evermike

I think it would be useful if at least the first email could be read without a subscription. Just to understand the content, tone of voice, and so on. I believe the conversion rate would be higher after that first read.

What we didn’t try

For example, charging based on customer revenue (like ChartMogul). It doesn’t really fit our case, but I just don’t like this model overall.

We also avoided usage-based pricing tied to API calls or account activity.

We never tried monetizing through ads or selling anonymized data — and we never plan to.

And unlike many SaaS companies, we never forced existing customers to accept price increases. I know some businesses calculate churn vs. uplift and decide it’s worth it. We’ve stayed away from that path.

No, as far as I know. But as a merchant, in theory you can block that customer from making future payments. But probably only their specific card or email.

I’d say if a chargeback does happen, the chances of winning =0, unless you can convince the customer to withdraw it. I realized this especially after my last dispute, where I was 100% sure I would win. But that’s it. I have no faith in the process anymore. What’s left is just the internal struggle, I always want to respond to something unfair and try to prove my case. But here it’s not worth doing.

Of course we would never do anything like that. In the post I just shared two different cases to give some perspective to the community.

From everything discussed in the article, there are a 2 major takeaways:

1) You need to avoid chargebacks as much as possible.

2) If a chargeback does happen, the chances of winning are basically zero — unless you can convince the customer to withdraw it.

Yeah, we have that

Thanks for sharing. Appreciate.

Sure, and that’s the right approach. We also issue refunds, but for that, the customer needs to write to us and ask.

Sorry, I probably misunderstood and confused things. I was of course talking about the Apple App Store, when users file complaints about the app itself.

Well, I treat other companies and people the way I’d like to be treated myself. Knowing that a chargeback is unpleasant and creates extra costs, I always first write to their support.

I appreciate your attention. Let me explain.

In the post I mentioned that we build several products. I didn’t want to list them all, because I always feel a bit awkward about self-promotion. My goal with the post was to spark a dialogue, not to advertise.

RE pricing page: yes, we do state that there’s a minimum of 5 seats. But there are no chargebacks here, since we don’t take a card upfront and we don’t bill in a hidden way. In the worst case, if you missed or didn’t read that detail, you can simply decline and not subscribe after the trial. You’ll see the price in Stripe before giving us your card. And if you prefer, you can stay on the free plan for up to 5 ppl.

As I mentioned in the article, this is extremely rare for us, but it has happened a couple of times. And that’s where I start having questions and frustration about the process itself.

I’ve shared examples in the article.

Email about an upcoming charge is automatically sent a couple of days in advance, that’s Stripe standard feature. The other question is whether the user actually check their email (or which email they registered with).

As for cancellation, the problem is that even though it’s easy to cancel a subscription, chargebacks usually happen afterwards. It doesn’t matter how simple cancellation is, what matters is that the user first cancel and then still goes and files a chargeback.

Neobanks definitely have this feature. For example Revolut. There’s a “Block future payments” button, and once you click it, no more charges from that merchant will go through.

We always issue a refund if a customer asks, or at least try to find a compromise if the payment was made a very long time ago. In that case, it’s usually more about a pro-rated refund.

But recently I asked for a refund from a very popular project management system, and it was a nightmare, an absolutely terrible experience. After that, I gained a new level of respect for our own support team ))

To be honest, I’ve never personally filed a chargeback, so I don’t really know how difficult the process actually is ))

I know for sure that if users start filing complaints against you with Apple, they can simply ban your account entirely and for long. Some companies never recover from that and end up shutting down.

Yes, we’ve had a few cases where people tried card testing through us. But we noticed quickly and introduced the proper limits. In general, if you redirect the user to Stripe Checkout after clicking Subscribe button, all of that should be handled by Stripe itself and not affect your account. I guess ))

But this is a slightly different story. With chargebacks, almost every time it was just a customer not wanting to admit fault. What’s strange is that they could have simply written to us and asked for a refund. But I guess they realized they were in the wrong, so instead of contacting us, they went straight to their bank.

