Hacker News Reader

I agree that the wording is not clear, but just to be on the safe side, you should probably eliminate the very obvious dark pattern of collecting payment details for a "free" trial, and just ask them to enter their payment details at the end of the trial.

Is it so dark if you shine a bright light on it at the start? We collect credit card info as part of the free trial signup, and clearly state the recurring terms -- start date, amount and interval -- in a prominent box right over the submit button.

If the transaction succeeds they immediately get a thank you email with the recurring terms prominently repeated again. There's also a link to the cancellation button, which is available immediately.

I've accepted this sort of deal as a user and think it's only nefarious if it's not clear or if cancellation is difficult.

You still need to send an email before the trial is about to go into paid mode

That's fine. It looks like at least that plus an ongoing per-charge notice will be mandatory. As a user I'd want to disable them, but it sounds like that won't be an option. So I'd probably mark them as spam instead.

> Is it so dark if you shine a bright light on it at the start?

Absolutely. A lot of dark patterns are prominent. They prey on an innate human fallibility. In this case, memory.

If you're going to offer a free trial, then you should not need payment information until the end of the trial. You could start sending out reminders to add the payment information towards the end of the trial, instead of an email with a cancellation button, and that would not be a dark pattern. Either practice is a means to the same end, but only the former eliminates the possibility of people paying for what they didn't intend to.

On or about the date of conclusion of the trial, send a notice:

   Your trial is about to end. To continue receiving services, 
   please make payment of {PAYMENT_AMOUNT} by {DATE}. You will
   need to authorize recurring payments in the amount of
   {PAYMENT_AMOUNT}. You can do that by clicking {PAYMENT_LINK}.
   If you would like to cancel the trial click {CANCEL_LINK}.

   Please note that if we do not hear back from you by {DATE},
   we will have to temporarily discontinue the service/product
   until you authorize recurring payments.

Hirundo, what do you sell? Can you share?

Websites mostly for small or medium sized B2B publishers. For this the common use case is selling subscriptions for newsletters about a particular industry. Right now we're hoping that our payment gateway for recurring transactions, authorize.net, will step up and handle much of this for us.