u/-theriver

I've recently launched my own SaaS which I'm learning a great deal from. One of those things was simply how to properly handle a free trial. I thought I'd share my experience with this, and I'd love to hear how you implement trials to compare.

Like many, my project does its billing through Stripe, which does handle free trials, but requires the customer to add a payment method for once the trial ends. I don't think there is a way around this but correct me if I'm wrong.

As a customer, I hate having to add a payment method just to have a free trial, knowing I'll be charged at the end of it. I understand the point of it, but damn do I forget to cancel these trials.

With my SaaS, I'm trying to take the pro consumer route as best as I can. As a result, I'm handling free trials entirely through my backend database, for every user account that signs up to a trial, no payment method needed, the system sets a hasUsedTrial boolean to true, and sets the date their trial ends.

I'm hosting on Vercel, so each day I run a cron job which checks for expired trials throughout the database. The cron job downgrades the expired trials to a free account by changing values in the database through my API.

From the user side, it's as simple as making an account to access a free trial. If the user wants to continue their paid plan once the trial is over, that's where I inject Stripe to handle the rest.

The best part is, handling the expiry date in the database allows me to handle adding a payment method gracefully. If a user has 2 days left of their trial, and wants to add a payment method to continue, I can give a custom 2 day trial through Stripe to align, only charging them at the end of their trial, regardless of when they added their payment method.

My project is Venet which is a maintenance manager for web developers. A benefit of the paid plans is increasing the number of sites a user can manage. For Venet, I've built an entire correction system, which is activated whenever a user has more sites than their current plan allows. It's built to allow users to deactivate or delete sites to meet their downgraded plans limit, or the user can upgrade from this page too.

This is my first SaaS, so I'm really interested to know if I've handled this well. Let me know how you handle your free trials, I'd love to compare and see if there are better alternatives. Thanks!

Hi fellow founders! I’m running into the problem I’m sure we’ve all faced, I hope I’m in the right place to find some guidance.

I’ve built an auto maintenance reporter for web developers. I don’t want to promote, so that’s as much as I’ll say.

When I first launched it, I posted across reddit talking about the landing page, how to convert, and just general discussion about it. Within 2 days I found 650 visitors to the site, which translated to 5 user accounts, all who have seemed to stop using the product.

So far this was all I really did to find users, blatant promotion, but as far as reddit goes, no one actually likes that so I’ve decided not to anymore.

I’m wondering, what kind of steps you might recommend for me to expose my product to my audience of web developers, and how I might be able to build the reputation of my product, and seriously fit it within the workflow of a dev.

Thanks!