Here's a crazy idea: automatically pause recurring subscription of users when you detect they aren't actually using your app/service
— levels.io (@levelsio) December 23, 2015
I wonder how many startups would collapse if they'd cancel recurring subscriptions of users that don't use their service anymore but forgot
— levels.io (@levelsio) December 23, 2015
We’ve all been on the side of the customer who pays for a subscription service. Once in a few months you check your credit card bills and you see a monthly payment for a site/service/app you’ve not used in months.
This is one the big secret money makers for services with recurring revenue (like SaaS), it’s users that have forgotten about it but are still paying. Most figure it out some time or another, but they’ll still be charged for all the time they didn’t actually use (thus not getting any benefit from) your service.
But that’s bullshit and not good for people’s savings accounts.
So let’s be responsible as an industry and change this.
**If you’re a company that gets recurring revenue, automatically detect if a paying user actually still uses your service. And if they haven’t for a month, pause their subscription. Send them a message that you have paused it until they log back in. When they log back in, re-instate the subscription.
**
Actually Slack already does this and calls it Fair Billing.
As a business owner, it’ll make you less money in the short-term but probably more money (and more happy users) in the long-term:
@jansn @levelsio @LeonPals it re-aligns business objectives with customer objectives which in the long term should be a good thing
— Marc Köhlbrugge (@marckohlbrugge) December 23, 2015
And those happy users who trust you? That’s a very big competitive advantage:
@levelsio Couldn't agree more. Trust from your users is the highest form of competitive advantage.
— Shoin Wolfe (@shoinwolfe) December 23, 2015
I’d love to see forward-thinking startups like Buffer, Fancy Hands and all others take the lead in this and automatically stop charging users when they detect they’re not using them anymore.
It seems like such an obvious thing to do and odd that it hasn’t become the default.
P.S. I wrote a book on building indie startups called MAKE. And I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. I don't use email so tweet me your questions. Or you can see my list of posts. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
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