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Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

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Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#51

Post by teknopaul »

xxs wrote: post #30
sokoloff wrote: post #7

Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer*. In this space, giving a credit card seems perfectly normal and serves as a vetting function of seriousness for you. * I can concoct exceptions of course: worker who wants to try it for work but doesn’t have their own company card being one. But if you’re targeting cloud users, “doing whatever…

>Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer This is extremely weird. It's a B2B - I won't ever use my own credit card just to try some service, heck - I won't provide my credit card to an unknown entity that may lack PIC compliance, either. Asking for the company/budget/contract review/etc. for trial, etc. is a massive hassle as well. >…

I would even prefer a cheap first payment on a credit card or paypal than to give my credit card details to a company that claims not to want to use it. That just looks suspicious to me.

I refuse to give my credit card details to google because I suspect I know what they will use it for, tracking, sneakily taking payments by dark patterns in apps or if my phone gets stolen.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#52

Post by js4ever »

xxs wrote: post #23
wizwit999 wrote: post #2

I think you should collect CC.

credit card numbers tend to require proper PCI compliance and audit. Storing credit cards is quite the liability, and unless I know I can trust the company entirely, they won't be getting any credit cards.

We don't collect CC directly, we redirect users to Stripe Checkout page (so not on our website anymore) and we get a webhook from stripe with a token of the CC and no details about the real CC number... It's pretty safe and that way we dont need to be PCI compliant

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#53

Post by acjacobson »

Free trials are most useful / valid in my opinion when the product or service is novel and your potential customers aren't sure yet if you'll solve their problem. It makes perfect sense for a project management SaaS because everyone works in different ways. However, you're offering managed services which should already be well understood by your real customers. Managed Postgres is something they need or not - you're not in the business of selling them on Postgres itself. Thus I don't think offering a free trial does anything to attract a real willing customer.

As an alternative you could offer free credits if you really want to test this, but this will always be a trade off and there will be a lots of people who use the free credit and never convert.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#54

Post by [deleted] »

nojito wrote: post #11
humanistbot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dark pattern and will infuriate both your abusers and legitimate users.

Not really. All the big SAAS offerings utilize this pattern. It’s one of the best ways to get a nice core group of dedicated users that will help you iterate.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#55

Post by paskozdilar »

CPLX wrote: post #44
paskozdilar wrote: post #35

Your basic problem is that a single person can pretend to be many persons, and therefore use up much more resources than expected. The only way to prevent this is to identify the users in some way. Every way of identification is a tradeoff between convenience and security. CC card info is very secure (it's really hard to fake a CC), but it's extremely inconvenient. Personally, if a service requires me to put in my CC…

> Personally, if a service requires me to put in my CC info before even trying it, I am not using it. That seems unlikely. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you’ve signed up for at least one service in the past year that required a credit card up front.

Nope, I haven't. In fact, I don't recall using any paid services lately, except the ones my employer provides me in order to do my job.

That being said, I just don't like the concept of services altogether. If I can setup a system myself to do the thing I want, then I set it up. If I cannot, I try to find a way to live without it. I am somewhat of a Free Software idealist, so this text has really resonated with me a few years back:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

So perhaps I could've left out the "Personally,..." sentence, since I'm am probably not the OP's target audience :)

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#56

Post by ackbar03 »

lwhi wrote: post #39

Ask for a phone number for 2 factor authentication.

I think this is the easiest way, not sure why it's so far down on the list. Usually this is enough to prevent casual abuse. If phone number is too troublesome just use Gmail or something, they do a decent job of preventing multiply email registration. I guess the main problem is the bad actors who are determined to misuse your service will still find a way, but then you can just ip block manually

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#57

Post by mcv »

I've been thinking lately that we need some sort of internet identity. Something that proves you are a real, legitimate and unique person, but shields your privacy.

Netherland has something like this for government services: DigID. Every citizen can get one, and you use it to handle all sorts of government-related stuff, like your taxes, etc.

We need something like that, but internationally, and useable for everything, rather than just government services. But international is hard. And who will be put in control? Different countries have different privacy standards, not to mention different standards of corruption.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#58

Post by xxs »

js4ever wrote: post #52
xxs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

credit card numbers tend to require proper PCI compliance and audit. Storing credit cards is quite the liability, and unless I know I can trust the company entirely, they won't be getting any credit cards.

We don't collect CC directly, we redirect users to Stripe Checkout page (so not on our website anymore) and we get a webhook from stripe with a token of the CC and no details about the real CC number... It's pretty safe and that way we dont need to be PCI compliant

Okay - would be useful to mention, you don't process the credit cards on your own. But in that case - ask for minimal payment and possibly offer a refund. You can honor 2 weeks refund,

Personally I will be much more ok to pay a trivial sum to try out something than just have my credit card.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#59

Post by mcv »

ushakov wrote: post #47

3 possibilities, learned the hard way: 1) Offer a limited free tier 2) Ask CC before free trial, you don't need customers that are not able to pay you later 3) Make a shared demo account where customers can log in and check out the product without need to commit

Replace #2 with: use a payment system that doesn't require them to give their credit card info to a stranger. Payment shouldn't require that.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#60

Post by philipphutterer »

js4ever wrote: post #52
xxs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

credit card numbers tend to require proper PCI compliance and audit. Storing credit cards is quite the liability, and unless I know I can trust the company entirely, they won't be getting any credit cards.

We don't collect CC directly, we redirect users to Stripe Checkout page (so not on our website anymore) and we get a webhook from stripe with a token of the CC and no details about the real CC number... It's pretty safe and that way we dont need to be PCI compliant

how many legit users are turned away when asking for CC vs how high is the abuse ratio? maybe try to find out when the legit users turn away. maybe they are not satisfied with checkout process?
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