Paid Account Trial

[vickyblueeyez]

Title:
Paid Account Trial

Area:
paid time

Summary:
Give users the option to have paid time for a certain length of time so see if they like it.

Description:
LJ had a feature where for free, you get two weeks of paid time. I think this would be useful for DW. By having this, users can preview what it's like to have paid accounts and therefore, if they like it, they would be more inclined to buy it. I would like to preview what it's like myself but am hesitant because I do not want to end up wasting money if I don't like it.

Poll #8877 Paid Account Trial

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 87

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
21 (24.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (5.7%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
34 (39.1%)

(I have no opinion)
25 (28.7%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (2.3%)

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

I chose shouldn't be implemented because we have the option to only buy a month for $3 and I just don't think, if someone is seriously considering buying paid time, that is too much. However, whatever Denise and Mark decide is fine with me. I don't really have a pony in this race.

[dancing_serpent]

Yes, this exactly.

[kerravonsen]

Agreed.

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[laitaine]

This. Absolutely this.

[denise]

$3 is more of a psychological barrier to people than 'free' is, though, and it's entirely possible that this would lead to an increase in paid accounts from people who want a trial first! On the other hand, it's a lot of coding for unknown reward -- none of LJ's payment system is open source and therefore we can't legally use it, so we'd have to code a system like this from scratch. (Also, there are apparently bugs with LJ's version that will let you game the trial and keep the paid benefits for free, or so I hear.)

So, I am officially on the fence about this (usually I will either move business suggestions straight to Bugzilla if they'll work for us, and reject them with an explanation out of the queue if they won't, but if I have no strong opinion or if I have strong opinions in both directions, I'll let it out for discussion) and can possibly be swayed with a strong argument in either direction.

(Also, I quote from a blog entry made by the guy who owns/operates Pinboard: "It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when buying a new car. Prospective users would hand-wring for weeks on Twitter and send us closely-worded, punctilious lists of questions before creating an account." He is so, so very right.)

[azurelunatic]

I wound up convincing a friend to buy a Pinboard account with the phrase "It has been worth two frappucinos of entertainment."

[claire_chan]

Icon +1

[ceesoo]

Could bugs and things be avoided if to do the trial DW went through the checkout system rather than doing it as a button-click process that doesn't seem to go through checkout (at least on the user side) the way LJ has it?

Since DW already keeps track of payment history would it be possible to allow one payment of $0.00? :|a Hrm... I was thinking it could somehow be done like the money orders, but I guess you guys have to manually approve the paid time after you receive the money for it...

[vickyblueeyez]

Funny that you mentioned pinboard. I haven't purchased that either due to my same fears of buying it, then not liking it and not using it. Many swear up and down by it but I am still apprehensive. Yes DW is only 3 dollars (in ref to the argument that 'but its only 3 bucks') but it's 3 dollars in addition to the other stuff I'm paying for.

Someone gifted me paid time and I like what I see so far. If whoever did it is reading this, thank you.

[jumpuphigh]

Someone gifted me paid time and I like what I see so far. If whoever did it is reading this, thank you.

Users on Dreamwidth are very generous and we want everyone to love it as much as we do.

[amadi]

There's a comic at The Oatmeal that's also coming to mind: we gladly drop several hundreds of dollars on iPads, iPhones and various Android devices, then bug out about spending 99¢ on an app.

But having said that, how about a 99¢ one week trial?

[mc776]

I think $.01 is little different from $3 as a psychological barrier that $0.00 does not have.

For me the biggest psychological barrier is just setting up all the account information and then entrusting the vendor with my credit card info... which barrier seems even bigger in proportion to smaller transactions.

If there were a coin slot in the side of the monitor, I'd probably be buying stuff online far more than I do now.

(one great thing about Steam: you do this once, and can do transactions with any number of other vendors and let Valve, whom by this point you've already deemed to be worth giving your CC # to, handle the money bit.)

[archangelbeth]

Offer .99 cents for a week, and upgrade to a month (for an additional $2.01) if you like it?

[alexbayleaf]

There are overheads with the payment processor, though. I suspect that if you made the payments any smaller, nothing would be left for DW.

