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How is this a dark or “grey“ pattern. Are they being sneaky about it? At most it could be a signal that a business intends to be a douche, but that’s only beca

by rapind 5y ago

How is this a dark or “grey“ pattern. Are they being sneaky about it? At most it could be a signal that a business intends to be a douche, but that’s only because douchey companies ruined it. Just like duchey free customers ruined that for everyone. My employer probably thinks payroll is a “grey” pattern by this logic.

mitchdoogle 5y ago
It's a dark pattern because they claim the trial is free, but ask for a credit card. They are betting on the user forgetting to cancel, or worse, actually make it difficult to cancel. If it was just about giving the user a chance to try a product, they wouldn't need to collect credit card information. Some people claim it helps to prevent abuse. Maybe, but there are other, user-friendly ways to prevent abuse.
- rapind 5y ago
  I disagree. I can't see how this is a dark pattern / trick. They are just saying if you want to participate in the trial they need to validate that you're serious about it. If you don't like these upfront terms, then you can bail right there and then. If however they are being sneaky about the CC requirement, or actually bill you a month later, then I could see that qualifying as a dark pattern (or straight up fraud). I probably wouldn't move forward as a potential customer myself once the credit card requirement pops up unless I'd already done my research and was pretty sure I wanted to use that product. They could lose potential customers, but they also probably eliminate a massive amount of customer support... which maybe they just can't afford yet. Customer support isn't free.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> Just like duchey free customers ruined that for everyone. But you need to factor this in. Nobody forces you to offer free trial. But if you do, you need to accept the fact that there are people who are going to use your product for free to the maximum available capacity. In the old days, it wasn't much of a problem: you basically gave away pieces of software that stopped working after a certain period usually with limited functionality. There were many variants of this model: demo, trial, shareware. These free users didn't incur any direct costs for you (often someone else would do that for you, like computer magazines). Now, with SaaS, you need to provide computing resources for them - but this is your marketing cost. This is the problem of the model, not the customers. If you tell them they can use it for free for 2 weeks, they have the full right to use it and stop, period. They are not duchey unless they abuse the system by doing something clearly wrong, e.g. exploiting a bug in your software.
- rapind 5y ago
  Support costs need to be factored in too. Free customers can often have an enormous customer support cost. They'll send emails to sales@company.com if they can't find a support email with questions along the lines of "How do I do x..." (which might be completely covered by the documentation they didn't read), or "I have a suggestion...". You have to weigh the pros and cons. In some cases the cons might outweigh the pros and so you further qualify your free users, for example by requiring a Credit Card. This can be a big problem in freemium (and open source) type products.

by rapind 5y ago

mitchdoogle 5y ago

It's a dark pattern because they claim the trial is free, but ask for a credit card. They are betting on the user forgetting to cancel, or worse, actually make it difficult to cancel. If it was just about giving the user a chance to try a product, they wouldn't need to collect credit card information. Some people claim it helps to prevent abuse. Maybe, but there are other, user-friendly ways to prevent abuse.

rapind 5y ago
I disagree. I can't see how this is a dark pattern / trick. They are just saying if you want to participate in the trial they need to validate that you're serious about it. If you don't like these upfront terms, then you can bail right there and then. If however they are being sneaky about the CC requirement, or actually bill you a month later, then I could see that qualifying as a dark pattern (or straight up fraud). I probably wouldn't move forward as a potential customer myself once the credit card requirement pops up unless I'd already done my research and was pretty sure I wanted to use that product. They could lose potential customers, but they also probably eliminate a massive amount of customer support... which maybe they just can't afford yet. Customer support isn't free.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

> Just like duchey free customers ruined that for everyone. But you need to factor this in. Nobody forces you to offer free trial. But if you do, you need to accept the fact that there are people who are going to use your product for free to the maximum available capacity. In the old days, it wasn't much of a problem: you basically gave away pieces of software that stopped working after a certain period usually with limited functionality. There were many variants of this model: demo, trial, shareware. These free users didn't incur any direct costs for you (often someone else would do that for you, like computer magazines). Now, with SaaS, you need to provide computing resources for them - but this is your marketing cost. This is the problem of the model, not the customers. If you tell them they can use it for free for 2 weeks, they have the full right to use it and stop, period. They are not duchey unless they abuse the system by doing something clearly wrong, e.g. exploiting a bug in your software.

rapind 5y ago
Support costs need to be factored in too. Free customers can often have an enormous customer support cost. They'll send emails to sales@company.com if they can't find a support email with questions along the lines of "How do I do x..." (which might be completely covered by the documentation they didn't read), or "I have a suggestion...". You have to weigh the pros and cons. In some cases the cons might outweigh the pros and so you further qualify your free users, for example by requiring a Credit Card. This can be a big problem in freemium (and open source) type products.