Do you log freemium customers in Stripe?
We're flirting with the idea of adding a freemium tier to our SaaS product.
Question, what's the best practice for tracking freemium customers? Do you track these as Customers in Stripe and create a new Product item that's $0? Or is it best to leave freemium users out of Stripe altogether.
Some additional context:
- We wouldn't be requiring credit card capture up front for freemium
- We need to use an email marketing tool to try to upsell to these freemium customers (and some of these tools seem like they integrate with Stripe's customer database).
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Hey Pat! I’m sure you will get a couple of different answers here, but if you are a freemium model I wouldn’t immediately add the user to Stripe. I use Intercom to track freemium users and then when someone converts I trigger Stripe’s API to do:
Test Card
Create Customer
Save Card to Customer
Add Customer To Subscription
If you have a limited free trial (ex: 14 day) and collect credit card upfront then I would do it.
In the end it’s preference, but I only like to give data to third party companies when absolutely necessary. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the insight! It makes sense, but it just bugs me a little that the "source of truth" is in 2 separate apps, and I need to keep those 2 sources in sync.
Couple questions on your approach:
Do you then have to flag the freemium users on Intercom differently after they convert? (so you don't keep marketing to them as freemium users).
What tool are you using to market/upsell/email paid users in Stripe? Are you using Intercom for that as well? I was looking into one of the email automation partners in Stripe App Marketplace to handle that (since theoretically, I'd be able to segment emails to different customers based on Stripe's subscription data...vs using Intercom's customer data).
Really appreciate your input!
Hey @patcheung,
Yep, I totally get it. I use my source of truth as my database. Then I pulled data from the database to use at will for different tasks.
Yes that’s exactly right. On the successful submission of a payment I tag the user as “paid” within Intercom.
All marketing activity for me is done within Intercom. Intercom is pricey, but it does user segmentation, marketing emails, in app pushes and customer support so I don’t have to buy any other tools.
There are cheaper alternatives to Intercom like Drift and Customer.io.
Also if you’re more technical you could always use something like SendGrid and simply pull all relevant users from the database and then send out via SendGrid, but would require more development time.
I think you hit the nail in the head with my dilemma. I think I can make due with Intercom, but due to the high price, I went with Crisp...and their email automation integration with the customer data just has too many gaps. Anyway, thanks for the input, I think I got some ideas to work with!
Has anyone used the 0$ product for freemium users?
Hey Pat,
In my SAAS products, I create a stripe customer during the credit card submission if there's not one that exists for the team.
Helps keep the stripe dashboard data clear of cruft.
Does your product have freemium? If so, how do you track/communicate with those users?