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This coincidence is too frequent to be one; many online services - and probably offline too - provide a pricing options that look like:

The frequency of 3+ "recommended options" is too high. It makes you wonder if there is a UX angle to this. Why not 1 or 5? Or maybe custom solution?

The Three-tier Pricing Strategy always work because often customers don't know what they need.


So in one simple chart, you show them what they can get for different prices. They feel like they have a choice, and not feel like they are falling into a swindle. And you want to do business by making the majority of them choose the intermediate one.

Much like many websites offering their services:

There are a few reasons behind this...

Implicit Option

If a customer is deciding whether to choose your product or not, and there is a single option available, then the choice is binary. They can choose to buy it or not.

If you present 3 choices, then they tend to forget about the implicit option to not buy the product.

Centre Stage Effect

When 3 options are presented, people tend to choose the middle one. This effect is known as the centre stage effect.

In their article 'Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect', researchers Paul Rodway, Astrid Schepman and Jordana Lambert of the University of Chester, UK analyze three separate but related experiments in which they tested the association between the location of an item in a series and how often that item is selected as preferable over other choices. The results indicate a clear tendency toward favoring items located in the middle of a row -- regardless of whether it runs horizontally or vertically. original article

Its all different manifestations of cognitive bias.

Every human is effected by cognitive bias, thereby it is a factor in all human transactions.

Which is definitely fundamental to sales/marketing because you are selling and marketing to humans. This is a step in an overall transaction in which cognitive bias is used to influence a human to seek out an interaction with an interface to facilitate and resolve the transaction.

Human interfaces, web or otherwise are designed to facilitate a real world transaction. Every interface is intentional, it is a vital step in facilitating and resolving the transaction.

This is why the science behind successful IA/UI/UX designs is largely based in cognitive bias. The decisions you make in designing a human interface are founded in leveraging human cognitive bias (hopefully to the benefit the of user) to increase the success rate of resolving the transaction.

So please, use your powers for good :)

Some interesting reads

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

https://uxdesign.cc/the-importance-of-cognitive-bias-in-experience-design-66feeef50c5b

https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/leveraging-cognitive-biases/

As already noted in some comments, the three-tier product range design has both psychological and economic reasons. I would like to explain the economics a little more.

One Tier

Imagine you want to offer a service with only one tier. How do you price it?

Your market research shows that you will have two groups of customers: professionals who would use the service daily, and casuals who only use it a few times per month. How would these two groups value the service? Obviously the casuals would value it lowly, while the professionals would be willing to pay rather high price.

If you charge the professional's price, then you would not acquire the casuals as customers because you are too expensive for them. And if you charge the casual's price, then you don't make as much profit as possible. Perhaps you might not even appeal to them since you are too cheap.

Charging everyone a middle price is merely compromise - you will still not acquire the bottom of the casual market, and you could still get more money from the professionals.

Two tiers

The obvious solution: create two tiers, so you can charge customers from each group as much as they are willing to pay.

But you can't simply charge two prices for exactly the same thing. So you must create two versions of your service: either takes some features away from the casuals that they don't need, or add some extras for the professionals.

Three tiers

In similar situations, the market might have more than two user categories.
We also get back to the psychological aspect: binary choices can be difficult. So you create three tiers.

Second order price discrimination

This concept is called second-order price discrimination: using different tiers of the same service, you charge each customer what he is willing to pay. Basically it is the same reason why airlines have different seat categories, or cars are available in multiple versions, ...

For a more elaborate explanation, I recommend the book "Information Rules" by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian.
The book also says that too many tiers will overwhelm customers (looking at you, Ubisoft) and that the best number of tiers, if you don't know better, is probably three.