Any recommendations on whether to ask for credit card at start (required to begin) or end of trial period? Or what criteria to help us decide.
ps - yes we can test it but won't have enough statistically significant traffic for a while
Find some method for disabling future data entry at the end of the test drive but make it freely available in its frozen state and easily exportable.
If the user likes your service and wants to continue, the request for a credit card will be welcomed.
If the user doesn't want your service anymore, you will generate good will by allowing export of the data. The person either will export data and delete the account, just delete the account, or walk away and leave the data to rot on your servers.
Basecamp does it NEARLY right. Except they lock the user data behind the wall and won't let you export it. I have two Basecamp accounts right now for two different businesses. One is the unlimited $150/month account. The other one expired at the end of 60 days. It is much smaller.
I will become a paying customer for the second but the fact that they locked me out of my own data adds just a smidgen of hate in my heart for Basecamp. Add that to the fact that my employees are not terribly thrilled with Basecamp (they find it hard to use for the types and numbers of projects we have) means it is probably that Basecamp has pointed me toward a competing product over the semi-near term -- for both businesses.
That's one user's anecdote about Basecamp. I suggest you attempt to go through life trying to piss people off as little as possible. That's a reasonable business model to pursue.
At the moment you don't have a lot of traffic, so you likely don't have a lot of users, and you don't really know if you have something they'll pay for. You don't really know what problems they experience using your app. You don't really know where else in the process they might fall out of the funnel. Putting the CC requirement at the beginning will even further restrict the flow of users through your funnel and make it harder for you to learn where your stuff is broken.
When you do have traffic, A/B test to find out which one works better for you BTW: there is likely more than one axis with which you'd measure what is "better". You'll have to decide for yourself what those are. Is it better than you have less tire-kickers and more seriously committed users? Is it better to have more people in the funnel in total so you can optimize the trial experience? Is it better to have pre-authorized the credit card and remind them that you're going to start charging them tomorrow if they don't cancel their account?
Question to OP - Why not have a freemium model - where if the user does not pay then his account is downgraded to free plan. This generally has the benefit of keeping those users interested who may pay for the service sometime in the future.
As an example - I used Zopim on my website for a whole year for Free before converting to a Paid user. Had Zopim not had a free plan, I would have tried other competitors and eventually become a paid customer of theirs. By keeping a free plan, they retained me as a customer.
If your app has the remote possibility that it can be abused by fraudsters, scammers, con people, ask for credit card at the start of the trial. This will save you a lot of hassle later down the road.
Otherwise, you can ask at the end.
Keep in mind that a qualified user will sign up for your service even if you ask for the CC up front. As a business owner, your job is to get users, yes, but also to get paid for your efforts. Hopefully this will help you decide what to do. Remember, it's much easier if you just treat it like a learning experience.
You want committed users, not people who gave you their cc for a free trial and then forgot to cancel.
