Another reason I have low margins though is because my free plan and free trials also cost me real money. There is no way I can get around that.
Have you considered rolling back or sharply limiting your free trials? With the exception of people you've made commitments to, if they aren't accomplishing a business goal for you, you don't owe the world them. There is nothing intrinsic about SaaS that says there has to be a free plan. (Additional options: aggressively using the free plan as a viral spread mechanism. Your free competitors do this, as I learned the other day when on a sales call organized by somebody who would have happily dropped $50 to remove the external branding for that single phone call if they were aware of your option existing.)
We also run on Twilio, and have a 30 day free trial with CC required upfront. While we still have marginal expenses to service free trials in a way that many SaaSes do not, the costs are not terrible and easy to justify as a cost of customer acquisition. (We shoot for, and mostly get, 80%+ margins on the paid plans.)
If you're ever in the mood to chitchat about this, drop me an email. I'd be happy to share about how e.g. moving a bit upmarket and doing a bit of enterprise sales has worked for us.
Quick question: Do you have some kind of monitoring setup on HackerNews for the keywords "Free Plan" or "Free Trial" or are you just that active? You always get to these topics so quickly.
Thanks for chiming in!! :) I always find a lot of value in your advice.
I started out asking for a CC before the trial, but on a small adwords test campaign that converted exactly zero out of a few hundred people. Then again, that may have been because the entire site was a single signup/cc form and had very little information otherwise.
I can sympathise with the OP. Free accounts also costing us money but if we strip them of the key feature (NLP) or limit them, the conversion drops because it is a service that takes some time to learn and people tend to be lazy.
Have you considered rolling back or sharply limiting your free trials? With the exception of people you've made commitments to, if they aren't accomplishing a business goal for you, you don't owe the world them. There is nothing intrinsic about SaaS that says there has to be a free plan. (Additional options: aggressively using the free plan as a viral spread mechanism. Your free competitors do this, as I learned the other day when on a sales call organized by somebody who would have happily dropped $50 to remove the external branding for that single phone call if they were aware of your option existing.)
We also run on Twilio, and have a 30 day free trial with CC required upfront. While we still have marginal expenses to service free trials in a way that many SaaSes do not, the costs are not terrible and easy to justify as a cost of customer acquisition. (We shoot for, and mostly get, 80%+ margins on the paid plans.)
If you're ever in the mood to chitchat about this, drop me an email. I'd be happy to share about how e.g. moving a bit upmarket and doing a bit of enterprise sales has worked for us.