Kill your credit card-less free trial. • Hacker News Board

Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.

#61

Post by rfelix2121 » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

thejteam wrote: post #41

The biggest problem with requiring a credit card with a free trial is that unscrupulous people also use the same tactic. Rightly or wrongly, the pattern "requires credit card for trial == scam" is etched into some people's minds. In order to overcome this, the company would have to be well known and well respected, at least within their niche.

That is definitely true. Personally, I feel fairly secure in putting my credit card info into web apps for free trials because of protection offered by the credit card company. If I have problems with charges that I don't want on the card, I can call them up and reverse them.

I see how some people's knee jerk reaction upon seeing that a credit card is required for a free trial would be to just close the tab and find a competitor, though.

Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.

#62

Post by kybernetikos » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 5:58 PM UTC

rfelix2121 wrote: post #52

kybernetikos wrote: post #50

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…

For website monitoring, a big part of the reason that people buy is trust, not necessarily ease of signing up. When you're running a commodity business at scale, you'll also find that more and more users will sign up for free accounts repeatedly over time instead of paying you money, which is yet another reason to require credit cards for free trials. When you're doing most things yourself, like me, the goal is to ge…

I see. I'd assumed that you were competing primarily on ease of use and pleasant UX, which if that were the case, you'd want potential customers to see what you are doing.

If it's actually about trust, it sounds like word of mouth is actually more important to you. It just seems a shame that you'd be extremely unlikely to get my business (assuming I were looking for such a service) simply because I wouldn't be able to evaluate your service without handing over data that I'm loathe to spread around, particularly for services I might not actually want.

[By the way, another model that might work for website checking as well as restricting the number of sites is delaying the notifications on the free account after the first week. Anyone who really wants the service almost certainly needs the notification immediately. It also gives you another excuse to email them 'by the way, your premium notification speed add on is expiring, upgrade to a full account to keep your instant notifications....]

Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.

#63

Post by MortenK » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 8:27 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #9

MortenK wrote: post #6

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…

That's a good observation. I didn't consider the cost of converting signups to paying customers though, as in my experience, the cost is little to non (when talking the type of SaaS products in the report). But in a scenario where there is significant cost pr acquisition, then the point is very valid.

I think jasonkester below nailed it when stating if you need to interact individually with customers or in any other way have significant expense supporting trials, then that's really something to address. Again, at least in these kinds of products, obviously it does not apply to enterprise etc.

Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.

#64

Post by nirvdrum » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 4:36 AM UTC

rfelix2121 wrote: post #57

nirvdrum wrote: post #48

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…

I'm writing an app specifically to help with this. You can sign up on the bottom of the original blog post. :)

Thanks. I read the article, but completely blocked out that blue box. There's so much hawking of eBooks and such that I skip over that stuff now.

Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.

#65

Post by rtpg » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 2:59 PM UTC

Amazon does this neat thing with Prime where if you stop right after a billing, if you haven't "used" the service they reimburse you fully. Was a pleasant surprise (Amazon's customer service is world-class)