> However, more SaaS applications should also consider a usage limited trial.
it depends on the product , but for Saas that makes more sense. Even if the offer is really limited. However , what i dont like is services that has a free limited offer , but the first paid offer is just too expensive for those who want an entry level but paid service.
It sounds like the author is complaining that some products aren't priced right for people who aren't willing to pay for them. If you don't have much money, you can't afford nice things. The 30 day free trial isn't broken just because you can't afford the end product.
That's like saying a free test drive on a Ferrari is broken because you can't afford it. You knew you couldn't afford it when you took the test drive. Would it be better if they never let you have the test drive simply because you couldn't afford it?
I don't think he is complaining as much as saying you can get a greater conversion rate if you give the person more time, but limit based on usage when it is used effectively as a non-trial.
A ferrari is too extreme of an example, because they are trying out a few services, potentially developing some business with that service.
A better car analogy would be to let you drive around any cab of a truck to get the look and feel and how everything works at your own pace, and then when you want to hook up the trailer they start charging.
But he's still asking to get something more than he can afford for free until he can afford it.
As an analogy you don't get to have a free Ice cream truck for a few months until you can get your ice cream business going and are dependent on it. You have to pay for it or get something cheaper you can afford such as a push bike ice cream cart. The ice cream truck company is not in the business of funding new ice cream companies hoping one day you'll be able to make it
A usage-based trial is really just the same thing as a time-based trial. There is a certain pace at which users are going to use up their usage quota, and that translates to a time period. Generally, though, you want the time period to end after the user has seen the benefits and before they have exhausted their initial enthusiasm or encountered any bugs. Giving a user four months to make their choice probably puts you on the wrong end of all those considerations.
After the time-based trial, there are going to be different packages based on different usage quotas anyway. KISSmetrics is probably catering to very different and more established customers than the author, and their pricing model is structured accordingly.
Slightly tangential, but the KissMetrics 14 day trial makes little sense to me regardless of their target customer base. With an Analytics package you need time to set it up, then time to gather data, then time to analyze it to see how beneficial it is. 14 days just isn't enough to do anything of the sort. That said, I am a satisfied user of KissMetrics. Both their sales and their support team are incredibly helpful and responsive.
The author compared KissMetrics to MixPanel, two services that offer relatively the same thing. MixPanel gives a free account up to 25000 events instead of a 14 day trial. This is a much, much more useful way of introducing the product to a new user.
> Generally, though, you want the time period to end after the user has seen the benefits and before they have exhausted their initial enthusiasm or encountered any bugs.
Corollary: do not end the trial, whether it is time-limited or usage-limited, if the user couldn't verify the expected benefits before it's over.
For example, at my company, we help vacation rental owners to publish their property on multiple websites. We've learnt that 1 month was, in fact, too short a trial for people to fully appreciate our service (for reasons that would take a long time to explain here). YMMV.
Another thing I don't like about 30 day free trials is that they usually start right away. Before I know it, I'm getting an email saying that the trial is almost over, and I've barely used it. It takes time to develop a new habit and explore a product or service. This is worse if it requires some integration, setup, training, or data import.
I wouldn't say the 30d free trial is broken, or even mostly broken, but it's not always the right solution.
I've seen this in a training subscription product I have worked with. Customers sign up because it's a free trial, then don't come back until they're warned it's almost over. The customers that don't use it in the first 30 days aren't likely to use it in the next 30 anyway.
The solution for the provider is to better engage the users during the 30 day trial. If the only email they get during that trial is the warning that it's almost over then you're probably doing it wrong.
The more email I get from a service during a trial period the more pissed off I get; it feels as bad as someone nagging at me. I hate receiving email and trying to "engage me" by email is about as bad as a sales person calling me every few days to "see if I need some help" or to "offer a few helpful tips" etc.
All a matter of taste, I guess. We've seen good results with it, as have plenty of other people. It's easy to overdo it, but 4-5 helpful emails spread out over 30 days isn't too much I think. This is assuming the emails actually are helpful and not just an annoyance.
