How to set up a pay-what-you-want price

Pay-what-you-want lets a buyer choose what to pay, above a floor you set. On Getly 448 of 5,672 live listings use it. This is how to turn it on and, more importantly, how to choose the number.

Turning it on

In the product wizard, the pricing step asks how the product is sold. Choosing pay-what-you-want replaces the single price field with a minimum.

1. Open Dashboard → Products and create or edit a product.
2. Go to the pricing step.
3. Select Pay what you want.
4. Enter the minimum a buyer may pay.
5. Save and publish as usual.

That is the whole mechanism. The buyer sees a price box pre-filled with your minimum and can raise it before paying. Everything downstream — the receipt, the download, the payout schedule, the commission — behaves exactly as it does for a fixed price.

Choosing the floor

This is the part that decides whether the model helps you.

The middle half of paid listings on Getly sits between $3.00 and $15.00, with a median of $6.99. That range is what your floor is implicitly being compared against, whether or not you think of it that way.

A floor set at or near the median reads as a normal price with room above it. A floor set far below reads as a discount, and a floor of zero reads as a donation request — which is a legitimate thing to ask for, but it is not pricing and it should not be used for work you need to be paid for.

A practical starting point: set the floor where you would have set a fixed price if pay-what-you-want did not exist. You lose nothing, and you gain the buyers who would have paid more.

Say why, in one line

The single most common mistake is turning the model on and explaining nothing. A buyer who sees a variable price and no context has to invent a reason, and the reason people invent is usually unflattering.

One sentence in the description fixes it. Something like: "The minimum covers the work; pay more if this saves you a day." Or: "Students and hobbyists, the floor is for you. Studios, you know what your time is worth." You are telling the buyer which group they are in, which is exactly the decision you have asked them to make.

When to use it, and when not to

Use it when the same product is genuinely worth different amounts to different buyers — fonts, presets, templates and libraries all have this shape, because a hobbyist and a studio get different value from identical files.

Use it when you are releasing something new and do not yet know the price. The listing will tell you what people pay, which is better information than any amount of guessing.

Do not use it as a substitute for deciding. A product with one clear audience and one clear use has a price, and asking the buyer to find it adds friction to a decision that was already made.

After you publish

Watch what people actually pay. If everyone pays the floor, the floor is the price and you can switch to fixed with no loss. If a meaningful share pays above it, you have found a product with range, and that is worth keeping — and worth remembering next time you price something similar.