Author: saasfoundry

Ah, free loaders. You know, people who sign up to your app, play around a bit, and never had any intention to purchase.

It messes up with your costs and it dilutes your metrics. Heck, these people might even complain to your support inboxes, and you spend time answering them.

Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of them… no more freeloaders means you can focus your money and energy on your ideal customers, those who really derive value from your app and are willing to pay for it.

At some point, someone said:

WAIT… if we ask for payment details upfront, we would get rid of these cheap guys… only people who are really interested would sign up. Sounds like a good idea! gonna code it now!

Not so fast, tiger. Unfortunately, things are not so simple, and it involves trust. Let's talk about it.

Trust has to be earned, and one of the best ways to do it is with a free trial

When users first come to your website, they don't know you. So they're not willing to trust you right off the bat. Of course, testimonials help, case studies help, and whether your app is well-known also helps.

But they're not sure if they can TRUST that what you promise is exactly what they'll get, and whether it will fit in their current workflow.

The golden way to earn that trust  is with a no-strings-attached free trial (even though, people have been experimenting with ways to earn that trust differently, such as Brennan and his sandbox onboarding experiment).

You give the possibility to the user to see by himself that your app is doing what you promised, and he can verify that it's what he wanted. Once he trusts you on that level, then he will be more than willing to pay real money to satisfy his needs.

But if you ask for payment details, you unnecessary elevate the amount of trust required by the customer to decide favorably on your product. If he doesn't trust you enough to give you payment details, he won't bother and leave.

But it's okay, because as I said, I don't want non-serious visitors. The serious visitors will trust my product to do the right thing. They will be qualified by the additional hurdle.

Wrong. A person can be a good customer for your product but still decides she needs more trust to give you payment details. A credit card upfront paywall only qualifies people who are willing to give you money right now, not people who might be willing to give you money once you proved your value as a company and product.

I'm not sure, man. That's your opinion. Do you have any real numbers? Or I'll be back coding my credit card paywall.

John Solomon over from Charge Bee did a good job of crunching the numbers from two different studies, one from SaaS business Totango and the other one Softletter from SaaS University.

The end result being that end-to-end conversions (from visitor to 90 day customer retention) were:

• 1.2% without credit card upfront
• 0.6% with  credit card upfront

Which gives a 100% improvement by NOT presenting a credit card paywall to the visitor.

 I still want to use a CC paywall. Will you let me? Dammit!

Your choice. It might even be better in your case. If you have a strong brand (which builds trust), or if you need to verify identity because your business requires so, it might be better to capture payment information first.

But if your intent is to "better qualify your visitors", you are probably misguided.

Still, test without and with paywall, and decide for yourself what is better.