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Do Not Piss Off Your Customers

The Chargify Twitter account has been responding to complaints all day, and the change has sparked a popular thread on Hacker News. Chargify has responded to the negative feedback by announcing the addition of a ‘Bootstrapping’ plan, which runs $39/month for up to 100 customers and will only be available to Chargify users who signed up before today. But anyone relying on a free plan is out of luck, and it’s not trivial to make the jump from one payment system to another.

...

Chargify isn’t the only company in this space that’s had to change its pricing model. In March Recurly, which launched with pricing based on per-transaction fees rather than a monthly rate, moved to a flat-rate model. And, as you’d expect, some of its customers weren’t pleased.

via techcrunch.com

My take on this is simple. You should keep your customers happy. You should find the right words or right customers, either one is okay. However, do not take an existing mass and throw it against the wall.

In this specific case, they had to run a long enough campaign to keep early adopters happy, and make the transition smooth. If the new customers who are unhappy but never bothered to take any steps during that campaign to secure their discount or free spot - well, shit happens, move on - however, do not screw up legitimate and loyal users ever.

Free to paid through obstacles

I'm facing a dilemma here and would like to ask for some advice.

Say, I'm operating a resource, which was free for some period of time, has established community of users and monetizes through other means (ads, sponsors, etc). Management has decided to start offering paid plans to users (although, with no good sounding plan on table, yet). Meanwhile, I've spent some time researching the needs of visitors and came up with a list of things that would definitely make users happy.

However, I'm hesitating to proceed with those changes, as the management is afraid that some of those changes (most of them being minor though) might be used as a tool to push users towards a paid plan. And once they are offered free, the users might be less happy moving into paid, and would be angry to know that we're taking something away from them.

So, the question is:

How should we deal with taking away something that was free (for a while) and making it for-pay, and
Should we consider bundling up minor changes to make a good reason for people to upgrade their plans, while not offering much else?

Thanks!

Do Not Piss Off Your Customers

Free to paid through obstacles

About Olexandr Prokhorenko

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