A lot of recent tools like Intercom and GetVero and Customer.io can help make this even smarter by emailing about specific abandoned tasks, different emails to those who aren't engaged at all, or not emailing someone who is fully engaged.
Just as a data point, let me tell you how my mind works because I'm the person your raw numbers won't tell you about:
Just getting the emails is likely to annoy me unless it's really, really earth-shatteringly useful and I've yet to ever see an example of this. I'll likely open the email and give it 1-2 seconds of scanning time to make sure I'm not missing out and to find the unsubscribe link; if I can't find that, I'm hitting the spam button which (for a service like gmail) will in some small way affect deliverability for other users.
Nagging me about abandoned tasks is really irritating and it would teach me that using the service "improperly" is likely to lead to my inbox filling up with no-shit-sherlock emails, and would make me want to avoid using the service at all just to avoid this fate. If I abandoned a task, I did it deliberately and really don't want to be punished with email.
Begging me to come back because I haven't logged in in x days is likely to piss me off too. If I haven't used a service in x days it's because it wasn't useful to me and an email isn't going to magic it into the opposite. If anything, you might actually be offering me social proof from (my past self, not others) that the service isn't useful!
When I'm evaluating an app during the free trial I've likely made up my mind within the first 30 minutes, if that. I'm looking to see if it's usable, useful, and beautiful, and if I can't determine that from experiencing the app, email isn't going to save the day.
If I abandon it within 24 hours I'm almost certainly never coming back, except to cancel the trial if I've already entered my credit card details.
If there's a high abandonment rate, emailing people after a trial is over to ask them what pissed them off (giving them the option to submit anonymous comments) is more likely to lead to useful information that will increase retention by improving the quality of the app. But nobody is ever going to say they abandoned a service because they didn't get enough email!
Email has never persuaded me to use an app I've abandoned, but I begrudgingly accept my fate of more email whenever I sign up for a free trial as non-monetary price I must pay to experience the app. If irritation is a currency, apparently I'm broke.
The thing is, overly-aggressive marketing tactics that you wouldn't want to be subjected to yourself have downsides that aren't readily detectable by your stats and dashboard.
There was someone who's articles and videos I'd share on reddit because they contain (and still do!) really, really great content. The trouble is, they're now wrapped up in overly-aggressive marketing tactics. The videos now have a YouTube ad and a 15 second intro lead-in that reminds me of the THX intro clip [1]. This is followed by an advertisement for other products, followed by the actual content, followed by the spammiest looking "click subscribe!" clip. If you visit his website for the first time, you're now immediately greeted with a popup asking to subscribe to their email list. Again, really great content wrapped up in unempathetic marketing tactics. Last time I shared something he'd created on a targeted subreddit, everyone immediately bitched it was spam and it was downvoted; they missed the content because of yucky marketing.
Every time I'd post a link, pre-unempathetic marketing, it would (apparently) net him a lot of traffic and reach a previously untapped audience. (I'd get a thank-you email for the huge spike in traffic!) Social media traffic is harder to convert but can be done quite effectively when done properly. What this person can't measure is my current unwillingness to continue to share his best content because of these overly aggressive, unempathetic tactics. I put up with them and still consume his content because I know it's good and it appeals to my interests, but it seems to make newbies bounce very quickly.
There are marketing tactics that "work" and will result in a positive bump in metrics but have an ick-factor to them and hidden cost. Same deal with on-boarding emails, nagging emails, jQuery popups begging for an email address, etc. They have tangible results and appear to be working, but the undetectable damage is still present.
My general rule of thumb is that if you wouldn't want someone to subject you to the tactic, don't subject others.
It comes from the benefit of gaining 10 over the risk of losing one. There exist people who vehemently hate receiving email but for some reason refuse to just opt out, and you will lose them. But they are not the common case. Remember that unless your target market is "a handful of people on HN," you should not place much faith in a self-selected sample of vocal HN users expressing their personal feelings.
Many people here will also tell you that $100 a month is an outrageous price for a service that saves time for software engineers. It is true that they feel that way, but it's a mathematically false statement.