Yes, that’s pretty much how I look at it. And in all of our products I do everything possible to keep chargebacks to an absolute minimum, sometimes even making decisions that aren’t the most profitable from a business perspective.

When I look at some other companies, I often see all kinds of "shady" tricks that clearly boost revenue, but also inevitably increase the number of cases like this.

TL;DR: We run multiple SaaS products on Stripe. Even with clear renewal reminders, invoices and easy cancellations, some users skip refunds and go straight to chargebacks.

A $10 payment ended up costing us $43.95 recently. Banks almost always side with the cardholder, and the only reliable “win” I’ve seen is when the customer withdraws the dispute themselves.

So here’s my question to the community:

What’s really going on here? Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to when they subscribed, or even in cases where the claims are obviously false? And why aren’t customers required to provide any proof at all?

What actually prevents someone from using a SaaS product, filing chargebacks every time they cancel, and essentially getting refunded for the last several months of usage?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

In our case there are no big companies involved. And Stripe, which we use, makes the payment as simple as possible for the user. It feels more like plain unwillingness to pay anything at all.

Can't say anything RE advertising. Don't have experience. But I think you’d need an even bigger user base to make ads meaningful. And I’m not even sure Trello would allow it. I’ve never seen any other plugin do that. Do you have an example?

We started to monetize the add-on after a fairly long period, definitely more than 6 mo. Those early users didn’t convert well. That’s exactly where my confusion comes from. It probably would have been better to start billing almost right away. Maybe with a lower price at first and then raise it with adding more features, but the idea is to begin charging as early as possible.

I honestly have no idea. I don’t know what I could have done wrong by simply deciding to share my experience.

1) I generally agree with the first argument, but I think context matters a lot. There’s always a market price depending on what the product does and what competitors offer. If your pricing is far below or far above that range, it usually won’t work out well. Our add-on was mostly for 1-3 ppl team.

2) As for the second point that’s definitely a lesson I keep bumping into and somehow never fully learn. No matter how clearly you communicate and give advance notice, users still perceive it negatively. And yet, as a user myself, I regularly get emails from services I pay for about price increases or plan changes. Very few companies offer true grandfathering forever.

100%. What’s also interesting is that this pattern holds true in many other aspects. I often review our support tickets to see what customers are writing. And often, the bigger the client, the more polite and reasonable they are. Of course, there are exceptions.

For example during down time. AWS might goes down and we’re rushing to fix things. The first ones to complain are usually the smallest customers. They tend to write everywhere, often in a rude tone, sometimes exaggerating “we couldn’t track time for half a day”, while it is only 10 mins. Bigger clients usually more polite, thank us for responding quickly, and sometimes even offer to buy us some coffee 'cause they say we’re under pressure )

Yes, I see what you mean. In our main product, where billing is per seat and we work with somewhat small-med biz, the subscription form after the trial asks how many seats you want to pay for. It’s possible to choose more seats than the number of users at that moment, which means those seats can be filled later without extra charges/invoices.

From time to time, we see cases where a single user signs up but purchases 20–50 seats for a year upfront. That’s still always surprising me in a good sense.

The whole topic of seats could actually be a separate discussion on its own, 'cause there are many nuances, good/bad approached and funny situations we’ve run into along the way ))

I guess I just wanted too much ))

You mean 2% conversion from free to paid, or from trial to free? In our main project, we usually see around 4–5% conversion from trial to paid. But here it’s different, people have been using the product for a long time, everything works well for them, and the price doesn’t seem high at all.

And there’s another interesting argument I hear from time to time: people tell me they use Google for free, or for much less, and it gives them way more.

Maybe the big companies are partly to blame for shaping the kind of mindset users have today?

By the way, we’ve only had a single chargeback so far — which was surprising in itself. And our churn rate is around 6.5%, which is actually pretty solid for a product like this and for this kind of audience.