Show HN: ProsperStack – Use Stripe to automatically prevent cancellations
prosperstack.com
prosperstack.com
My co-founders and I created ProsperStack after working at a SaaS company and realizing how little we knew about why our customers were leaving. We wanted an easy way to collect data and prevent cancellations by incentivizing customers to stay, and realized that hooking into Stripe to automate the process would be super valuable.
The app can automatically present offers to a customer before they cancel using Stripe coupons, collect feedback from cancellations, and use your Stripe data to show meaningful churn metrics.
Thanks so much for checking it out and any feedback you might have!
I am thinking someone on Reddit posting a trick to save money on your sub.
On the roadmap are plans to target offers based on segmented customer data (lifetime value, etc.) so even if you did try to follow a trick posted on Reddit, it might not work for you!
Things I am missing
1. Documentation, how exactly does it integration with Stripe? How does it handle my weird subscription setups? etc.
2. Pricing, I know it says $79 a month in the blue banner, but if you are like me you basically look for a pricing page and all I see is "Start a free trial" I am going to close the site.
Beyond that I am fairly excited to see such a product come out, I am surprised Stripe doesn't have a setup to handle this.
2. Makes total sense, thanks so much for the advice.
We're mostly worried about the sales cycle being too long with performance-based or scaling pricing, since none of the founders are trained salespeople. I'm realizing we're probably going to have to adjust that mindset and learn how to sell.
As a customer, I don’t want to be “saved”. Treat me right in the first place and I will remain loyal. Otherwise, let’s part ways amicably without you wasting more of my time.
Like others, I'm a bit on the fence about the ethical aspects of it. Yes, there's a lot to say about giving real value, listening to customers, but it does start going down the path towards darker patterns like Amazon Prime (there's a looong way to go down that path, but still feels like a step there). I'm not trying to criticize, but just voice my personal feeling around adding friction to cancellation.
We'll get to work on adding some more documentation for sure, but the short answer is that it's a JavaScript widget that runs everything for you on your site. You can check out the technical docs on the NPM package here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@prosperstack/flow
Thanks so much for the honest feedback. I definitely agree about steering away from dark patterns and adding friction to cancellation. We want the cancellation process to be super easy, and hope to try achieve a balance that actually benefits customers instead of trying to trap them into not leaving.
Have you thought about pricing based on performance?
At the low end, it could be "pays for itself": A monthly fee of max($79, mrr_preserved_that_month). When the fee cancels out the preserved mrr, the customer still gets data features of the product for free. Thinking mostly of the indiehacker crowd here.
At the high end, I suppose you could flex up to something like a percentage of mrr recovered with a cap.
(Always find subscription pricing economics interesting, especially to learn how others do it.)
I know that virtually no startup gets pricing correct right out of the gate, so I'm sure we'll be tweaking it!
Even though that is easy money, saas companies should offer "inactive account maintenance" fees rather than full subscription fees, when the user starts using it, they could charge them full. This is win-win situation where user gets to keep the account for smaller fees and companies can retain more customers.
ProsperStack like tools can offer these by default.
Sometimes all people want is a discount, and as a business losing $20 a month is better than losing a customer.
This is some serious MBA-speak right here. Losing $20 a month is worse than losing a customer. The only time there's a difference is when you're looking to capture enough market in an unsustainable way so that you can paint a good picture for someone dumb enough to acquire you to try to shut down competition.
If you're well-capitalized, then this is just a straightforward monopolization tactic; if you're not well-funded, this is just gaming the numbers so that a well-capitalized monopolist can come in and use you to play the same game.
If you're a company that is trying to be successful and make money, then you're better off using this as a signal about your pricing.
I don't think the GP meant the classic "lose money on each sale but make it up on volume" nonsense, but rather "it is better to forgo $20 of your margin than to lose a customer".
What kind of signal do you have in mind?
It suggests some customers are willing to pay a lower price than other customers. That's not really a surprise, but the numbers are data.
So is the signal that you should lower your price for everyone to something in between, depriving some customers of a service in their happy price range, so that you end up with lower revenue and lose a few more customers as well, but at least you keep a reputation for consistency?
Not to be too much of a jerk about it, but you clearly don't agree. Hard to tell exactly without a end to end demo but it looks like it's at least a couple questions and making sure you click the right button to cancel. And you have to be careful what you click because you swap the "success" button from cancel to accept offer. That's not the same as "just let people cancel".
I'm sure it makes sense from a business perspective. Forcing people to go through a couple questions and click off some offers will increase retention. It's not a big deal. Businesses do lots of things that are annoying to customers because ultimately it makes them more money. Just own that this is what you're doing.
I think we would have used something like this (instead of rolling our own) if it integrated with Chargify.
We'd love to integrate with more payment providers, and Chargify is definitely on the list. If you'd be interested in helping us get a Chargify integration going, I'd love if you'd send me an email (address in profile)!
We do not and never will sell your Stripe data. We're not using any ML, so we're not training any models on your data.
We understand having access to your Stripe account comes with a lot of responsibility, and we're taking that seriously. I'd be more than happy to discuss security if you want to shoot me an email (address in profile).
If I sign up for a month then quit, what will it then cost me?