Ask HN: Why not more SaaS are “Pay when you're ready”
But it's incredibly frustrating for me to want to check out / use a SaaS product and have my "30 day free trial" start running out even if I'm getting zero value from the product in those 30 days. Don't even get me started on companies that charge up front (money back guarantee instead of free trial)...
What I mean is, if I sign up for something like Basecamp, yes, probably as soon as I start creating projects and tasks, it's fair to assume I'm getting value. A normal 30 day free trial applies. But for something like Mailchimp, I should be able to use the product as much as I want until I'm ready to send a few emails (ideally, more than a 'test' threshold, like 10 emails). So I can take my sweet time checking out the UI, creating all my email sequences, customizing templates, etc. Or if I sign up for Squarespace or Wordpress.com, again let me write and customize my site indefinitely until I'm ready to "publish it" for others to see.
What ends up happening is I run into a certain product I like and since I know I'm going to be in this anxious period of "I need to make use of this NOW or I'm going to run out of my trial since I don't have time to focus on this if I sign up now", I just don't sign up at all. I guess you could say they're also qualifying customers by only getting those actually ready to get value from their product right now to sign up vs those just wanting to kick the tiers, but I personally believe it's a lost opportunity to engage with me. Maybe once I sign up they can create an email sequence to educate me on the product, or use onboarding techniques to get me to use it.
Any thoughts or examples on companies that do this?