[archangelbeth]

Alas, that's true. O:(

Make it possible for other people to give 1-week subscriptions, with points, where you have to have bought a minimum of X points anyway? O:/

[jumpuphigh]

Good points. Thanks. That gave me something to think about. <3

Whatever you decide, I'll support that decision. Seriously, if you offer it, I'll completely talk it up. "AND! You can try it for a week for free!" Although, tbh, if I want someone to try DW and I think a paid account might be the thing that tips it for them, I just give them a month.

[arethinn]

+1

[montuos]

+1

[mc776]

Voting no... might be open to abuse by creating multiple accounts.

Don't have a dog/pony/squirtle in this myself though.

EDIT: Didn't see denise's comment before this...

[vickyblueeyez]

Abuse in what way? I admit, if you see it as abuse, I did this on LJ with other accounts. I gave my RP journals the free paid time to make RSS feeds to get updates for Fanfiction.net on my LJ. I did that because to make syn feeds, you have to be a paid member. But since it's free to make here, that wouldn't be an issue.

[ceesoo]

I imagine what they mean is people making a new account whenever their paid trial runs out or something?

Having an invite code required to make a free account might help with that (when those come back), but it's also true that invite codes aren't hard to get.

[pseudomonas]

Maybe it could be generated as a gift thing? Say when you buy a year's paid account for yourself, you get (either free or for an extra $0.50 or whatever token amount) to gift a fortnight's "paid" account to another account [optionally: that's not had such a gift before]?

Just throwing this out as an idea, I am not a business person and have no idea if this would make financial sense.

[alexbayleaf]

What, like the 10% bonus that's running *right now* in the store, where if you spend $10 you get $1 in DW points to use as you wish?

[pseudomonas]

Um, yup. I have a permanent account, so am out of touch with the store :-/

[erik]

The ticky box I wanted to check would have said something like "Shouldn't be implemented, with changes."

There is already a system in place to "try out" a paid account: buy it for a month. $3 is nothing.

But what denise said about the fact that $3 is still a lot more than free is also true. Especially if you have to go through the whole process of setting up your billing info etc before you can actually spend the $3.

What if there were a system whereby upon buying the first month ever of paid time you received 2 months, and the $3 was fully refundable until the first month was over. This would add a little extra incentive to the idea of starting a paid account (two for one!) and reassure some of the wafflers that if they hate it they can easily send it back.

There would have to be a: a way to flag each account that they'd already received the free trial (to—as people have suggested—keep people from canceling on day 28 again and again), and b: a way to refund people's money, which I assume might already exist.

[denise]

We can issue refunds, yeah, but it has to be done manually through the payment processor frontend, which is a very annoying and tedious and irritating process.

[ceesoo]

Haha, I think voting might be pretty skewed on this, since people who come to this comm are probably more invested in seeing DW do well and flourish and want to see the DW team rewarded for their efforts.

If it could be done without bugs I'd like people to be able to try a week of paid time though. That seems like long enough to explore some of the features, and if people want to fiddle with things longer, $3 for a month of testing stuff out isn't too much.

LJ made trial accounts their own separate account level, which I wonder if might be the reason it can get kind of buggy...


:|a I think one advantage of doing a trial for DW is that it gives users who have lots of icons on another service a chance to move them over to DW with the importer and play around, set everything up and make it homey, before putting down some money. You could do that after paying the $3, true, but I feel like I'd be more inclined to put money into something I already customized to my liking.

[mc776]

:|a I think one advantage of doing a trial for DW is that it gives users who have lots of icons on another service a chance to move them over to DW with the importer and play around, set everything up and make it homey, before putting down some money. You could do that after paying the $3, true, but I feel like I'd be more inclined to put money into something I already customized to my liking.

...that sounds like a really good reason for implementing trial accounts. :O

(I imported from a "basic" LJ account that I never paid a penny for, so the initial move to a free DW account was an unmitigated upgrade for me... I never even thought of this.)

[vickyblueeyez]

Also, I don't want to be mean or start anything but there are a lot of comments that $3 isn't anything. But there are some people who don't have income coming in at all so $3 could be a lot. I just saw the comment as kinda selfish to be honest. That's just me. :/

[tephra]

Being someone in a position where, yes, $3 is a lot.... Why would someone in my position be considering a paid account? If I can't toss $3 out to test the paid account level I can't buy one if I like it anyway.

