No free tier, what to do with non-paying accounts?
I’m working on rolling out a new product. Easiest to think of like a niche linktr.ee (they’d actually be a competitor in a way).
I don’t want to have a free tier, I find it to be a waste of my time and resources. I will offer a free trial though. I’m wondering what to do once the trial expires and the user doesn’t subscribe, or if they cancel their subscription.
Normally I’d just leave the account data alone but restrict access. But like Linktree, in my app you can claim usernames. This means any locked accounts will permanently restrict that username from use. So I’m considering deleting the account after X time to free up usernames (and resources), but I’m not sure how long to wait and if there’s any issues I can run into from this?
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How many users do you have? Do you find that your new users have numbers in the back of your user names? If it's in the hundreds/thousands, and if new users usually don't have numbers at the end, your users are probably picking their favorite user names just fine. Also, disk is cheap. Based on what your product it, I can't imagine it's taking up gigabytes of data per account.
Hence, it's probably not worth your time to delete the account, unless some right-to-forget law demands that you do.
I'd keep it around. It's valuable data for who doesn't go into your funnel, and possibly why.
In my case, I delete data that's taking up resources - like analytics etc after 3 months of no log in.
Then, after 6 month of no login I remove their account & everything related to it.
Good to give them a headsup beforehand, and it might even help you get a few to come back.
Deleting is fine, but I would wait a month.
Send emails during that time. Think 14 days, 21 days, 29 days. Make sure the user knows and isn't just on vacation or medical leave.
Deleting the data makes sense. I'd let the user know a bit before you're going to delete it (maybe an automated email) so they have a chance to reactivate. Don't have much backing to this, but I think a week is a good amount of time before deleting.