These are great points, and speak to why measuring the impact of email is really, really important. Until you're holding your emails accountable to performance (whether it's getting someone to come back or to buy), you're just throwing darts in the air and potentially annoying someone.
At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - and we definitely find that some emails don't work. You've got to test different emails and strategies, see what works - and then ideally optimize and personalize what (or even whether) you are sending based on individuals' actions.
How do you measure how pissed off I am? From your side of the table a lack of positive action is indistinguishable from absolute apathy, passive interest without action, undelivered mail (most tracking widgets fail in webmail), etc.
I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they never react to.
Why should they measure how pissed off you are? Why is that data point interesting to them if it doesn't affect any of the metrics they're actually interested in, such as making more money and satisfying a higher percentage of users?
It doesn't feel great to be told you're unimportant, and no company owner will say that to their own customer, but really — you and I are not that important. I do not expect McDonald's to abolish all their meat products because they offend me as a vegetarian — the rest of their customers manifestly do not share that opinion, so it would be a dumb choice if they killed the Big Mac. Similarly, it is not in a company's best interests to terminate an objectively successful email campaign just because some random guy got pissed off but was unwilling to click Unsubscribe. Successful companies lose customers all the time for all kinds of reasons — they would never get anything done if they tried to personally appeal to every single person on earth.
Avoiding pissing people off is a basic ethical concern, which is at least as important as making money. Obviously it can't be totally avoided, but you try anyway. If you can't make more money without pissing a bunch of people off, you should consider changing your business.
This isn't about a bunch of people. Remember, we're talking about so few people that they don't even make a blip in any of your metrics. If you're getting angry replies or all your emails are deleted without being read or lots of people are unsubscribing, yeah, that's bad and you should think about what you've done wrong. But that's not the situation we're talking about here.
Again, McDonald's pisses off millions of vegetarians every single day. Would you say on that basis that they should go meatless? Should churches close to avoid pissing off militant atheists?
The point is not that you should be callous about offending people. Obviously it is better for all involved to make people happy, and that should always be your goal. But the point is that one or two guys saying "I'm so angry!" on an Internet forum does not mean you've failed. No matter what you do, even if it's pure charity work, you'll eventually find someone who gets upset about it. All you can do is apologize and offer to unsubscribe them — it's not rational to throw your business away on that basis.
Yeah -- I really thought about providing a "4 hours of actual usage" trial instead of a 14-day trial for a product of mine -- thinking that they could sign up immediately, not worrying that they don't need to fully try it within the next 14 days.
But the problem is, users don't understand it. The think it's 4 hours from when you sign up. The amount of text it takes to explain that it's actual cumulative usage, is so much that they don't read it. They just see 4-hour trial, and think, that's weird, and I don't have time for that right now.
Here is an idea - Pause/freeze the trial period. Initially give a 14 day trial period. If the user does not come back after 2-3 days, send them an email that you have paused their trial for now and it will start running again when they login next time.
The problem with this is that we're all in the business of making money. You want to put constraints on your customers to give them urgency to complete their trial, so they can then become paying customers...thus keeping you in business.
With any business that requires configuration (like setting up tracking on your site or entering candidates in a CRM), you need to push your users to get over that initial hurdle. A short time constraint forces them to act quickly to try to get value out of your product. They can always sign up for the trial at another time if they're not ready to really commit to setting it up and using it right now.
The added benefit of all of this is your sales team then works with more qualified leads and spends less time talking to people that would fit into your "paused" category, which can often become a deadpool of unactivated users.
I often sign up because something seems neat, or because it solves a problem I know I have.
It would be great if the 30 day trial started the first time I really start using the software.
A great alternative is for a company to offer a newsletter. Then I can get reminders about what they do, learn about how great they are, and sign up when I'm ready to use the software.
I'm bad at estimating time frames. I often think I need something (e.g., KissMetrics) next week. In reality, I won't start using it for months.
I couldn't disagree more. I've done 30 day trials and unlimited Free plans. Free plans convert much less often and require much more user support time.
