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Comment by antaviana | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have a 14-day money back guarantee instead of a 30-day free trial?

My perception (although I never tried it) is that it reduces the number of people actually trying it and avoids that you have to still pay for the payment platform fee when there is a refund, plus I presume there is also some dedication needed for handling the refund itself.

I speculate that there might be a sweet spot between the impulse purchase and the price level where you do not bother to ask for a refund, even if the tool does not work for you, but still it is counterintuitive for me why not to reach as many potential users as possible at a nearly zero marginal cost and sort of pray for conversion with a much higher user base.

In other words, at this price range with no recurring income, what is the percentage of users who actually to ask for a refund? Is it very low?

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Hey there, This topic always pops up from time to time. First, when I started building macOS apps, the extra work of building a trial mechanism was something I wanted to keep for later. Today, my key management backend already supports that, and when a user personally asks for a trial key, I give it to them. But from my experience, when someone has a free trial, 2 thing can happen: 1. Download and never use 2. Use a little bit, stop using it, and leave the app without buying it.

When someone pays for the app, they try it most of the time immediately. He explores the app, finds issues, and, because he paid for it, will be much more involved, which will provide me with much more accurate feedback.

Also, if something is not working well for him, he writes me, and I benefit from these interactions with the users. A lot of my improvements for my apps are based on "Refund talks" Overall, the upsides outweigh the downsides.

I don't have many refunds, but when I do, it really helps me improve the app. I already had users who asked for a refund, and a few versions later, the app improved based on their feedback, and they repurchased it.

I am sure that some users don't buy without trying, And this is why I am super responsive to refund requests and handle them faster and without "playing games" with this topic.

Hope this makes sense in some way

You are leaving a lot of money on the table.

The amount of people who do not want to pay upfront, but would buy after a trial, is not just substantial, but game changing.

You can also add the same pressure to test the app after installing by offering a 14 or even a 7 day trial.

Maybe, This has a lot of different opinions, In SaaS, I can understand why you would give this trial version. You can improve the onboarding and user progress tracking in the tunnel. Making rapid updates and improving the onboarding process. But for Mac apps that nothing is tracked or sent to my server, I have no idea what the user is doing or not doing with the app, I can't roll out fast updates or even force users to get the newest version So I won't be able to really improve it. Maybe in my future Saas I will have some kind of trial. But for now, I will stay with this model. Anyway, thank you so much for the feedback, Super appreciated!

I was speaking from experience selling single-fee end-user Windows apps for about a decade. Trials are basically a must as virtually no one would pre-buy to test.

Perhaps on Macs it's different, or maybe it's due to your price point, but still your approach automatically drives away a large swath of potential, but cautious buyers, or those who don't want to be bothered by the refund process. Your pitch is "here is some good stuff, and here are the hurdles if you want to test it".

Thank you :) Got your point, Maybe I will give it a try for a month and see how it goes.

The apps by Rogue Amoeba on Mac are a great example of the trial model on Mac: https://www.rogueamoeba.com

I'm not affiliated with them, but I am a customer. They put a lot of effort into finding the right balance of what to unlock upfront in the trial. And their license/unlock process is pretty seamless.

I don't dispute the power of a free trial, but it can be a fair bit of work to get the details right.

I'm not the author, but generally: It could depend on whether those trial users are worth supporting. You could potentially get a free-rider problem. You could get a lot of support emails from people who never convert anyway.

It's only 10€, so it's pretty well in the impulse-buy category.

To the author: I'd suggest localising the currency, if possible. At least for English speaking locales (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ). The EUR pricing made it look to me like you might not be able to buy it if you're not in Europe. (Edit: I'm in Canada and it shows EUR, not CAD.)

Thank you for the suggestion! I need to handle this multi-currency in all of my products This is on my tasks list

Great, thanks. Very interesting product. Best of luck!

Thank you

I see you use Stripe. They have this Adaptative Pricing feature where you get paid in EUR and customer pays in their own currency. It has some drawbacks (fewer payment methods and higher cost perception for customer due to Stripe’s upfront currency exchange comission), but it can do the trick.

Just provide limited support to non-paying customers. Keep it forum-based, for example. That's it.

I don't think it will change much, and this will be one more thing to maintain. Without proper handling, I may miss good feedback. This is a more complex topic than it seems.

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