Ask HN: Why not more SaaS are “Pay when you're ready”
I&#x27;m pretty sure the answer is a combination of:
- Creating certainty in WHEN you will cancel or upgrade, easier stats.
- Creating urgency for you to use the product.<p>But it&#x27;s incredibly frustrating for me to want to check out &#x2F; use a SaaS product and have my &quot;30 day free trial&quot; start running out even if I&#x27;m getting zero value from the product in those 30 days. Don&#x27;t even get me started on companies that charge up front (money back guarantee instead of free trial)...<p>What I mean is, if I sign up for something like Basecamp, yes, probably as soon as I start creating projects and tasks, it&#x27;s fair to assume I&#x27;m getting value. A normal 30 day free trial applies. But for something like Mailchimp, I should be able to use the product as much as I want until I&#x27;m ready to send a few emails (ideally, more than a &#x27;test&#x27; threshold, like 10 emails). So I can take my sweet time checking out the UI, creating all my email sequences, customizing templates, etc. Or if I sign up for Squarespace or Wordpress.com, again let me write and customize my site indefinitely until I&#x27;m ready to &quot;publish it&quot; for others to see.<p>What ends up happening is I run into a certain product I like and since I know I&#x27;m going to be in this anxious period of &quot;I need to make use of this NOW or I&#x27;m going to run out of my trial since I don&#x27;t have time to focus on this if I sign up now&quot;, I just don&#x27;t sign up at all. I guess you could say they&#x27;re also qualifying customers by only getting those actually ready to get value from their product right now to sign up vs those just wanting to kick the tiers, but I personally believe it&#x27;s a lost opportunity to engage with me. Maybe once I sign up they can create an email sequence to educate me on the product, or use onboarding techniques to get me to use it.<p>Any thoughts or examples on companies that do this?