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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

As always, great work from Patrick.

  An excellent question! Net on net, removing the CC required upfront decreases conversions in the early life of startup,
  until you’re sophisticated with regards to onboarding, in-app messaging, lifecycle email, and reachout by a customer
  success team. I would not suggest you remove the CC required from this free trial.

This was exactly our experience as a pretty unsophisticated team with Cronitor. Our 3 month experience in 2015 with no-card-up-front free trials was a total failure, dropping conversion and arpu in that cohort.

  Name pricing plans to sell them to the right users

This is something that does work well for us. For us that means Business, Teams and Solo. We do a bit of feature packaging to add value and more or less you get everything you need at your size by buying one of those 3 packages.

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> Name pricing plans to sell them to the right users

And make sure the names make sense to them, not you. One thing I hated about buying from Dell was I had to decide if I was a small business, medium business, consumer, etc. Who do I know? And does my choice give me a worse price?

I was very surprised by this one. I will never, ever, under any circumstances, put my CC details in a form hosted on a domain I'm not 100% confident with (s.a apple/amazon). I can't believe I'm an outlier on this one. Maybe it's because I belong to the nowhere-dense set of developers?

But if it's not your credit card, it's your employer's, you've got a job to do, and you know there's an accounting department whose job it is to make sure the bank refunds the charges in the unlikely event there's any funny business?

Most people in that situation will not be deterred by having to enter a credit card for a free trial. And those are the customers you want.

Business don't get refunded when crazy things happen on their cards. That's one of the major difference between being a consumer and a business. You have zero protection as a business.

Sure about that? I use my business AMEX all the time and have contested at least one time and there was no problem.

You always have recourse against fraudulent activities - the credit card company will just reimburse

Consumer protection laws, such as the Credit CARD Act of 2009, don’t apply to businesses.

Many small business cards are issued to the owner not the business.

Talking 3 man business, not 4000 person enterprise.

Definitely depends on the card. Make sure to read your cardholder agreement!

>I can't believe I'm an outlier on this one

You are.

If I want to buy something I'll put my credit card info in wherever it's asked for. If something happens that's why I have a credit card. Their problem not mine.

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