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Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

- No details at all on the official extension page in VSCode - I bite the bullet and try anyway - No immediate confirmation after setup - Only one configuration option (log file path) - After I start typing into a buffer, the onboarding notification requires sign-in - Sure, why not - "Link to IDE?" - heck yeah, let's finally go - Sign up for a trial - um... - Requires a CC for a 30-day free trial

Respectfully, this is a terrible experience.

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Wow, that’s the same experience that I havr trying to use any app on the iOS App Store. Download, use one basic feature, use a second feature? Nope sign up first. Ok, signed up. Ok now? Nope, that feature requires a subscription. It is very sneaky because the app does not need to show in-app purchase on the App Store info. I have given up on Apps now because of this.

App developer here. Sadly, it’s what works. Put differently: when users browse for apps, it’s usually when their need for sth that solves the problem is relatively high. Which means you have a much higher chance of converting that user right now during onboarding than anytime later in the lifecycle of your app.

I wish Apple properly displayed prices though instead of this sneaky vague “contains in-app purchases” text.

>"when users browse for apps, it’s usually when their need for sth that solves the problem is relatively high. Which means you have a much higher chance of converting that user right now during onboarding than anytime later in the lifecycle of your app."

I can't argue with this in general as I do not have the statistics. Personally however I just never give CC info unless I tried the thing and found out that it does work for me.

Well good thing is you don’t need to on Apple. Just get the free trial and cancel immediately?

You can IAP and cancel?

Not a workflow I've tried.

So do you just end up with a lot of unsolved problems? I get the principal, but does it end up hurting you in practice? Or do you end up solving the problem with a free tool? If so, I guess the product wasn’t really needed.

Not OP, but some "problems" actually aren't.

More often, I'm looking for an easier / faster / better way to something I'm already doing, either because I want to do it _less_ (e.g. pay monthly bills) or I want to do it _more_ (e.g. find & read relevant news).

I'm Curious. Seeking innovation. Exploring.

Just because I can get water from a well with a bucket doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy modern plumbing and irrigation.

>"So do you just end up with a lot of unsolved problems?

All the non free tools I use and paid for do provide trial version which lets me evaluate it without pulling out CC. Wake up and look around. Plenty of those.

And/or the problem is minor enough to not be worth the costs of subscription - costs that include not just the sticker monthly price, but also cognitive space taken by unnecessary, unwanted, forced ongoing relationship with a random third party, and all the value-add/upsell bullshit on top. Couple that with relatively low trust that a random app is not trying to scam you somehow...

None of them are really needed, we have survived for thousands of years without phones and computers.

Food is a problem i must solve, clicking on some cow clicker or whatever was never a problem until we made it one.

I uninstall so many apps like this. I would rather pay $2 up front.

They do display prices of in-app-purchases last I know, somewhere in the app listing

Yes, but that price list is quite broken. A lot of apps have different price points - either for A/B testing, or because of discounts with partners, or educational discounts (we have a 50% discounts for students, for example).

Apple lists all prices in that list.

To make matters worse, if you ever decide to change your prices, you'll have both the old and the new prices in the list. Especially when you start out, you won't really know what a good price point is, and within a short amount of time the price list will be cluttered with all the prices you tried.

I'm sure Apple believes they're protecting the user here, but in reality they're serving neither the users or the developers with this.

Put differently: when we ask them to give us payment details at the start, we know a significant percentage will forget to cancel (or FOMO) after their need is gone.

I have a card with $0 on it for this purpose. Services count on you forgetting to cancel instead of you liking the product per se. If I like it I change the card, but most products I don’t so they bounce. Works well.

Aren't most payment systems making a $1 or $0.1 block/charge to confirm the card is real and has non-zero balance? At least that is my experience as an European user, whenever I try to subscribe to anything that came out of the US.

They usually just do an auth request. But otherwise I put $1 just for that case. As long as the balance is normally $0.

Sorry. We should be more clear about the CC being required to sign up for the free trial.

I can understand the business imperatives (I am a PM at a start-up :)), but can you please make a decision on actually having the sign up flow work without friction (Think Slack / dropbox etc). You can always iterate and find the right thing to charge for but developers are a demanding bunch especially with tooling!

This goes against the guidelines for "Show HN". You can still post it, but generally it won't qualify for the Show HN moniker. You can review the rules for Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails.

"Without signups or emails" definitely implies without credit card authorization!

I didn't realize that. I would have posted without the Show HN tag if I had read that carefully.

How about just not having one? i am often interested to try things but I am not giving out my CC until I've tried it out, FOMO be damned. I don't want the burden of cancellation if I decide it's not for me, I've been burned before by forgetting and paying for a service I didn't want.

We think this is the most sustainable option because there is a cost to providing a quality service. We take a small loss on every user who cancels their free trial - more than a typical SaaS because AI models are expensive to serve.

Maybe a shorter trial would work?

Personally I only need about 30 minutes with a code autocompletion LLM to see if it will do what I want without pissing me off (and maybe even making me smile!)

Crossing your fingers that the user forgets to cancel is never "sustainable", it's predatory.

How about taking the CC but not subscribing the user. As in the CC is used only to verify the user but I have to subscribe once I consume my free credits (even though the CC is on file).

I'm VERY interested in using your service and would be happy to pay if it's good.

I'm never going to try if you ask for my CC up front though. Sorry.

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