-time commitment, and a goodwill framing means pay-what-you-want fits. Any bounded reply, turnaround, or file delivery means a fixed price fits better, because your cost stays fixed even when the fan's chosen payment does not.

• Tips — pay-what-you-want, with suggested presets as an anchor.
• Paid Private Questions — fixed price; you set the price and how fast you commit to replying, and that reply commitment does not shrink at a lower price.
• Creator Services — fixed price per tier; you set the price and turnaround yourself, so publish two or three tiers instead of opening the price.
• Personalized Shoutouts — fixed price; treat a shoutout the same as a Creator Service for pricing purposes, though pairing a tip with a shoutout in one offer needs its own fixed-versus-open-amount call.
• Wishlist / Project Support — fans contribute toward a stated goal with a progress bar, which is closer to pay-what-you-want in spirit because there is no per-fan deliverable, but it funds a project rather than replacing a per-unit price.

If you have decided a fixed price is the right call and now need to land on the exact number, how to price your first paid offer covers that separate question — it assumes you are setting one fixed number rather than opening the price to the fan. If the number you land on feels high for a first-time buyer, whether an introductory discount is worth it for your first paid offer is a better lever than opening the price with pay-what-you-want.

Frequently asked questions

The recurring questions about pay-what-you-want pricing are whether pay-what-you-want is the same thing as a tip jar, whether it wins more orders than a fixed price, whether it earns less per sale, and whether a minimum price can be set. Short answers with the underlying field-experiment figures follow.

Is pay-what-you-want the same thing as a tip jar?

Functionally, yes. Both let the supporter choose the amount with no deliverable owed in return. On FanBell that is exactly how tips work: you enable tips, set a few suggested amounts, and nothing is owed back to the fan.

Will pay-what-you-want get me more orders than a fixed price?

It depends on which fixed price you are comparing against. In the PNAS cruise-photo experiment, pay-what-you-want sold to 55% of passengers, more than the 23% who bought at a $15 fixed price but fewer than the 64% who bought at a $5 fixed price (Gneezy et al.).

Does pay-what-you-want actually earn less per sale?

Per sale, usually yes against a high price; per customer served, not necessarily. The PNAS paper reports profit per photo taken of $3.50 under pay-what-you-want versus $3.45 at $15 and $3.20 at $5, with the PWYW-versus-$15 difference not statistically significant (Gneezy et al.). The PNAS profit parity held for a near-zero-marginal-cost souvenir photo, not for scoped work that costs a creator an hour of real time.

Can I set a minimum price and still let fans pay more if they want?

Not as a native setting for Paid Private Questions or Creator Services on FanBell, which are each published as a single fixed price. The closest native option is publishing multiple fixed-price tiers so a fan can choose to spend more for a bigger deliverable, and pointing bigger supporters toward a separate tips offer for open-ended generosity.

Does pay-what-you-want work better for well-known creators?

The cited studies do not test creator fame as a variable. The PNAS field experiments isolate deliverable type and framing, and the Schmidt, Spann and Zeithammer experiments isolate market structure. Treat any claim that follower count changes pay-what-you-want outcomes as unverified rather than research-backed.

What should I use instead of pay-what-you-want for a paid question or service?

A fixed price scoped to one clear deliverable. If you want fans to choose their spend level, offer two or three fixed-price tiers — for example a quick text answer versus a fuller written review — rather than opening the price on a single listing.

Create your free FanBell page and set tips open while keeping your paid questions and services at a fixed price you know covers your time.