Getly
Charm pricing — the .99 ending — is one of the oldest conventions in retail, and on this shelf it is the minority. Measured 19 September 2026 across 6,388 paid listings, 51.60% end in a whole dollar and 35.18% end in .99.
How prices end
- .00 — 3,296 listings (51.60%)
- .99 — 2,247 listings (35.18%)
- .50 — 171 listings (2.68%)
- .95 — 63 listings (0.99%)
- everything else — 611 listings (9.56%)
Roundness goes further than the ending alone suggests. 21.13% of paid listings divide evenly by five dollars, and 10.80% by ten.
Twenty prices cover three in five listings
The twenty most common exact prices account for 61.83% of every paid listing:
- $5.00 — 371 · $9.99 — 351 · $1.99 — 333 · $4.00 — 331 · $10.00 — 292
- $4.99 — 257 · $2.99 — 234 · $2.00 — 221 · $1.00 — 204 · $3.99 — 197
- $3.00 — 167 · $15.00 — 165 · $0.99 — 146 · $19.00 — 103 · $7.00 — 101
- $12.00 — 101 · $9.00 — 99 · $5.99 — 98 · $7.99 — 90 · $20.00 — 88
The concentration is the finding, not the ranking. When three in five listings sit on one of twenty numbers, a price carries almost no information. It does not say that this file took longer to make, or covers more ground, or comes with support. It says which default the person who made it accepted.
Why .99 does less work here
The .99 ending was built for physical retail, where competing products sit side by side under one strip of shelf-edge tickets and the eye reads the leftmost digit first. Price-comparison sites inherited the same geometry: a column of numbers, scanned downward. In both cases the price is read against other prices, in the same glance.
A digital listing is rarely read that way. It arrives from a search result or a link, one at a time, next to a description and a preview rather than next to four rivals. The mechanism that makes .99 work is mostly absent — and half the catalogue has quietly stopped bothering with it.
This is a description of what people do, not a recommendation. Whole-dollar pricing moves with a particular kind of product: a template, a pack, a single file with an obvious job. The .99 ending stays common where the shelf looks most like a bookstore, and that is a reasonable place for it to stay.
Pay-what-you-want is smaller than it sounds
Across the 6,519 active listings, the pricing model splits:
- Fixed price — 5,941 listings (91.13%)
- Pay what you want — 462 listings (7.09%)
- Free — 116 listings (1.78%)
Pay-what-you-want gets discussed far more than one listing in fourteen would suggest. It is a real option, and it is not the norm. Free listings are rarer still, at fewer than two in a hundred.
What to do with a price
Two readings follow from the concentration, and neither requires changing what you make.
If you are on one of the twenty, know that you chose it. There is nothing wrong with $9.99. There is something wrong with $9.99 arrived at by not thinking, because the number is the part of the listing read before anything else — often before the description, sometimes instead of it.
An unusual price needs a reason in the text. $14.50 or $23.00 reads as deliberate only if the description says what makes it so: the scope, the licence, the fact that it is kept updated. Without that, an off-grid number reads as a mistake, and a buyer who suspects a mistake does not ask — they leave.
There is also a quieter point in the endings table. The gap between .00 and .99 is one cent, and the gap in what they signal is not small at all: a whole dollar reads as a considered number, .99 reads as a shop. Both are fine. Picking one on purpose is the whole of the advice.
