30 days free trial vs. $30 free trial
A few months ago, we upgraded our pricing for a much simpler strict pay-as-you-go pricing. In short, we charge for every single forecasts retrieved from Lokad: the greater the number of forecasts, the larger the bill. Then, if no forecasts are retrieved during for a month, no charges are placed on your account.
This pricing evolution leads us to revise the notion of Free Trial as well, but in a more subtle way. Indeed, our old 30 days free trial was both not enough and too much in the same time:
- Not enough, because companies frequently need a few months to evaluate a new technology.
- Too much, because we did not previously put any usage limitation within the 30 days period (*).
As a consequence, we decided to go for a Free Trial with $30 of pre-paid services.
Simply put, when you open a Lokad account, your balance starts at $30 instead of zero (or the equivalent amount in other currencies). Hence, you will only get charged if you consume more than $30 worth of forecasts which represents almost 3000 forecasts.
Then, we haven’t set any expiration policy on this pre-paid amount. Hence, if you open your account now, but only start using it in 3 months from now, the free trial amount will still be available.
(*) We did choose $30 as we think it’s sufficient for the most situations. If your company require more than that to evaluate Lokad, don’t hesitate to drop us an email, as we are usually extending this amount on simple requests.
Reader Comments (2)
Hi Victor, Lokad don’t ask for any credit card upfront, and actually, we are quite generous with letting prospects overspend their free trial (no CC provided). In particular, if the prospect wastes loads of forecasts while setting-up her system (through an intense trial-and-error process), then we typically reset her balance at the point where the client is actually satisfied from the Lokad service. From this day on, we start charging regularly. In SaaS you make money on the long run, not by tricking the client once with a significant over spending. 8 years ago | Joannes Vermorel
It’s quite interesting, as I’ve received a similar offer from Facebook recently - a free $50 trial of their advertising platform. From what I gather, Lokad, Facebook, AWS, OVH cloud and others bill like utility companies do: whenever you use an unit of their service, you are billed the matching price. At the end of the month, you pay the bill. Facebook does not allow you to put a limit on how much you want to spend. Sure, you can place a daily limit, but if you forget to come back and disable it, you can be billed beyond what you were willing to pay. This makes the free $50 trial less enticing: they need me to provide my credit card number just in case I exceed the allotted $50, and I have no intent in providing my credit card unless the trial proves that Facebook ads have a good ROI. I ended up not using the free trial. How does Lokad handle this? Can I set a limit on my spending so I don’t accidentally overspend? 8 years ago | Victor Nicollet
