I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

Some banks make this much easier by allowing you to spin up virtual cards w/ daily spend limits on them.

This is a very cynical take. Not all of these things are designed to trick you.

For example, requiring a credit card for a free trial is to prevent free trial abuse. A normal person can only get so many valid credit card numbers, assuming you can detect burner cards (which for the most part the CC companies will happily help you do).

Yes, a good company will notify you that a trial is going paid, and a great company will require an affirmative action on your part, but the main goal isn't to trick you and hope you forget.

Also, the part about not prorating costs if you use less resources. Usually you get a discount for paying up front. The reason you get a discount is because it allows the company to do more efficient resource planning, a savings they pass on to you. If they allowed you to cut back, you haven't upheld your part of the deal. A big company can absorb the loss, but a small one can't.

Yes, some companies do these are dark patterns to increase their profits. But most have some pretty good non-nefarious reasons to act like they do.

I agree, and was going to posit the same argument, however, a credit card is a useful way to get unique info. If someone signs up to free trail without something like a CC, instead using an email address, then they just have to register a new email address to get further free service. Although I am sure there are alternatives that I havent considered.

Our software is subscription-based, and our customers love it. They get a predictable cost over time, rather than large costs every now and then. We can afford to include features that otherwise might not be justifiable in terms of new sales.

On the flip side, one of our competitors who hasn't switched has been struggling for years and a recent new version almost killed them off as many customers didn't feel they could justify the $10-20k or so to buy the license to the new version.

A key part of our success is that the subscription price scales linearly with customer activity. There's a fixed base price per active user, and in addition there's a cost associated with certain actions. This means that the subscription price scales with the customers activity and hence income. If they have a slow month they have less income but pay less, if they have an active month they have higher income but they also pay more.

FWIW our software is primarily installed on premise, but we do offer hosted service as well (base cost is different for the two cases).

> Companies waste tens of thousands of dollars every year on SaaS products they subscribe to but don’t use. And when I say “don’t use,” I literally mean zero logins for paid users during a subscription period.

We have a SaaS product, and we see that as well. Usually our sales folks will have a look every now and then and see if there's a lack of activity.

Almost always it's the result of someone quitting or losing their job, and our software gets lost in the handover of responsibilities. I've heard of several cases where sales has effectively re-sold our software more than 3-4 times to the same division in a company over the years.