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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer*. In this space, giving a credit card seems perfectly normal and serves as a vetting function of seriousness for you.

* I can concoct exceptions of course: worker who wants to try it for work but doesn’t have their own company card being one. But if you’re targeting cloud users, “doing whatever AWS does to gate accounts” is perfectly reasonable.

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>Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer

This is extremely weird. It's a B2B - I won't ever use my own credit card just to try some service, heck - I won't provide my credit card to an unknown entity that may lack PIC compliance, either. Asking for the company/budget/contract review/etc. for trial, etc. is a massive hassle as well.

>doing whatever AWS does to gate accounts” is perfectly reasonable.

Not really, Amazon is beyond well known and massive, and it has all the policies in place. This a small unknown startup.

Yes, but the people who don’t trust them with their CC are much more difficult (non-)customers to reach. Filtering the set of prospects to the easiest ones to convert, providing that set is still large, seems like a good 80/20 use of a startup’s limited time.

If you were a really hot prospect, super-interested in using elest.io for a big project but didn’t want to give a CC because <reasons>, I’m sure you’d find a way to contact them by email and try to work something out. And they’d find a way to vet you or just turn on a free account for you.* The casual “no way I’m giving my CC” people aren’t high-likelihood future paying customers.

Gate with a CC, make sure there’s a way to send an email/free text form and move on with building the company.

* “no way I’m sending an email either for a free trial just because I won’t give a CC.” “OK, you’re not a prospective customer. It’s a numbers game.”

I would even prefer a cheap first payment on a credit card or paypal than to give my credit card details to a company that claims not to want to use it. That just looks suspicious to me.

I refuse to give my credit card details to google because I suspect I know what they will use it for, tracking, sneakily taking payments by dark patterns in apps or if my phone gets stolen.

Your concocted exception is actually a very plausible scenario in my opinion. In the past 2 years or so I convinced my workplace (well, a previous workplace) to spend some money on two freemium products: one is buying a few licenses for PyCharm Professional, and the other was a platform for doing coding interviews. The free version was the only reason I even considered these products. As an employee in a big corp, this is my only reasonable route.

I can't say I agree with this. AWS has the size, reputation, and sheer near-unavoidability to find themselves with significantly more leeway in this kind of thing.

Just because AWS can get away with something doesn't mean you can.

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