We waited six years to raise our prices. That was the mistake, not the price increase.

When we launched in 2020, our Premium subscription for lawyers was around $49 a month. At the time that price made sense. We were young, still proving the concept, and the product itself was simple. Lawyers could claim their profile, collect verified reviews, and look better online. That's about it.

Then we just left it there. For six years.

In that time, basically everything else about the company changed. We went from Norway into new markets, each with its own legal industry and its own expectations from customers. We stopped being a simple lawyer directory and became a platform that helps law firms show up everywhere that matters: traditional search, AI search, reviews, client requests, analytics, rankings, content. We kept building and adding features, one after another, and never once asked ourselves if the price still matched what we were actually selling.

Earlier this year we finally fixed that. We moved Premium from $49 to $210 a month.

From the outside, that looks like a bold move, maybe even reckless. From where I was sitting, it felt more like correcting something we should have fixed years earlier.

Price should follow value, not the day you launched

One of the easiest traps to fall into as a founder is pricing your product based on what it cost you to build it, or what made sense the day you started. Customers don't care about that. They pay for what your product does for them right now, not for the effort behind it.

Our pricing was still describing the company we were in 2020. Not the one we'd become by 2026.

By this year, The Lawyer Guide had turned into a real client acquisition channel for a lot of lawyers. Their profile brought them visibility, inquiries, actual business. For others it had become part of how they built credibility and got found, whether someone was searching on Google or asking an AI assistant. Once a product is doing that kind of work for someone, pricing it like a basic marketing add-on stops making sense.

Price is also a signal

Something that became obvious to me through this process is that price doesn't just decide how much money comes in. It tells people how to think about what they're buying.

People use price as a shortcut. A cheap subscription signals "nice to have." A price like $210 sets a different expectation, and it forces you to actually deliver on it, but it also tells the market you're confident in what you built.

Nothing about the product changed the day we raised the price. What changed was how we wanted lawyers to see us. We didn't want to be a small add-on to their marketing anymore. We wanted to be part of how they grow their firm long term.

And here's the part I didn't fully expect: the lawyers paying more got more involved, not less. They spent more time on their profile, used more of the features, asked us more questions, actually tried to get the most out of it. Paying more didn't make them harder to deal with. It made them more committed.

Losing customers isn't automatically a failure

We knew we'd lose people over this. Internally we modeled a scenario where we lost around half our paying customers, and we still came out ahead because of how much more each remaining customer was paying. That was our worst case, and we were fine building the decision around it.

In the end we lost about 30%. Less than we expected.

No one enjoys watching customers leave. But founders get so focused on keeping every customer that they forget a business isn't just a headcount of who's paying you. A smaller base of customers paying what the product is actually worth is often in better shape than a big base that's been underpriced for years. Pricing comes down to finding where what customers are willing to pay actually meets what you're delivering, and for a long time we had that badly wrong.

Staying cheap isn't the safe option

People talk about price increases like they're the risky move. Staying underpriced has its own risks, they're just quieter.

It limits what you can reinvest in the product. It slows down hiring. It slows expansion. It can even hurt your positioning, because the customers you attract at a low price are often the ones who chose you for exactly that reason and nothing else.

Underpricing isn't a safe, neutral decision. It's a strategic one, and it has consequences that show up slowly, which is exactly why it's easy to ignore for years.

Looking back, raising the price wasn't the risky part. Sitting on the old price for six years was.

What's next

The Lawyer Guide keeps moving. Right now we're putting a lot of effort into AI search visibility, making sure lawyers show up when people are asking AI assistants for legal help instead of typing into Google, refining how our ranking works, and making it easier for firms to build a real presence online.

The mission hasn't moved since day one: make legal services more transparent for people looking for help, and give lawyers a real shot at building trust and growing their practice online.

What's different now is that our pricing actually reflects what we believe we're worth. That's a lesson I'm taking into everything I build after this.

Price isn't just a revenue decision. It's also a positioning decision.