3 ms·

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 re

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 comparisons of services. How many of those people you convert is likely to be a function of how good you are compared to the other options. If you are offering something unique or have amazing word of mouth, this probably won't matter. If on the other hand you think your product is one of the best solutions to the problem out there, you're probably losing more customers than you want by demanding credit card details. In the case of the OP, doing something that on the face of it anyone who needed that service could hack together a script to do roughly the same thing within a relatively short period of time, I would have thought that it would be very important to remove as many barriers to trying the thing as possible (but yes, there's no need to let the free user have access to checking more than 2 sites).

rfelix2121 13y ago
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 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.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  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....]

rfelix2121 13y ago

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 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.

kybernetikos 13y ago
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....]