HN Explorer

Ask HN: Sign up with Credit Card for trial or not?

2 points by djt ↗ HN
Is it better to force customers to give you there Credit Card details to sign up for a free trial of your software or to allow them to do the trial without a Credit Card and then ask for it at the end of the trial.

Please reply if you have tried one or both and what you discovered.

6 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] thread
dangrossman
That depends on your costs associated with a new signup. If they're nominal, then don't ask for a credit card, you're almost guaranteed a better conversion rate. If they're high (you often need to handhold new users through some kind of setup, your service is attractive to spammers or some other bad element you'll have to clean up after, it's resource-intensive to service each user, etc) then require a credit card to filter out all but the most committed prospects.
Gustomaximus
I would say test both.

In the absence of a test, I would say free trial and then get the CC details. My logic being; I would prefer eyeballs on my product for a period (if it is not too expensive to do so) as they may come back a year or more later when they are ready to pay. If you do the CC up-front most people will never experience your product and it wont be recalled so easily.

nancyhua
Agreed. As a user, cc often deters me from signing up bc 1) I hate filling out forms, and 2) I know there's >30% chance I'm going to be too lazy/busy to cancel eom. From the company's perspective, maybe 2) is an argument in favor of cc signup so they can tax my carelessness.
staunch
The only right answer is to A/B test on your own product. It can work out that your initial conversions are higher but your paid conversions are much lower, so make sure to test the net result.

Convincing people they can cancel their account and get a 100% refund can go a long way, if that makes sense for your product.

CyberFonic
I did some A/B testing for a client a while back and the number of abandoned sign-ups was much higher with the CC option. With the non-CC option, the number of bogus email addresses was also very high.

I think your best option is to put a time-limit on the software and to block advanced functions.

djt
do you remember the % on those?