I definitely considered that. Then I realized that I would also need to not let the numbers get too large and/or reset them at some point, so I just shipped it.
I may still do this, as it's definitely more accurate that way in terms of representing how it actually works!
I've been building on top of Stripe for awhile now, and I've always wanted a way to see live charges as they come in. I also needed an excuse to finally learn WebSockets/ActionCable, so I made this.
I plan to add more sections of data in the future, and maybe some goal tracking, so that people can track progress toward their revenue targets (and share them with others for support!)
I'm Richard, founder of Stunning (bestunning.net). We've been dealing with handling failed payments on Stripe longer than anyone else out there (and I've been running successful SaaS apps since 2009).
I'm happy to freely share what I've learned, if anyone has questions about cutting churn and retaining SaaS customers. You can catch me on Twitter, where I'm @rfelix.
We've been doing dunning for Stripe from the beginning, support a ton of email types and events, have an iPhone app with push notifications of payments and other important events, payment update pages for your customers to easily update billing info, and we can even send out emails before cards expire.
That is definitely true. Personally, I feel fairly secure in putting my credit card info into web apps for free trials because of protection offered by the credit card company. If I have problems with charges that I don't want on the card, I can call them up and reverse them.
I see how some people's knee jerk reaction upon seeing that a credit card is required for a free trial would be to just close the tab and find a competitor, though.
I'm sorry that you feel that way. I definitely understand the feeling of being burned, but I've never had issues with something like this, as a user myself of services with a free trial that requires a credit card.
Things like Twitter and Hacker News, where you can broadcast your displeasure of a company's terrible tactics would make it difficult for a company to keep signing up new users if people are complaining about it. The only companies that I see getting away with stuff like this are huge companies who don't care about their customers anyway, like Tivo.
All of my apps have a prominent link in the user settings panel that lets a user cancel their account/billing with one click.
I'm only doing lifecycle emails on some of my products. Some of them were built way before the current lifecycle email craze, and I haven't gotten around to adding them on the others yet. On those older products, I do send emails asking them to come back and enter credit card details.
Great point, though! My larger point, I guess is about leveraging something that only more interested users will go through (credit card entry in this case) to let them filter themselves out early.
You can fix this by not automatically charging at the end of a trial, and sending an email instead to ask if they still want to keep the account, and closing the account or charging them based on their action at that time. I didn't say anything about automatically charging anyone necessarily. This is more about using credit card entry as a barrier to entry that gets you more of the type of users that you want (ones who are interested in your product and likely to pay you).
Also, if someone gets charged at the end of a trial because your code is set to auto-bill them and they forgot, it's not like you can't refund them. Not doing so would do more harm than good. You only want to bill people who are actually using your product.
You definitely shouldn't use this as a tactic if you want to have a viral product. This is specifically about web apps.
I may still do this, as it's definitely more accurate that way in terms of representing how it actually works!