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Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

I welcome Mastercard's move at the issue. If you do give your c/c number for free trials then this is probably most useful.

Aside from that, I don't think I've ever given my c/c number for any "trial period" offer. I've mostly ever used the usage of that scheme as a red flag to steer away from the business before even considering signing up for anything.

This is not merely because I'm lazy and I don't want to even think about remembering to cancel but because I probably wouldn't want to use such a service at all. The shabbiest businesses are heavily infested with this sort of trickery, but even some good businesses have followed. It doesn't bring any value to the user except one more place where you c/c details can leak away, one more thing to remember and potentially an extra charge that will just upset you.

Trial periods can be implemented without a credit card if you really want to.

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That's correct when you're a business but not when you're dealing with consumers. Some of the latter will have no qualms creating new email addresses to "renew" their trial periods, effectively giving you free riders and bunk operational stats.

Requiring a cc for that is the wrong solution.

What's a better solution?

If you've anything better to offer, methinks a gazillion marketers, designers, and SaaS developers out there will be all ears open. Here's the dilemma in a nutshell:

- If you don't give full access to what you're offering during the trial period, would-be users won't get a feel of what they might be losing out on when the trial runs out.

- If you do give full access during the trial period, but don't require some kind of hard to get unique enough identifier, a non-negligible users will create new accounts ad nauseam.

(Alternative unique identifiers could be SSNs or ID cards or physical mail addresses. But these are all non-starters. And phone numbers and emails are free for all practical intents.)

> (Alternative unique identifiers could be SSNs or ID cards or physical mail addresses. But these are all non-starters. And phone numbers and emails are free for all practical intents.)

Can you speak more to your comment that phone numbers are essentially free? I know with something like Google voice you can get one free number (which still needs to be associated with a non-GV number). How would you get many phone numbers for free?

The top Google result for free phone number yields, for me, a PAYGO internet phone service that offers a number for no monthly costs. I can't imagine they're the only one doing so. And even if there's a limited number of such services, I'd be surprised if a number of other internet phone operators don't allow you to change your number for free or very cheaply.

Could you provide a link to the service you are talking about? I can't find any without a monthly fee of some kind.

Also, the original comment specifically mentioned free phone numbers, not cheap or otherwise not-free numbers.

It often is very easy to limit the usefulness of a trial version without impacting the trial at all.

The negligible part is the cost of the freeloaders, there can also be value in freeloaders. They help spread the word and keep up the good word and they might convert rather than going to a competitor. They also represent a good opportunity to show good will.

The non-negligible part is the lost revenue from performing such shady practices as requiring a cc / phone number. If you require that for a trial I will perform extensive research of your competitors. And if desperate enough might consider you after that if nothing else was up to par.

If you allow me to sign up for a trial without an email that is very positive and shows me that you respect your users. That is very appealing.

And very reasonable, because the sole reason for anyone to ask for an email is so they can send spam to it afterwards. Which of course shows me that you do not respect your users.

The thing is there are already multiple services offering endless virtual CC numbers. This doesn't work at all as an unique identifier. It just adds drag.

That's why you don't accept things like prepaid cards for subscription services.

Frankly if your paid-tier is so underwhelming that people would 'bunk off' and keep renewing free trials then I think your offering sucks.

Look at current Flickr, trying to force users into a one-size Pro membership. They're not listening to light users who won't pay $50 + taxes + currency conversion fees to get 'stats and partner offers'. Instead people are creating multuple accounts and storing 999 photos in each, for free. Flickr should be in that space with $10 Basic accounts

Sure, there are businesses that need better pricing. There are also people who will go through extraordinary efforts to get something for "free" (ignoring the cost of their efforts). I'm fairly sure that if you had a service that changes $1 to $2 that you would have people figuring out how to not give that $1.

That's true, but those people would most likely never be paying customers. If you could get 10% of the freeloaders to become paying customers by adding a lower price bracket that would be a win for the business.

Frankly if your paid-tier is so underwhelming that people would 'bunk off' and keep renewing free trials then I think your offering sucks.

If you've never run a business in this sort of industry, you would be truly amazed at the lengths some people will go to just to save a few bucks.

At an early stage of one of my businesses, the founders were literally sleeping in shifts because a small group of people was creating new accounts 24/7 and trying to scrape our entire offering piece by piece to work around the caps on individual accounts. So apparently our offering was good enough for them to try to clone all of it and presumably set up a copycat site, yet by your argument it was also "underwhelming" because they didn't want to pay anything for it.

If that was the case, they'd email you a few days before payment was due to remind you.

Twice I've been stung for that - they're silent for the month, but as soon as you cancel (after navigating their dark patterns) they start the email bombardment.

Requiring payment details for a "free trail" is a huge red flag for me now - simply because it tells me what type of company it may be.

I have a CC that let's me generate a temporary number with a spending limit, a specified expiration date, and whether or not to allow recurring payments. That's the only one I use to sign up for "free" trials, because I don't even have to remember to cancel. The company will remind me to cancel when the can't collect payment!

May I ask you which company is this?

Bank of America MasterCard. ShopSafe feature. Not sure if all BOA cards have it though.

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