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Comment by skeletron | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I appreciate your response on this, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on the following two points specifically:

- Why have you chosen to make users opt out of a subscription when the free trial ends, rather than letting them opt in?

- Why is the annual payment option pushed so hard, in favour of the monthly payment option?

I'm reiterating this because promoting an opt-in, monthly payment model (thus giving more opportunities for any unintentional ongoing payments to be noticed by the payer) seems to me to be the kindest approach to subscriptions for users with ADHD, and a model that would be most empathetic to their condition.

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Thanks for the follow-up questions.

We're actually working on several different sign-ups flows at the moment including opt-in post free trial, longer free trial, web sign-up and one-off purchase vs subscription. It is not our intention to push annual significantly over monthly - we wanted to give a significant discount to yearly subscribers but perhaps the difference between the two is too large. The previously mentioned issue with scrolling is due to to a bug with small screen sizes on Android which we're working to fix.

Thanks, it's good to know that you're considering alternatives.

As you have a number of people with ADHD working on your app, I would be curious to know if any of them raised concerns about these specifics of your subscription model, during planning and development of the app?

As well as input from the team, we did a lot of user interviews and testing during development and this wasn't flagged as a concern (a lot of people were used to the model from other apps) but clearly this is something we need to work on.

You might want to look into ways to identify cases where people are used to something but not happy about it in your research process. So many things that shouldn't be normal are considered so and tolerated by people who don't do well with it to the point they don't think about it unless someone asks the right question.

This is unfortunately very true. Thank you for your feedback.

While as an ADHD’er who agrees with all the concerns expressed here on the payment model, I also think that criticism like this has to be a little measured and proportional. Some of the feedback in the comments here (not necessarily in this direct thread that I’m replying to) are going a little too far in my opinion.

Constructive criticism is useful but there are many here breaking the “take the most charitable possible interpretation” rule of HN.

So please do listen to this feedback and please do act on it, but don’t take the personal attacks and name calling in some of the comments here too seriously.

You are being polite and gracious in your responses!

I do not have ADHD diagnosis but I forget such things all the time. This is why I have reminders set up for all trials I ever start the minute I start the trial. This way I'd be reminded to cancel it (or not, in case I like it - but it'd be my decision then). I never complain about it because what's the point? That doesn't mean I like the practice - in fact, I hate it, but too many providers do it anyway.

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