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What are the pros and cons of different subscription methods?

1 points by oliakaoil ↗ HN
I am working on a project that requires site users to maintain a monthly subscription, like Netflix. I'm wondering if anyone has insight into the different pros and cons of when and how to ask users to enter their payment information.

It seems that if you ask for payment information during the initial signup process, you are tying your fate to how well your brochure pages sell the site and its services. The signup process is a bit more complicated, but users who sign up are more likely to actually use the service and are more likely to maintain a subscription. You won't end up with lots of short-time free users who aren't that interested.

However, if you make the signup process dead simple (i.e. no payment information required during initial account creation), you pull more users in to the site, get them using the product, and get feedback. Then, your fate is tied to whether or not users actually like your site and service. Also, it's an additional step of getting them to enter payment information after they've been enjoying the service for a period of time for free.

Anyone with direct experience of these different approaches would be greatly appreciated to contribute their two cents.

2 comments

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byoung2
At our startup (we're still stealth, so I don't want to announce it here), we found that way more people signed up when we kept the signup as frictionless as possible, because our app doesn't sound amazing in the marketing language but it really speaks for itself once you start using it (I'm thinking of my reaction to the iPhone back in 2007 - "so it's like a smartphone without a keyboard? How does that work?"). Once we get people using the app, it is very easy to get them to put in a credit card. One way we encourage them to put in a credit card is with a free trial countdown at the top of the screen that gives them special offers if they put in a credit card on certain days (e.g. 14 days left, get a freebie if you enter a credit card). One thing that is unique about our app is that it has residual value even if you don't convert, because you can opt in to still receive alerts. Each alert gives us another chance to convert a former free trial, and to date the record for latest conversion is 100 days after trial ended.
oliakaoil
Thanks for the response, you basically confirmed what my hypothesis is regarding the onboarding process. I like the idea of some kind of visual indicator on the page to remind users that they will at some point have to start paying for the app. Unfortunately for me there is no way to continue using the service in any way after your trial period expires, so it's a hard stop for the user at that moment. However if they are actually using the thing that shouldn't be a problem.