Now, do I think a bootstrapped startup should seek out free plans and betas? Of course. Just dont do that with your app.
I think the very big problem with trials is that the majority is not by day of usage, but days in a row. So, when I really need to use, the trial has expired.
One is that I really need the product RIGHT NOW in which case I am going to pull out the credit card.
The other is that it's one of the many things I'd like to evaluate someday and sure let's start that 30 day trial but there are so many other things I need to do RIGHT NOW that I never get around to finishing it.
Test against your own audience, but I would bet heavily against the conclusion "Usage limited trials outperform free trials" for the majority of SaaS apps. Dropbox's case is different with a capital D because the trial/invite mechanic is code to their viral adoption.
One powerful reason why you generally want to avoid having a meter running is you are really making two related but distinct sales: you are trying to convince them to pay, yes, but you are also trying to convince them to use your thing versus their existing way of doing business. That is often the harder sale. Putting a marginal cost, even in free quota, for using your thing puts friction in the adoption process, which you KEENLY do not want.
While it may be the case as a bootstrapped entrepreneur that your business has not yet spent the sum of $600 on everything put together, the overwhelming majority of businesses are not like you. Many businesses will spend $600 today on one line item, for instance virtually any company which employs 3 or more college graduates. Many of these businesses also have habits with regards to buying software which are more beneficial to SaaS companies than your habits are, for example a) having predictable positive ROI on integration costs and b) never attempting to optimize for $150 expenses by switching providers on a whim.
How much better is a free trial for making that harder sale? If I know that any work I put into switching to your thing might get destroyed after thirty days, I'm less likely to bother at all. Whereas if it's a partially-free-forever thing like Dropbox, I don't have to commit as much to either the new way or old way. If I hate it, I don't have to rush to get out before the trial ends, I can just wait until I can't take it anymore.
Partly it depends whether I actually need the "full version" just to evaluate, or if I can get by on the free version, for now at least. Didn't you have a similar issue with BCC, where people would get all they needed from the free trial? I don't remember how you resolved that.
Not speaking for patio11, but I would guess the free trial allows businesses to evaluate whether the software meets their requirements.
Companies have budgets to pay for what they need. Their concern is that the software meets those goals, then they are willing to break out the checkbook. They know they have a problem, they have a budget to solve it, and they just need to know your software solves it.
Consumers, OTOH, may need to have value proven over time. Thus, the dropbox usage limits make a lot more sense.
I look as the difference in your example that one suction cost $600 at the initial stages. Which to me indicates that you're very price sensitive. Maybe this is how the other company weeds out people who want to pay as little as possible. They basically don't want to fund startups. It's just a different business model.
Too many times I hear here people saying startups should charge more, get paid for your efforts. But then if you do you're critized for being too expensive for startups. So what's the option then?
A survey we ran at https://starthq.com confirms the points the post brings up. We are looking to add pricing and trial duration info to our SaaS directory, but I was wondering: what does everyone think would be the best way to display this information & how should we go about collecting this data?
When it comes to displaying the info, I was thinking of using two sets of tags, one for the pricing model, i.e. "Free", "Freemium" or "Trial" and the other for the starting price per month once you do start paying: "<$5", "<$10", "<$20" etc. perhaps with an option to say that you pay per use such as when sending transaction emails or infrastructure.
As for collecting the data: the only thing I can think of is that we either do it ourselves, which would be time consuming for the 700+ apps we've got in the directory, or get the SaaS providers to register and do it themselves. Perhaps there's some way to automate this or crowd source it, but I can't seem to think of anything sensible.
I was expecting this to refer to how easily most software trials are bypassed. Some simply by changing your clock, others require uninstallation and reinstallation or change registry settings (I have yet to come across trial software on linux), and some even go so far as to have rootkit behavior, modifying your boot sector. For website services like this, it's trivial to just use multiple accounts. Not that I'd want to do this, I just think it's an interesting subject.
If $20 is worth more to you than the hassle of creating a new account and having to re-enter all your data every single month till the end of time, you are probably not somebody the provider should be optimizing their sales process for.
