Kill your credit card-less free trial.
observationdeck.net
Kill your credit card-less free trial.
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#2Really interesting. I'd love to see some numbers from a site/product that actually A/B tested both options.
If I had to use my credit card to get a free trial with Buffer for example, I would have never tried it (and eventually converted), but I guess it depends on the product.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#3Really interesting. I'd love to see some numbers from a site/product that actually A/B tested both options. If I had to use my credit card to get a free trial with Buffer for example, I would have never tried it (and eventually converted), but I guess it depends on the product.
There's this report from Totango - http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-... (PDF)
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#4An interesting side effect of prompting credit card sign-ups is that the visitor is engaged in getting use out of the service immediately. They're running against a ticking clock (14 or 30 days) to get whatever service running.
Those who don't prompt for cards are under no immediate time pressure and therefore less likely to engage a month down the line when the specific problem that caused them to search for you in the first place is no longer as acute.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#5Your advertised feed[1] seems to be missing. Returns an empty document.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#6Really interesting. I'd love to see some numbers from a site/product that actually A/B tested both options. If I had to use my credit card to get a free trial with Buffer for example, I would have never tried it (and eventually converted), but I guess it depends on the product.
There's this report from Totango - http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-... (PDF)
Really great report! It's based on 100 SaaS companies, and concludes very differently from this blog post: Requiring credit card for signup results in 50% lower retained users after 90 days.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#7Just know that I won't be using your product. And most of my friends have no credit card either.
Besides not being able to sign up, I also wouldn't want to. From what I heard about how credit cards work (as opposed to debit cards, which I think is the right term for the cards that we commonly use here), I'd never sign up for a free trial and give the developer (and any potential hackers) the permission to withdraw arbitrary amounts from my credit card. I sign up for so many things and try out so many demos, it'd be a major security risk. I even prefer not to give out my real name anywhere, let alone bank account details.
But then again, if you think this system works for you, go ahead and use it. If it makes you richer, who am I to say you shouldn't.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#8Until now I've always charged a very low trial fee. Say, $1 for the first 30 days of service then auto bill after the 30 day $1 trial.
Never thought it was a good idea to request credit card for free trial, though I haven't tested it.
Now I am testing a free trial that is action based, so the first 3 actions are free, but anything beyond that requires a full subscription. The reason is because the product I'm selling the primary concern potential customers have is "how would I use this" so we give them time have an a-ha moment but not enough to get a tremendous amount of use from it.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this report from Totango - http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-... (PDF)
Really great report! It's based on 100 SaaS companies, and concludes very differently from this blog post: Requiring credit card for signup results in 50% lower retained users after 90 days.
I'm not sure the conclusions are very different. Yes, in this report, you get more customers if you don't ask for credit-card upfront.
But, those 120 signups you get from 1000 trial signups, meaning, for each signed up customer you need to support over 8 trials (support here means your time and to a lesser extent, your service's resources).
For the 60 signups in the case where the credit card was asked upfront, there were 200 free trial signups, ie a bit over 3 trials per customer.
So which is better depends on how much money (or time) you invested in getting the 10000 interested visitors to site (prior to them signing up), and how much money (ie. time and other resources) you need to spend to get them to become paying customers.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this report from Totango - http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-... (PDF)
Really great report! It's based on 100 SaaS companies, and concludes very differently from this blog post: Requiring credit card for signup results in 50% lower retained users after 90 days.
Conversion rate 100/200 = 50%(cc required) vs 200/1,000 = 20% (cc not required).
As OP mentioned in his post: > Also, as an independent developer, it’s also very important for me to minimize time spent dealing with users who will never give me money for my product.
As an indie dev, it's a big difference.