[130e13a]

that's something i keep wondering about as well. i think it depends on the reputation of the company/project. some of them probably do attach it to the option that is actually most popular, but i'd guess that most of them do not.

for example, if a thing has three pricing options (free, paid, and enterprise), it is always the second option (paid, but not enterprise) that has the "most popular" badge. which seems suspicious to me in cases where the free version is sufficient for most users and as a result there isn't really much of an incentive to switch to a paid plan.

[hnbad]

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy at best. I don't think anyone[0] actually marks pricing plans by what's actually most popular.

The idea behind these callouts is to direct people away from the lowest tiers. According to theory, some buyers will always go for the priciest plan because they want "the best of the best" but most will try to get the best value for their needs. A common trick is to have a slight price increment between the bottom and middle tier and then a large increment between that one and the top tier because this suggests that you're leaving money on the table by going for the cheapest option. As an approachable example consider McDonald's McNuggets sizes where the smallest size has a noticeably higher cost per nugget than the next one up.

It's a bit silly in this case as an organization plan has a different target audience from a personal plan but to me this suggests the license works in such a way many organization end up buying only a single personal plan because the organization plan doesn't provide any added value beyond allowing multiple developers to work with it.

A common pricing strategy is to either only have two plans (free/paid or personal/organization) with easily distinguishable value propositions or to have multiple pricing tiers (e.g. basic/premium/professional plus a de-emphasized free/minimal "trial" plan and an option to get a custom offer for enterprise) with only the latter strategy normally having these callouts.

If a company does use "most popular" based on actual popularity, they'll likely only do so when the most popular option is the one they actually want you to pick anyway.

[0]: To be fair, a few years back I once came across a pricing page that had tons of plans and did distinguish between "most popular", "best value" and such. But this is a rare exception and I still don't think they actually measured that one.