Grandfathering

Grandfathering keeps existing customers on the terms they bought under after you have changed pricing for everyone new. It is partly goodwill, partly contractual obligation — many enterprise agreements include price protection for the term — and partly risk management, since forced repricing is a reliable way to trigger churn and renegotiation at once.

The cost accumulates quietly

Every grandfathered vintage is a pricing model you must continue to support. After three or four pricing changes a company can be running six or seven distinct models simultaneously, with:

• Old plans still referenced in the product catalog and impossible to retire.
• Entitlements that no current plan grants, still enforced for legacy accounts.
• Revenue reporting that cannot roll up cleanly by plan, because the plans are not comparable.
• Sales teams unable to answer what a given customer would pay today.
• Support and engineering carrying edge cases for packages nobody sells.

Migrating people off it

Grandfathering should be a decision with an end date, not a permanent state. The techniques that work:

• Bundle the increase with new value. Migrate to current pricing at the point you deliver something they want.
• Migrate at renewal, with notice, rather than mid-term.
• Cap the step. A 40% increase all at once triggers escalation; the same increase over two renewals frequently does not.
• Offer a longer term in exchange for accepting current pricing.

The structural prerequisite is a catalog and price book model that can express “this customer is on the 2023 book” as data. Where legacy pricing exists only as hand-edited prices on individual subscriptions, you cannot even produce a list of who is grandfathered, let alone migrate them systematically.