Work Progress – Payment Paradox (Part 2)

With those five options in front of us – it’s time to choose a path.

For this phase of the application, I’ve chosen to pursue Option 2 – Free Trial. This model serves a few purposes:

• Exposes users to a full set of features immediately
• Extremely easy to implement with payment infrastructure- remitting payment can be automatically activated and collected with a service like Stripe after the free trial period has elapsed
• Extremely easy to implement with the application architecture – there won’t be any logic to gate features based on a customer’s payment state

Let’s break down the benefits point by point below.

Exposure to Full Features

I’d rather have users experience the full set of features and then revisit pricing and payment in the future, once more users and features are active.

The feature set as of today is quite small, so there’s no need right now to really gate or price on features right now.

This is also a good test of the overall applications hypothesis, “Is there enough value (or even premise of value) worth paying for?”. If features are lacking in any aspect, it’s easier to adjust course when there isn’t a lot of deployed complexity.

Integration with Payment Infrastructure

Going along with my theme of keeping things simple and lightweight, I don’t want to spend the time nor energy figuring out payment infrastructure, and the details with a freemium or tiered user experience.

Having a straightforward free trial period provides an experience to users with the expectation, that payment needs to be made for continued use of the service.

I plan on doing a little more research, but Stripe seems to be the easiest payment provider to integrate with. Once payment information is collected, it’s fairly straightforward to enable and disable a users account based on payment state and free trial duration.

I should mention, from what I’ve already researched, Stripe also handles payment processing with their own UI widget – which thus saves me a lot of time from the start.

Integration with Application Infrastructure

Very similar to the point above, with users having immediate access to all the features, there’s little work to be done to integrate a trial period with their experience. While there’s a fair amount of non-trivial work involved with gating features behind a flag or similar solution, it’s not critical to this particular phase of the application.

At this point, one goal providing users an opportunity to experience the application at its foundation and continue building features that users want to use (with their feedback).

A small tangent – earlier in my journey building this application, I was always worried about scale, “doing it right”, or making it perfect. I realized a lot later, it’s more important to ship some code, get users to give me input, and move as fast as possible.

I can worry about scale, “doing it right”, and other things of that nature when the application has stabilized and I actually have a paying and committed user base. Down the road, I do imagine that I’ll have to revisit the payment and feature model. It’s merely not important right now.

Next Steps

With all that said, I’ve got a big list of to-do’s:

• Investigate and deploy Stripe to the application
• Figure out pricing
• Finish bug-bashing
• Assemble a social media marketing campaign
• Reactivate my former beta users

That’s it for this now, have a great week!

• Jonathan