Cheeseburger Economics: The Psychology of SaaS Pricing

You walk into McDonald’s craving a cheeseburger. Five minutes later, you’re walking out with a burger, fries, nuggets, a drink, and a McFlurry. What happened? You didn’t suddenly get hungrier - you got influenced.

In fact, when McDonald’s rolled out self-service kiosks, the average order size jumped by about 20% and order value by 30%, largely because the kiosks never forget to upsell you on extras.

Every screen, button, and animation on those kiosks is engineered to make you spend more than you intended. It’s a masterclass in behavioural economics - and it’s the same playbook SaaS companies use to price their products.

The Fast-Food Playbook

McDonald’s menus are a crash course in consumer psychology.

Anchoring: The priciest items are featured first with big, glossy images. By leading with a high-end £6.69 burger, the basic £1.49 cheeseburger suddenly feels like a bargain. Psychologists call this the anchoring effect: your brain uses the first option as a reference point for value. This is why buffet diners fill 70% of their plate with the first three foods they encounter. Even if you stick to your original choice, it now feels cheap, and you’re more likely to “go large” because it’s still less than the pricey burgers.
Eye-Level Economics: Ever notice how premium items sit at the top of a menu, while budget picks are buried below? Fast-food menus, like supermarket shelves, follow the rule “eye level is buy level.” High-margin items get prime placement and large, attractive photos. McDonald’s devote about30%of screen space to promoting premium combos (which cost ~35% more than the classics), while legacy value meals occupy only ~10-15%. By filling your visual field with higher-priced choices, they shift what you consider “normal” and guide you toward pricier picks. Retail research finds the same: products at eye level get far more attention and sales than those on the bottom.
Dark Patterns: The kiosk interface keeps your running total subtle - tucked in a corner - while the rest of the screen bombards you with “Treat yourself!” messaging and add-ons. This is called a dark pattern: distracting you from the pain of paying. Price information is often delayed or obscured until you’ve psychologically committed to that extra McFlurry. Only at the end do you confront the total, which by then feels like an afterthought.
Frictionless Add-Ons: “Make it a large for 50p more?” Of course you will. The system cleverly times its prompts - a nudge for a larger size or an extra side appears at the moment you’re about to finalise a choice. Because it’s just one tap to add, and “only a little extra,” each decision feels minor. In isolation, saying yes to 50p more for large drinks or an extra £1 for nuggets seems perfectly rational. Stacked together, though, those yeses dramatically increase your bill.
Rewards and Loyalty: Add a few more items to your cart, and you inch closer to a loyalty reward - maybe a free coffee next time, or bonus points in the app. These programs tap into our love of “free” perks. Research shows loyalty program members often spend much more - by one estimate 67% more per transaction than non-members - through larger carts and more frequent upsells. McDonald’s app and kiosk integrations personalise suggestions (“your usual order”) and dangle bonus points if you try a new combo meal. It feels like you’re gaming the system to earn rewards, but really the game is working on you, motivating you to add just a bit more to reach the next perk.

Each of these decisions feels reasonable in the moment. Anchoring makes that upsized meal seem thrifty; a tiny add-on feels negligible; points feel like a bonus. It’s by design. And as we’ll see, SaaS companies have adopted many of these same tactics (with digital subscriptions instead of burgers and fries).

The SaaS Translation

Swap burgers for software, and the same psychological principles show up in SaaS pricing. Companies carefully craft pricing pages and plans to influence which option you’ll pick and how much you’ll ultimately pay. Here’s how the fast-food tactics map to subscription software:

Anchoring: Ever seen a SaaS pricing page with a sky-high Enterprise plan for £999/month, while the Pro plan is £199? That top tier is often a deliberate anchor. Very few customers will pay £999 - and the company knows it. Its real job is to make £199 look “reasonable” by contrast. Slack famously introduced an Enterprise “Grid” option (with custom pricing in the thousands) which made their $12.50/user Plus plan seem cheap - and conversions to Plus jumped 40% that quarter. SaaS companies almost always show multiple tiers for this reason. One industry study found 98% of SaaS providers use tiered pricing (three tiers being most common) to leverage anchoring.
Eye-Level Economics: SaaS pricing pages are designed to direct your attention to the plan they want you to buy - usually the mid-tier. Just as the top of a fast-food menu pushes high-margin items, the SaaS page highlights the “just right” plan. Common tricks include labelling a plan the “Most Popular” or “Best Value” and using visual cues to make it stand out. For example, Vercel’s pricing page puts a bright coloured button on its Pro plan, immediately drawing the eye and subtly suggesting it’s the default choice. Others place the middle tier in a larger card or with a different background. This visual hierarchy exploits our tendency to gravitate toward the safe middle option 0 known as the Goldilocks effect (not too expensive, not too basic). By literally putting that option front-and-center at eye-level, SaaS companies increase the odds you’ll pick it without overanalysing the extremes.
Dark Patterns: Many SaaS companies make their pricing look straightforward at first glance, but the devil is in the details. Critical information - per-user charges, usage limits, required add-ons - might only surface at checkout or deep in the FAQ. Cloud platforms are notorious for this: their pricing models are so convoluted that users need calculators and tutorials to figure out what they’ll actually pay. One major cloud provider, for instance, has literally millions of price points when you factor in all the instance types, regions, and options. It’s nearly impossible to manually predict your bill. All of these are akin to McDonald’s hiding the total price until the end - they make the product seem cheaper or simpler than it truly is, until you’re already invested. It’s no surprise that 76% of SaaS companies deploy at least one dark pattern in their interface.
Frictionless Add-Ons: Just as the kiosk slides in a “just 50p more for large” prompt, SaaS products excel at upselling you in the flow. Think about usage-based upgrades: you hit a rate limit or storage limit, and the app immediately offers a higher tier or extra package. It’s a one-click upgrade - frictionless and often framed as “for your convenience.” Feature add-ons are presented at exactly the moment you feel the pain (“Need more collaborators? Upgrade to the Team plan”). Because it’s so easy to accept and usually a small incremental cost, users often go for it. The model is designed to land you on a low plan, then gradually ratchet up the spend.
Rewards and Loyalty: In the fast-food world you get loyalty points; in SaaS, you’re more likely to get a tempting retention discount when you show signs of churning. Ever try to cancel a subscription and gotten a pop-up offering “75% off your next 3 months” if you stay? That’s the same psychological lever as “earn bonus fries after 10 purchases,” except deployed at the brink of cancellation. Many software companies will offer extra months free, heavy discounts, or feature upgrades to keep you from leaving. These save-offers can dramatically reduce churn. However, they also signal how much padding was in the pricing to begin with - if a company can offer you 3 months at 75% off, it implies their margins (or willingness to retain you) are very high. Either way, it’s a reward for not exercising your other choices, much like a coffee punch-card that keeps you coming back.

The Illusion of Choice

Whether it’s a fast food menu or a SaaS pricing page, these choices aren’t as free as we think. Every selection is being shaped by the seller - through anchors, defaults, visual cues, and carefully timed nudges. In theory, you have many options; in practice, the design is channeling you toward a profitable outcome. SaaS companies don’t price for clarity, they price for psychology. The menu might list “freemium, Pro, Enterprise,” but your attention and preference shave been thoughtfully engineered in the background.

For founders and product leaders, this creates a real strategic tension:

Play the Game: If you don’t use these tactics, your competitors likely will. In the short term, these tricks do boost conversions and revenue. In cut-throat markets, ignoring psychology can mean leaving money on the table and potentially pricing yourself out of contention.
Break the Cycle: On the other hand, overusing these tactics erodes trust and brand equity. Customers aren’t fools; over time, they realise they were guided more than they realised. If every interaction feels like a manipulation - surprise fees, confusing tiers, hard-to-cancel renewals - they’ll feel gamed, not guided. The long-term value (LTV) of a customer depends on keeping their confidence. Once credibility is lost, it’s hard to win back. Not to mention, regulatory scrutiny is rising on dark patterns in subscriptions, and rightly so. A McKinsey study found71% of B2B customers are more likely to buy from companies with transparent pricing-a huge vote for honesty as a competitive advantage. So while playing the psychological game yields short-term wins, in the long run trust and goodwill are invaluable.

The nuance, then, is in restraint and ethics. Using behavioural design to guide users toward the best choice for them(and yes, earn revenue) can be done in a way that maintains credibility. It’s the difference between a helpful nudge and a manipulative shove. The goal should be to apply “cheeseburger economics” with a conscience: guide the customer, but don’t outright exploit them. For instance, anchoring can genuinely help users understand value tiers - it doesn’t have to mean creating a fake $1000 plan that no one needs. Upsells can highlight useful features without tricking users with hidden costs. And if you offer a discount or reward, do it in a way that feels like a generous gesture, not a hostage negotiation.

Next time you’re staring at a SaaS pricing page, or a McDonald’s self-order kiosk, take a moment to ask yourself: “Am I being influenced right now? ”Chances are, the answer is yes. From fries and drinks to software seats and add-ons, Cheeseburger Economics are everywhere around us. The products change, but the menu of psychological tricks stays largely the same.

In a world where every choice is engineered, the real differentiator might just be transparency and respect for the customer. As consumers, staying wise to these tactics helps us make decisions that truly serve our needs. And as businesses, balancing this psychology with genuine value and honesty is key to building lasting relationships. After all, you can only supersize someone so many times before they decide to eat elsewhere.