I sold several digital products in the past over 4 years or so and have ran numerous price tests; including letting people pay any amount they liked.

In total I had about 10,000 sales. (Sale doesn’t mean I made any money because customer could choose to “pay” nothing)

Of the 10,000ish sales, 7454 paid 0.

796 paid between $1 and $100

And the rest paid over $100.

ZERO people paid $100 voluntarily. It was only because I set a price that people paid this.

The product where I set no asking price had 2284 sales. Of those, only 16 people paid over $1

Almost the entire revenue I had came from charging what I viewed to be fair value. And while it was not my only income (i freelanced on top of that), the sales I had did help out a lot.

Maybe in a scaled nostr and the ease of payment with zaps the numbers would have been better for V4v, but in the legacy environment it just doesn’t work.

Part of the reason why pay what you want doesn’t work is because people need anchors - price anchors in the absence of comparative pricing. Price is one of the major signals which people use to make decisions and in the absence of price, people tend to equate that with FREE.