I definitely agree that you should have some kind of usage limitation so that if the person doesn't decide in 30 days they can come back and try the product still. However, what I've done for my product is given away the full product for 3 weeks and then limit usage after that. What I've seen, is more people buy my pro version instead of just the basic because they can test out all the features. They can also still come back and test the product and aren't shut out if they miss the time trial window.
30 day trials are prospect-hostile because they force customers onto the service provider's timeline, not the prospects. That said, I'm sure time-limited trials do force the decisioning process in a way freemium does not.
My opinion on SaaS plans is that the no/low-cost plan should be more or less fully functioning, without even some sort of limit such as number of leads (ex: Yammer, Zendesk, Eventbrite). When companies really start using your product, the features that make up a paid tier will become obvious and said companies will be more than willing to pay up.
30:14 And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and
will execute judgments in No.
30:15 And I will pour my fury upon Sin, the strength of Egypt; and I
will cut off the multitude of No.
30:16 And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin shall have great pain, and No
shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.
30:17 The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword:
and these cities shall go into captivity.
30:18 At Tehaphnehes also the day shall be darkened, when I shall
break there the yokes of Egypt: and the pomp of her strength shall
cease in her: as for her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters
shall go into captivity.
30:19 Thus will I execute judgments in Egypt: and they shall know that
I am the LORD.
44 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 97.8 ms ] threadThat's like saying a free test drive on a Ferrari is broken because you can't afford it. You knew you couldn't afford it when you took the test drive. Would it be better if they never let you have the test drive simply because you couldn't afford it?
A ferrari is too extreme of an example, because they are trying out a few services, potentially developing some business with that service.
A better car analogy would be to let you drive around any cab of a truck to get the look and feel and how everything works at your own pace, and then when you want to hook up the trailer they start charging.
As an analogy you don't get to have a free Ice cream truck for a few months until you can get your ice cream business going and are dependent on it. You have to pay for it or get something cheaper you can afford such as a push bike ice cream cart. The ice cream truck company is not in the business of funding new ice cream companies hoping one day you'll be able to make it
After the time-based trial, there are going to be different packages based on different usage quotas anyway. KISSmetrics is probably catering to very different and more established customers than the author, and their pricing model is structured accordingly.
The author compared KissMetrics to MixPanel, two services that offer relatively the same thing. MixPanel gives a free account up to 25000 events instead of a 14 day trial. This is a much, much more useful way of introducing the product to a new user.
Corollary: do not end the trial, whether it is time-limited or usage-limited, if the user couldn't verify the expected benefits before it's over.
For example, at my company, we help vacation rental owners to publish their property on multiple websites. We've learnt that 1 month was, in fact, too short a trial for people to fully appreciate our service (for reasons that would take a long time to explain here). YMMV.
I wouldn't say the 30d free trial is broken, or even mostly broken, but it's not always the right solution.
The solution for the provider is to better engage the users during the 30 day trial. If the only email they get during that trial is the warning that it's almost over then you're probably doing it wrong.
A lot of recent tools like Intercom and GetVero and Customer.io can help make this even smarter by emailing about specific abandoned tasks, different emails to those who aren't engaged at all, or not emailing someone who is fully engaged.
Just as a data point, let me tell you how my mind works because I'm the person your raw numbers won't tell you about:
Just getting the emails is likely to annoy me unless it's really, really earth-shatteringly useful and I've yet to ever see an example of this. I'll likely open the email and give it 1-2 seconds of scanning time to make sure I'm not missing out and to find the unsubscribe link; if I can't find that, I'm hitting the spam button which (for a service like gmail) will in some small way affect deliverability for other users.
Nagging me about abandoned tasks is really irritating and it would teach me that using the service "improperly" is likely to lead to my inbox filling up with no-shit-sherlock emails, and would make me want to avoid using the service at all just to avoid this fate. If I abandoned a task, I did it deliberately and really don't want to be punished with email.
