Pricing and packaging change more often than almost anything else on a website, and testimonials do not update themselves. Sooner or later you will find a glowing quote that says "an absolute steal at $9 a month" for a plan that now costs $19, or a customer praising your "unlimited free tier" that you sunset last quarter. The quote is real and the praise is genuine, but the number attached to it is no longer true — and a prospect who clicks through to your pricing page and sees a different figure will feel, however briefly, that they were shown something misleading. That small dissonance is exactly the kind of thing that erodes trust on a page whose entire job is to build it.
The instinct to quietly edit the number is understandable, but it is also where people get into trouble. A testimonial is a quotation — putting a price in someone's mouth that they never said is misrepresentation, even if your intent is only to keep it current. This guide covers how to judge whether the stale price actually matters, the honest ways to handle it, and when the right move is to retire the quote entirely.
First, decide whether the price reference actually matters
Not every mention of an old price is a problem. Before you touch anything, ask what work the number is doing in the sentence.
Sometimes the price is incidental — a passing detail in a quote whose real point is about outcomes or ease of use. "We switched from a $500 tool to ProofShow and honestly haven't looked back" is carried by the switched and haven't looked back, not by the $500. If the specific figure is not the load-bearing part of the testimonial, an outdated number does little harm and you may reasonably leave it.
Other times the price is the point. "At $9 a month this is the best value in the category" is a value claim anchored entirely to a figure that no longer holds. When the number is the argument, a stale one turns a persuasive quote into a liability, because the claim it makes is now false on its face. That is the case that needs action.
The swap test is a useful filter: read the quote with the price removed. If it still says something true and persuasive, the price was incidental. If removing it guts the sentence, the price was central and the staleness matters.
The line you cannot cross: don't put a new number in their mouth
Whatever you do, you do not silently change "$9" to "$19" inside quotation marks. The customer said $9. Editing the figure inside the quote attributes a statement to them that they never made, and if they ever see it, you have handed them a real grievance — you altered their words to serve your pricing. This is the same principle that governs what to do when a testimonial's results are no longer accurate: you may present a quote honestly or retire it, but you may never rewrite the facts inside it.
That rules out the lazy fix. Everything below is a way to keep the testimonial useful without falsifying it.
Option 1: Trim the price out cleanly
If the figure is incidental, the simplest honest fix is to remove it and let the rest of the quote stand. Editing a testimonial for length and focus is legitimate as long as you do not change its meaning — trimming "at $9 a month, this is the best value in the category" down to "this is the best value in the category" is a defensible cut only if the customer's point genuinely survives without the number.
Be careful here. Removing the price from a value claim can quietly strengthen it beyond what the customer meant — "best value at $9" is a narrower, more defensible statement than a bare "best value in the category." When in doubt, cut the whole value sentence rather than just its price, and keep the parts of the quote that speak to outcomes and experience. Use an ellipsis (…) to mark the omission so the edit is visible, not hidden.
Option 2: Reframe with a dated context line
When the price reference is central and you want to keep the quote, the honest move is not to edit it but to frame it. Present the testimonial as-is and add a small, factual editor's note outside the quotation marks:
"At $9 a month this is the best value in the category." — Jordan M., reviewing our Starter plan in 2024; pricing has since changed
This keeps the customer's exact words intact while telling the reader the figure reflects a past moment. It converts a potentially misleading claim into an honestly time-stamped one. Dating testimonials is good practice generally, and it is essential the moment a quote contains a fact that has an expiry date. This is closely related to how to keep testimonials from going stale — a visible date is what lets an older quote stay on the page without misleading anyone.
Option 3: Retire it and ask for a fresh one
Sometimes the cleanest answer is to take the quote down. If the price was the whole argument, the plan it praised no longer exists, and there is no graceful way to trim or frame it, the testimonial has simply aged out. Retiring it is not a loss — it is a prompt. A customer who loved you at the old price is often still happy at the new one, and a quick note ("we've refreshed our plans since you first signed up — would you be open to updating your testimonial?") frequently produces a stronger, current quote. The mechanics of that swap are the same ones covered in how to refresh stale testimonials before they lose credibility.
Retiring a quote also protects the ones you keep. A pricing page that shows a testimonial contradicting the prices right next to it does more damage than the quote does good.
Build a habit that prevents the pileup
The reason stale-price testimonials accumulate is that no one owns the connection between the pricing page and the proof around it. The fix is a lightweight habit: whenever you change a price or rename a plan, run a search across your testimonials for the old figure and the old plan name before you ship the change. Anything that turns up gets triaged with the three options above — trim, reframe with a date, or retire.
Do this at the moment of the pricing change, not later, because that is the one time you actually know what changed and what the old numbers were. A five-minute grep at ship time is the difference between a proof library that stays honest on its own and one that slowly fills with quotes contradicting your own pricing page.
The bottom line
An outdated price in a testimonial is a credibility problem, but a small and fixable one. Judge whether the number is load-bearing or incidental; never edit a figure inside quotation marks; trim it if it is incidental, date-stamp it if it is central and worth keeping, and retire it if it no longer holds up. The customer's praise was real — your job is to keep presenting it truthfully as the facts around it move on.