I analyzed SaaS billing dark patterns

I really like Digital Ocean and Linode in this respect, I can spin up a server, play all night, destroy it and it cost me cents. It's easy to see what't still running and monthly emails (payed per minute) remind you if you still have things running. I never had any surprises. But then again, I am the VM kind of guy, not the hyperscaler type.

I run a SaaS service and noticed we did a couple of these 'dark patterns', but not intentionally!

I've now added to our short term roadmap changes that will resolve these problems.

1. Emailing account holders a couple of days before billing to give them an opportunity to cancel.

2. Emailing account holders whenever a change to their account occurs which would affect billing.

This wasn't us being 'dark' more 'lazy', but thanks for highlighting!

> Just like duchey free customers ruined that for everyone.

But you need to factor this in. Nobody forces you to offer free trial. But if you do, you need to accept the fact that there are people who are going to use your product for free to the maximum available capacity.

In the old days, it wasn't much of a problem: you basically gave away pieces of software that stopped working after a certain period usually with limited functionality. There were many variants of this model: demo, trial, shareware. These free users didn't incur any direct costs for you (often someone else would do that for you, like computer magazines). Now, with SaaS, you need to provide computing resources for them - but this is your marketing cost. This is the problem of the model, not the customers. If you tell them they can use it for free for 2 weeks, they have the full right to use it and stop, period. They are not duchey unless they abuse the system by doing something clearly wrong, e.g. exploiting a bug in your software.

> It's hard to run a business ethically so that gives you the right to run it unethically?

The word "ethically" implies a strong moral judgment.

We can discuss ethics of course. For example, why would you think that charging at the end of a free trial is a problem, if this is clearly stated when signing up, notification E-mails are sent before any charge happens, and refunds are provided with no questions asked when necessary? What exactly is "unethical" here?

But my point was that many of these decisions are made not because of evil approach to making more money, but because of very practical and down-to-earth things. For example, requiring credit card information before a free trial reduces your signups considerably, leaving only the most serious potential customers. That lessens your support and onboarding load, because you do not spend time supporting non-customers that would not pay you anyway. Obviously this is not a clear-cut decision, but I'm trying to point out that the basis for making those decisions has nothing to do with morals, ethics or "dark patterns".

That kind of "dark pattern" conspiracy thought implies a lack of understanding of how a SaaS operates. It's very naïve to think that a SaaS business would care about charging for the first month through "dark patterns". If you run a SaaS, you care about long-term customers, retention, LTV and MRR. New signups are often actually a loss over the first months. So grabbing someones $49 through a "dark pattern" makes no sense: it actually lowers your important metrics, and makes you lose money, because that customer will usually contact support.

Another dark pattern is the use of credits.

You subscribe for $X/month. That buys you Y credits, which you then spend at different rates depending on your usage. Some services are credits per minute, some are fixed credit amounts.

Not only do you have to guess your capacity requirements, you also then have to translate that into a series of tiered variable costs and fixed costs, and translate from credits to currency (often working through bulk purchasing rates) to figure out how much you'll be billed.

I manage a SaaS contract that bills like this and I'm not sure I've ever accurately predicted our bill. Also one of their fixed credit cost items is clearly 10x more expensive than it should be when you actually work through the numbers to see how much it costs.