Begging me to come back because I haven't logged in in x days is likely to piss me off too. If I haven't used a service in x days it's because it wasn't useful to me and an email isn't going to magic it into the opposite. If anything, you might actually be offering me social proof from (my past self, not others) that the service isn't useful!
When I'm evaluating an app during the free trial I've likely made up my mind within the first 30 minutes, if that. I'm looking to see if it's usable, useful, and beautiful, and if I can't determine that from experiencing the app, email isn't going to save the day.
If I abandon it within 24 hours I'm almost certainly never coming back, except to cancel the trial if I've already entered my credit card details.
If there's a high abandonment rate, emailing people after a trial is over to ask them what pissed them off (giving them the option to submit anonymous comments) is more likely to lead to useful information that will increase retention by improving the quality of the app. But nobody is ever going to say they abandoned a service because they didn't get enough email!
Email has never persuaded me to use an app I've abandoned, but I begrudgingly accept my fate of more email whenever I sign up for a free trial as non-monetary price I must pay to experience the app. If irritation is a currency, apparently I'm broke.
For anyone with experience in this, does it just come down to weighing the benefit of gaining a customer against the risk of losing two?
There was someone who's articles and videos I'd share on reddit because they contain (and still do!) really, really great content. The trouble is, they're now wrapped up in overly-aggressive marketing tactics. The videos now have a YouTube ad and a 15 second intro lead-in that reminds me of the THX intro clip [1]. This is followed by an advertisement for other products, followed by the actual content, followed by the spammiest looking "click subscribe!" clip. If you visit his website for the first time, you're now immediately greeted with a popup asking to subscribe to their email list. Again, really great content wrapped up in unempathetic marketing tactics. Last time I shared something he'd created on a targeted subreddit, everyone immediately bitched it was spam and it was downvoted; they missed the content because of yucky marketing.
Every time I'd post a link, pre-unempathetic marketing, it would (apparently) net him a lot of traffic and reach a previously untapped audience. (I'd get a thank-you email for the huge spike in traffic!) Social media traffic is harder to convert but can be done quite effectively when done properly. What this person can't measure is my current unwillingness to continue to share his best content because of these overly aggressive, unempathetic tactics. I put up with them and still consume his content because I know it's good and it appeals to my interests, but it seems to make newbies bounce very quickly.
There are marketing tactics that "work" and will result in a positive bump in metrics but have an ick-factor to them and hidden cost. Same deal with on-boarding emails, nagging emails, jQuery popups begging for an email address, etc. They have tangible results and appear to be working, but the undetectable damage is still present.
My general rule of thumb is that if you wouldn't want someone to subject you to the tactic, don't subject others.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfg9DVwOd9w
Many people here will also tell you that $100 a month is an outrageous price for a service that saves time for software engineers. It is true that they feel that way, but it's a mathematically false statement.
At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - and we definitely find that some emails don't work. You've got to test different emails and strategies, see what works - and then ideally optimize and personalize what (or even whether) you are sending based on individuals' actions.
I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they never react to.
It doesn't feel great to be told you're unimportant, and no company owner will say that to their own customer, but really — you and I are not that important. I do not expect McDonald's to abolish all their meat products because they offend me as a vegetarian — the rest of their customers manifestly do not share that opinion, so it would be a dumb choice if they killed the Big Mac. Similarly, it is not in a company's best interests to terminate an objectively successful email campaign just because some random guy got pissed off but was unwilling to click Unsubscribe. Successful companies lose customers all the time for all kinds of reasons — they would never get anything done if they tried to personally appeal to every single person on earth.
Again, McDonald's pisses off millions of vegetarians every single day. Would you say on that basis that they should go meatless? Should churches close to avoid pissing off militant atheists?
The point is not that you should be callous about offending people. Obviously it is better for all involved to make people happy, and that should always be your goal. But the point is that one or two guys saying "I'm so angry!" on an Internet forum does not mean you've failed. No matter what you do, even if it's pure charity work, you'll eventually find someone who gets upset about it. All you can do is apologize and offer to unsubscribe them — it's not rational to throw your business away on that basis.
