How booting 99% of my users saved my business (short story)
Hey everybody, this is a short story about how changing from "freemium" to "credit card based trials" completely saved by business.
Two years ago, I launched ChatEngine.io on YouTube. It's a NPM React component to build chat experiences. To start, it was free forever - until you exceeded 25 users.
While I got 30,000+ signups, over 99.9% of users never paid, and basically spammed my servers with requests. While signups and usage were growing, so were my costs and losses (about $800 per month).
Once my runway vanished, desperately, I made users link a C.C. to signup. Not only did my costs drop (from spammy users leaving), but only potential customers stuck around and my revenue spiked too. Now my app is gladly profitable 🎉
My lesson: If you provide something useful, it is totally okay to insist your customers pay for their account.
The advice "charging more" is scary and useful. BUT you can also "charge earlier" 👈👈👈 this comparable strategy is what saved my business.
Hope you learnt a thing or two!
🔌 🔌 🔌 If you need user-to-user chat in your website and don't want to build it yourself - consider chatengine.io 😊 there are tons of great tutorials on YT if you search for them!