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We went through this transition at CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/ -- now we have free demos that don't support saving to the

We went through this transition at CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/ -- now we have free demos that don't support saving to the server, so they're almost free in terms of server resources. Also, don't allow forum posts from non-paying customers. As the article hints, the real limit isn't computing resources (CPU/storage/etc), but people resources. Committing these resources to non-paying customers is generally not a winning proposition. Upfront-card-capture free trial periods and liberal money-back guarantees give your customers the zero-risk ability to guarantee that a product is a win-win, but filter out people who don't take your product seriously enough to consider paying for it. I'd advise any founders working on SaaS products to provide some sort of free trial mechanism, but probably less than they imagine!

greggman 11y ago
I don't know why but upfront-card-capture (by which I'm guessing you mean must enter CC number to try and cancel later) is almost always an instant NO for me. It feels scammy like a porn site. I'm not trying to be cheap. I just have no reason to believe you aren't going to try to grab a few dollars from me hoping I'll forget to cancel. And while you might have a liberal refund policy many companies don't so the risk I feel includes previous scams. On top of which, from experience, many companies make you jump through incredible hoops to cancel and there's no way for me to know if your company is one of those. And, if I was an employee of some company. The odds of me feeling comfortable using a company credit card to trial or even having access to one seems low.
- compumike 11y ago
  Yup, that's completely understandable! We eventually settled on a three-tiered system: (1) A limited free demo - just one button click from homepage and it loads in your browser! (2) A more extended free demo - but requires e-mail signup / free account creation. (3) Fully-featured free trial period, includes saving to server, more export options, multi-user collaboration, other operations - but requires entering CC number and choosing plan. Even after all that, our default customer service policy is to cancel subscriptions (available on website without talking to a customer service rep) and to give refunds immediately when asked, extending into 60-days of past charges. At the end of the day, I definitely agree with your sentiment: nobody wants to get stuck paying for something that doesn't work for you. I think we've achieved that for our customers, but it took some iteration to get all of these tiers together, and other companies will have to come up with their own free trial plans. Just like Baremetrics is doing per their blog post. (The other side of this is chargebacks: businesses do not want chargebacks! Stripe, for instance, charges merchants like us a $15 fee for chargebacks [disputed charges reported by a customer to their bank], plus the time it takes our customer service staff to respond to the dispute, plus losing the payment from the customer! We are incentivized to avoid chargebacks.)
pjc50 11y ago
Thanks for circuitlab BTW, the integration with electronics.stackexchange is great!
- compumike 11y ago
  We love that integration too! Just makes so much sense for questions & answers to have schematics tied to them. That was another case where in conjunction with the team at StackExchange, we made it very low-resource-intensive integration: after a https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ user draws their schematic in a question or answer field, it's rendered to a static image and sent off to StackExchange's S3 buckets and hosted by them forever. But we still allow the same user (or a different one) to re-launch CircuitLab and edit or modify and extend an existing drawing by hitting our server again for the underlying data structure.
pmikesell 11y ago
The other thing about circuit labs is that it's b2c. It didn't take long time for me as an individual to play with circuitlabs and go "ok, this is cool, I want to use this a bunch, let's type in my credit card". As a b2b it requires a bunch of extra planning, trials, evaluation, and then mgmt approval. I guess I'm just saying that it's much harder in b2b to see who is taking it seriously and who isn't. (nice job w/ cl btw)
- compumike 11y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Definitely more steps on the B2B side, good point. To split even more finely: this is the difference between "bottom up" B2B sales where an individual contributor starts using a tool and then spreads it within their organization, and "top down" B2B where there's a higher-level sales conversation with management before the software gets "pushed" down to individual contributors.

greggman 11y ago

I don't know why but upfront-card-capture (by which I'm guessing you mean must enter CC number to try and cancel later) is almost always an instant NO for me. It feels scammy like a porn site. I'm not trying to be cheap. I just have no reason to believe you aren't going to try to grab a few dollars from me hoping I'll forget to cancel. And while you might have a liberal refund policy many companies don't so the risk I feel includes previous scams. On top of which, from experience, many companies make you jump through incredible hoops to cancel and there's no way for me to know if your company is one of those. And, if I was an employee of some company. The odds of me feeling comfortable using a company credit card to trial or even having access to one seems low.

compumike 11y ago
Yup, that's completely understandable! We eventually settled on a three-tiered system: (1) A limited free demo - just one button click from homepage and it loads in your browser! (2) A more extended free demo - but requires e-mail signup / free account creation. (3) Fully-featured free trial period, includes saving to server, more export options, multi-user collaboration, other operations - but requires entering CC number and choosing plan. Even after all that, our default customer service policy is to cancel subscriptions (available on website without talking to a customer service rep) and to give refunds immediately when asked, extending into 60-days of past charges. At the end of the day, I definitely agree with your sentiment: nobody wants to get stuck paying for something that doesn't work for you. I think we've achieved that for our customers, but it took some iteration to get all of these tiers together, and other companies will have to come up with their own free trial plans. Just like Baremetrics is doing per their blog post. (The other side of this is chargebacks: businesses do not want chargebacks! Stripe, for instance, charges merchants like us a $15 fee for chargebacks [disputed charges reported by a customer to their bank], plus the time it takes our customer service staff to respond to the dispute, plus losing the payment from the customer! We are incentivized to avoid chargebacks.)

pjc50 11y ago

Thanks for circuitlab BTW, the integration with electronics.stackexchange is great!

compumike 11y ago
We love that integration too! Just makes so much sense for questions & answers to have schematics tied to them. That was another case where in conjunction with the team at StackExchange, we made it very low-resource-intensive integration: after a https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ user draws their schematic in a question or answer field, it's rendered to a static image and sent off to StackExchange's S3 buckets and hosted by them forever. But we still allow the same user (or a different one) to re-launch CircuitLab and edit or modify and extend an existing drawing by hitting our server again for the underlying data structure.

pmikesell 11y ago

The other thing about circuit labs is that it's b2c. It didn't take long time for me as an individual to play with circuitlabs and go "ok, this is cool, I want to use this a bunch, let's type in my credit card". As a b2b it requires a bunch of extra planning, trials, evaluation, and then mgmt approval. I guess I'm just saying that it's much harder in b2b to see who is taking it seriously and who isn't. (nice job w/ cl btw)

compumike 11y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Definitely more steps on the B2B side, good point. To split even more finely: this is the difference between "bottom up" B2B sales where an individual contributor starts using a tool and then spreads it within their organization, and "top down" B2B where there's a higher-level sales conversation with management before the software gets "pushed" down to individual contributors.