Hey everyone!
I might be biased, but I'm genuinely impressed every time I spot a good solution from an actual giant. Most of my attention goes to startups — that's where I've worked my whole career and that's where the stakes feel real. So it's rare for a giant to… actually care?
This week though, Google did. And the move is one any SaaS team could steal.
Why not steal what's good? We aren’t picky, righ?
Btw, a reminder that you can always submit ANY product you are curious about for my breakdown ↓
The Find
Google Workspace wants me on a higher tier. This week they showed me this — parked at the top of my Gmail inbox, right between the toolbar and my actual emails:
Three things we should pay attention to.
1.Where it lives — in my inbox, where my brain is actually on.
Inside Gmail (aka the core product)? I'm focused. I'm doing actual work. And honestly, this matters more than it sounds like.
The best upgrade triggers don't come from the biggest exposure. They come from the few places where the user is already paying attention. And attention is expensive and rare.
2.The pitch — one specific problem, not a feature list.
Most tier upgrades try to sell you the whole bundle: advanced admin, DLP, Vault, eDiscovery, custom retention — you get the idea. You're supposed to read it and figure out which ones apply to your life.
Do you think Google Workspace has more than 1 feature? Exactly. But they don’t lead with all of them, right? This one picks one job: security, handled. That’s a much easier yes for me + helps you get better insights about what features drive upgrades.
3.The evidence.
"149K+ weekly phishing emails to small businesses." That's just showing me what's actually happening out there — no fear-mongering needed. "Protect your team" would have been generic noise I'd scroll past. A real number makes the threat feel real — teams like mine, getting hit constantly. The problem stops being theoretical.
What about your upgrade triggers? How many features are there?
Why it works: psychology behind
The mechanism here is cognitive offloading, the fancy name for "our brains hand mental work to external tools whenever they can." It's automatic, not a conscious choice.
There’s a classic experiment, "The Google Effect", yes, I get the irony.
Participants were given trivia facts to type into a computer. Half were told their entries would be saved. Half were told they'd be erased. Then everyone got tested — on the facts themselves, and on where the facts were saved.
The "saved" group remembered the facts much worse, but remembered exactly where to find them. Your brain doesn't even ask permission. The external system exists, so the work goes there.
Now apply this to upgrades. Most tier pitches ask you to take on more — more features, more access, more capabilities. Which means more stuff to fit into your head: which features matter, what they do, whether you'll use them. Your brain resists that.
Workspace's pitch does the opposite. It asks you to hand over one job, security, to them.
One offer instead of twelve asks.
The Playbook
When to keep it in mind:
Any tier upgrade where the higher tier is a bundle (which is most of SaaS), outside of the actual pricing page. The temptation is to show users everything they'd unlock because you built it all. Resist that! Pick one problem you know your users have and lead with it. The rest of the bundle still comes with the upgrade.
How to use it:
1. Pitch where users already have attention.
The real landing zone is inside the product, right after the success moment, when the brain is engaged. Workspace's card sits in Gmail because that's where email problems get felt. For your product, figure out where the pain of the thing you're selling actually shows up — Drive storage in Drive, Calendar scheduling in Calendar — and put the upgrade there.
2. Lead with one specific problem, not a feature list.
Open a typical tier upgrade card, and you get a task instead of a solution. Every item is something the user has to test against their own job. That's work you're asking them to do before they've agreed to pay. Pick one problem. The rest of the bundle is still in the tier — they just don't open with it. If the user clicks because of the one thing that matters to them, they get all twelve. If they don't click because of all twelve, you never got the chance.
3. Make the problem real with evidence, not abstract urgency, and no counters unless they are real-real-real.
Most upgrade triggers lean on trops: "Limited time!" or "Protect your team!" None of them make the problem feel real. Workspace shows 149K+ weekly phishing emails hitting small businesses. A concrete number you can picture. And notice — this is real, ongoing evidence, not a countdown timer or a fake deadline. Evidence moves people; abstract language doesn't.
When it backfires:
Here's the catch. Specific pitches are risky. Generic pitches fail evenly. Specific pitches fail loudly. When they miss, the user has a real reason to actively dismiss.
Aaaand… that was me this week. All three things that should have worked on me… didn't:
My team is three people. "Security for your team" pitches a coordination problem I don't have, I can brief everyone over coffee.
I've never been phished. "Protect from phishing" pitches a pain I haven't felt (and I hope, won’t).
The button doesn't show the price, so I couldn't even evaluate if the trade was worth it, I don’t remember how much I pay for every subscription.
The issue isn't that Google picked security. They picked security for someone like me, who doesn't feel that specific pain. Which means the real bar here is targeted specificity. Google knows my team size, my phishing history, my Drive usage. They led with the wrong one.
Better move: target the problem to what you already know about the user. Team size, usage patterns, behavioral signals — a password reset last week, a teammate added yesterday. Or just test. See what sticks and try to find the pattern.
If you forget everything, remember this:
No one wants to think. Testing 12 1-feature-focused upgrade triggers over time will tell you more than showing a full bundle everywhere.
🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!
Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.
I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.
