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Comment by mister_hn | Hacker News Reader

I abandon every website that promotes free trial period but asks directly for your credit card.

Absolutely a no-go: let me first try it for free and then I will add the credit card details, if I'm interested

Then you may not have the problem deeply enough to need the solution. It depends on a lot on the context B2B vs B2C, but I've experienced that the B2B customers who won't sign up without an absolutely free trial are much much less likely to convert anyways, to the point where it's not necessarily worth the effort for sales + support.

Also files under #chargemore for B2B, etc.

I don’t understand. The only reason it would be beneficial to ask for the credit card now instead of later is if you’re hoping the customer simply forgets to cancel. It signals to me as a customer that you’re not confident that your free trial will convince me to pay.

The ease of conversion is definitely a component. And that has a few parts. Maybe you hope that people forget they don’t want it (like you said). There’s also hoping they don’t forget they do want it. People are pretty lazy and forgetful.

There are other components. Credit card entry acts like a captcha, but it’s actually a useful part of the process (unlike clicking street signs).

And the marginal cost of a free trial is low, but it’s not zero. If I can have less free trial customers but end up with similar paying customers, that’s a win.

There’s not only one reason.

Sometimes it is used as a verification of "uniqueness", since someone could sign up for multiple free trials using different emails. Not a problem for most products, but can be a pain.

In that case, something like electronic ID or webauthn might solve the problem?

Suffice it to say, this has been heavily tested by thousands of businesses, and there's hard data behind many of those that land on requiring a card on file up front that has nothing to do with hoping people forget to cancel. It's about activation rates. If your service requires the user do some initial setup work to get value from it, like integrate your whatever into their website, they're MUCH more likely to follow through on that work after having given you a credit card to sign up (and perhaps had to discuss with their boss or IT dept or whoever to approve using the company card).

I have yet to use a service with this pattern that requires you to click an "Alright, start charging me $15/mo" button once their free trial expires. That would obviously be the most user-friendly thing to do.

So, without that step, you can't say "has nothing to do with hoping people forget to cancel."

As someone who as implemented similar CC blockers before: people who forget to cancel leave after one month, leave a bad reviews which affect future growth, and make churn numbers bad. I do not want many of those people, and will both send multiple reminders that they will be charged and refund them no questions asked.

But for any business that requires some amount of human support for users, it can be much easier to convert 15 out of 100 signups than out of 1000.

We ask for the cc now, but then still get a final confirmation before charging. The idea being that we won't charge you for forgetting, but you are also showing some interest by being willing to put the card in, and when it comes time to decide to pay, it's only a button press away and they don't even have to dig out their cc.

In B2B, it could be that the person who wants to try out the service is an employee of a company. He/She needs to first test the service before trying to convince their manager (or the company) to subscribe. Such people might not have a corporate credit card to put in, could be company policy that such subscriptions are handled by a different department. They might also not wish to use their personal credit card for corporate services.

For large values of B, in B2B, employees have corporate cards, with discretionary spending, so that's something to consider. A SaaS product with annual purchasing, priced just under the discretionary spending limit (read: an employee can buy this and their boss will just rubber-stamp the request and not even give it a second thought), is far easier a purchase. However, if corporate has to get involved, the effort is approximately the same wether it costs $1,000 or $10,000 because a bunch of people have to get involved, committees formed, and studies done.

Yeah I think there’s a general lack of understanding that leads inexperienced product people to believe that friction is always bad.

Good friction (verifying emails, asking a question in the signup form, collecting a CC upfront) can result in more paying customers as you’re optimizing your experience towards people who are actually interested in buying your service.

Rather than trying to cast a wide net and wasting resources on poor leads who want zero friction.

I typically disagree with free trials for B2B. The user has no skin in the game and the account will go by the wayside.

This issue came up for me recently when signing up for Audible. You get 1 free audiobook/month but have to verify a credit card before the free trial month. I imagined this was to cut down on users who sign up with throwaway accounts to get free books. What gets me is you can buy $10 prepaid credit cards and sign up repeatedly anyway, spending your $10 elsewhere. Completely opposed to the practise, however, when it enrols you in automatic payments which you have to opt out of before your free trial expires.

Have you tested this? Prepaid cards usually don't support subscriptions, which is a way of avoiding that. (I work with handling online payments, and tried this before, but it failed for my test-case)

Do you know if stripe supports identifying these cards?

I haven't tested it with Stripe, but according to their docs, yes: https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a...

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