[ceesoo]

In some cases people might not be seriously considering getting a paid account since they feel like it's a wasted expense, but since it's a free thing to try, they check it out anyway. Once that runs out, maybe the $3 purchase goes on the consideration list after all, because they've seen what it is and can decide better if it's worth it.

I understand the "wow, it's just $3 and you get a month to play!" but if people want to weigh it before deciding if those $3 should go here or some other service, it seems like it's fair to allow that.

[dancing_serpent]

That's exactly how I think of it, too.

[jumpuphigh]

I'm assuming you mean my comment and I worded it specifically the way I did - "if someone is seriously considering buying paid time" - because $3 can be too much for people but this isn't a question of how much is a month worth or how much people can afford for this type of service. It's a question of someone considering a paid account (ranging from $3/month to $50/year). The motivation, according to your suggestion, is "By having this, users can preview what it's like to have paid accounts and therefore, if they like it, they would be more inclined to buy it." But if $3 is already too much, then how would they be "more inclined to buy it"?

[boundbooks]

There were other comments too: http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/1285598.html?thread=3786974#cmt3786974

"There is already a system in place to "try out" a paid account: buy it for a month. $3 is nothing."

I think this is the one where people in particular raised eyebrows, as $3 is not the same as $0.00.

[azurelunatic]

I have been in situations where money was tight enough where $3 was a lot: I could come up with it, but there were enough different things that I could apply it to usefully that I didn't want to spend it on something that I didn't know if I'd want once I had it. It was affordable, but too much to throw away.

I also have a bit of a psychological barrier about spending money online, even in small amounts, because I know how small amounts add up if I get enthusiastic about something the way that I know I do; unless I have a strictly defined budget for online entertainment, one that I cannot impulsively go over, I cannot afford to lightly spend money online.

Offline, I control my impulsiveness with careful use of a cash entertainment budget and only using my debit card with deep forethought. Online, I still need to be careful.

[kerri]

This. Someone who has to think about spending $3 still has the right and desire to spoil themselves, buying a paid account may be one of the ways they do that. If a two week trial can help them decide that, I don't see any reason to object to it. I'm sure it can be limited in appropriate ways.

[vickyblueeyez]

I don't think it was your comment but various because you weren't the only one to say so. Right now my expenses are tight to the point where I can get one or the other.........such as pay for DW, dA, LJ or another service. I can't speak for everyone but others might be in my position. I would hate for someone to buy and end up not liking something and then be out of money. That's my main concern. Like LJ for example. I'm out of money thanks to that. One of the main reasons I paid was for the ability to edit comments. Now that it's free.......they just took my money.

[alexseanchai]

I think the drawbacks (as Denise said, lots of coding, not necessarily any reward) outweigh the potential of getting paid accounts out of it, unless somebody has hard numbers on how many paid accounts LJ gets out of this feature and those numbers indicate that this feature is worth it.

[keepcalmhyrule]

I like the idea of doing this via the check out process of a one-time only per account purchase of "$0.00" for a week of paid time. That way there isn't a glitch to get the free icon storage like it does on LJ because it goes through the same as any other paid time.

[alexbayleaf]

I don't have a horse in this race, but I'd like to suggest a potential implementation: upon account creation, automatically gift the user with enough DW points to buy one month's paid time.

[aibro]

You can send your DW points to other users so that'd be abused by those with multiple accounts.

...Unless the points were non-transferable.

[cesy]

A one-week trial might well be worth the cost of the paid features, though I'm not sure about the coding time to set up the system.

The other thing we can do is publicise the gift a random user feature - there are also many DW enthusiasts who would happily gift a month's paid time to anyone who's not sure yet.

[aedifica]

The other thing we can do is publicise the gift a random user feature

The thing is, though, that it is a *random* user--it doesn't select for "people who are curious to try out a paid account." (Don't get me wrong, I love the "gift a random user" feature, I just don't think it quite solves the problem here.) I suppose maybe a comm like dw_codesharing could be created for people who want to try out paid accounts to make themselves known? I don't think that's an ideal solution--a person could post again and again asking for paid time--but it's one thought. *shrug*

[cesy]

People could also use the comments of paidaccountfairy for that, though it's not official - some have already.

[aedifica]

My "with changes" isn't really so much "with changes" as it is "I started out neutral and have been mostly persuaded it sounds like a good idea, but not persuaded enough to be comfortable voting a full 'yes' vote."