But the problem is, users don't understand it. The think it's 4 hours from when you sign up. The amount of text it takes to explain that it's actual cumulative usage, is so much that they don't read it. They just see 4-hour trial, and think, that's weird, and I don't have time for that right now.
With any business that requires configuration (like setting up tracking on your site or entering candidates in a CRM), you need to push your users to get over that initial hurdle. A short time constraint forces them to act quickly to try to get value out of your product. They can always sign up for the trial at another time if they're not ready to really commit to setting it up and using it right now.
The added benefit of all of this is your sales team then works with more qualified leads and spends less time talking to people that would fit into your "paused" category, which can often become a deadpool of unactivated users.
It would be great if the 30 day trial started the first time I really start using the software.
A great alternative is for a company to offer a newsletter. Then I can get reminders about what they do, learn about how great they are, and sign up when I'm ready to use the software.
I'm bad at estimating time frames. I often think I need something (e.g., KissMetrics) next week. In reality, I won't start using it for months.
Now, do I think a bootstrapped startup should seek out free plans and betas? Of course. Just dont do that with your app.
One is that I really need the product RIGHT NOW in which case I am going to pull out the credit card.
The other is that it's one of the many things I'd like to evaluate someday and sure let's start that 30 day trial but there are so many other things I need to do RIGHT NOW that I never get around to finishing it.
One powerful reason why you generally want to avoid having a meter running is you are really making two related but distinct sales: you are trying to convince them to pay, yes, but you are also trying to convince them to use your thing versus their existing way of doing business. That is often the harder sale. Putting a marginal cost, even in free quota, for using your thing puts friction in the adoption process, which you KEENLY do not want.
While it may be the case as a bootstrapped entrepreneur that your business has not yet spent the sum of $600 on everything put together, the overwhelming majority of businesses are not like you. Many businesses will spend $600 today on one line item, for instance virtually any company which employs 3 or more college graduates. Many of these businesses also have habits with regards to buying software which are more beneficial to SaaS companies than your habits are, for example a) having predictable positive ROI on integration costs and b) never attempting to optimize for $150 expenses by switching providers on a whim.
Partly it depends whether I actually need the "full version" just to evaluate, or if I can get by on the free version, for now at least. Didn't you have a similar issue with BCC, where people would get all they needed from the free trial? I don't remember how you resolved that.
Companies have budgets to pay for what they need. Their concern is that the software meets those goals, then they are willing to break out the checkbook. They know they have a problem, they have a budget to solve it, and they just need to know your software solves it.
Consumers, OTOH, may need to have value proven over time. Thus, the dropbox usage limits make a lot more sense.
Too many times I hear here people saying startups should charge more, get paid for your efforts. But then if you do you're critized for being too expensive for startups. So what's the option then?
When it comes to displaying the info, I was thinking of using two sets of tags, one for the pricing model, i.e. "Free", "Freemium" or "Trial" and the other for the starting price per month once you do start paying: "<$5", "<$10", "<$20" etc. perhaps with an option to say that you pay per use such as when sending transaction emails or infrastructure.
As for collecting the data: the only thing I can think of is that we either do it ourselves, which would be time consuming for the 700+ apps we've got in the directory, or get the SaaS providers to register and do it themselves. Perhaps there's some way to automate this or crowd source it, but I can't seem to think of anything sensible.
My opinion on SaaS plans is that the no/low-cost plan should be more or less fully functioning, without even some sort of limit such as number of leads (ex: Yammer, Zendesk, Eventbrite). When companies really start using your product, the features that make up a paid tier will become obvious and said companies will be more than willing to pay up.
30:14 And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and will execute judgments in No.
30:15 And I will pour my fury upon Sin, the strength of Egypt; and I will cut off the multitude of No.
30:16 And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin shall have great pain, and No shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.
30:17 The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword: and these cities shall go into captivity.
30:18 At Tehaphnehes also the day shall be darkened, when I shall break there the yokes of Egypt: and the pomp of her strength shall cease in her: as for her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters shall go into captivity.
30:19 Thus will I execute judgments in Egypt: and they shall know that I am the LORD.