2 ms·

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. I

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.)

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.)