Today after I was charged 39 EUROs by Litmus for a forgotten trial+ subscription at Paypal I thought about how to handle such situations.
Here’s what I’ve figured out:
- Trial subscriptions are evil. You can easily forget about them and you will be charged for a service you do not really use.
- If you offer a trial subscription to your potential customers, send them an email few days before trial period expiration.
- SaaS expenses for the dormant account are approaching zero (or at least they are not very high), so refund last payment with no question for a customer that have not really used your application or just decided that it was a wrong purchase.
That’s what I’d like to stick with while running Issues Done. We have no refund requests so far and our current trial period is sorta unlimited, so that’s all working for us :)
When we’ll open doors for everyone (not only early adopters) we will probably review our trial/paid terms but we’ll stick to the ideas I’ve outlined above.
P.S. If you use Litmus but decided to cancel your PayPal subscription for some reason — better do this just before next period. It seems that currently Litmus blocks your account just when you cancel your subscription. How funny. P.P.S. Payment was finally refunded after requesting refund through Paypal
