51–60 of 65 posts
An 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…
Here's the thing: when there are a lot of services that do something similar, I sign up to the free trials of lots of them at once to evaluate them. If you require a credit card, I probably won't include your program in the initial evaluation. So yes, if you require a credit card, you're getting fewer people with a higher likelihood of conversion, but you're also missing out on a lot of people who are doing compariso…
When you're doing most things yourself, like me, the goal is to get a specific type of customer (not every customer is a good customer for you, some types are a bigger drain on support resources than others), and the easiest way I've found to get those is to require a credit card for the trial. That might mean that I have less users overall, but I end up with the ones that I want.
There is a strong argument that many people hear alarm bells when asked for a credit card for a free trial. Yet, there is a valid case for wanting to overcome people's inaction, where people just don't bother to sign up (some of whom would actively enjoy/benefit from the product if you could persuade them to look deeper). I wonder if there is a model that goes someway towards addressing both of these: 1) One month fr…
What you're basically saying to prospective new users is this: "I don't trust you enough to spend bandwidth and server-resources on you without getting your ID and credit card info. On the other hand, I expect you trust me with your personal identification and credit card information right off the bat." I've had to deal with credit-card fraud in the past, so I simply don't deal with companies that do this. I suppose…
After you've been running businesses for awhile, you start to realize that the goal should be to get a specific type of customer (not every customer is a good customer for you, some types are a bigger drain on support resources than others), and the easiest way I've found to get those is to require a credit card for the trial. That might mean that I have less users overall, but I end up with the ones that I want.
I'm also not talking about saving on literal costs, necessarily, It's more about opportunity cost. I could be dealing with a ton of free users, or I could be dealing with a self-selected group of paid users and work on new projects. As a developer, a couple of hours here and there could potentially turn into a new product.
A bit annoying article. The phenomenon that article describes is not about credit cards, but instead of the psychology behind actively unsubscribing vs passively unsubscribing at the end of a free trial. Most people has a tendency to inaction. If you give users two services of equal worth, but in one you need to unsubscribe to get rid of it and the other the default action of doing nothing results in unsubscribe, mor…
Also, if someone gets charged at the end of a trial because your code is set to auto-bill them and they forgot, it's not like you can't refund them. Not doing so would do more harm than good. You only want to bill people who are actually using your product.
You definitely shouldn't use this as a tactic if you want to have a viral product. This is specifically about web apps.
You can make a lot of money if you bill people who are no longer interested in your product and forgot about it a month ago. Sometimes they'll pay you for years without realizing that you provide no useful or necessary service of any kind!
For those requiring a credit card for trials, how are you tracking metrics/conversions? Since the conversion happens when the trial ends, which is an event disconnected from your customer's browsers session, none of the JavaScript/cookie-based 3rd party software will be able to be capture that event. Some do have a backend API you can call if you can identify the user (e.g., KissMetrics & MixPanel both have this), bu…
" Some would even sign up, promptly forget that they signed up, then never use the app again" "...only 1% of them actually stick around and pay you for your product." Those two quotes lead me to believe that you're not doing lifecycle emails. Would those people still forget after receiving four emails from you over the course of those 30 days with specific calls-to-action leading them back to the site? Would only 1%…
Great point, though! My larger point, I guess is about leveraging something that only more interested users will go through (credit card entry in this case) to let them filter themselves out early.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Less customers who are actually happy to pay me money for my product > More customers who don't care about the product as much, or at all.
I would be more likely to sign up for full price. "Free trial - just add credit card" is a massive alarm bell for me. In my experience, this type of free trial often means you want my credit card details so that you can make it as awkward as possible for me to cancel and maybe place dubious charges when I'm not looking. That experience makes it difficult for me to sign up for a similar free trial.
Things like Twitter and Hacker News, where you can broadcast your displeasure of a company's terrible tactics would make it difficult for a company to keep signing up new users if people are complaining about it. The only companies that I see getting away with stuff like this are huge companies who don't care about their customers anyway, like Tivo.
All of my apps have a prominent link in the user settings panel that lets a user cancel their account/billing with one click.