To Ask for a Credit Card Up Front or Not

Deciding whether to require a credit card for a free trial is a critical decision that impacts sign-up volume, lead quality, and support load. The default and recommended approach for most bootstrapped SaaS companies is to require a credit card up front.

The Case for Requiring a Credit Card (Default)

It's a Qualifying Event: A person willing to enter their credit card is a more serious, qualified lead than someone who is not. This filters out low-intent "tire kickers."
Reduces Support Burden: You get fewer, but higher-quality, trial sign-ups. This is critical for a cash- and time-strapped bootstrapper who cannot afford to support a high volume of non-converting users.
Higher-Quality Feedback: Feedback from qualified leads who have "skin in the game" is far more valuable for informing your product roadmap than noise from users who were never going to pay.
Higher Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate: A much larger percentage of these highly qualified leads will convert to paying customers at the end of the trial.

The Case for Not Requiring a Credit Card (Exceptions)

While it leads to a much lower trial-to-paid conversion rate, dropping the credit card requirement can be a powerful strategy in specific contexts:

Bottom-Up Adoption Model:
- Use Case: Your product is often adopted by employees who don't have access to a company credit card (e.g., Slack, Trello, Dropbox).
- Strategy: Removing the barrier allows an internal champion to get their team using the product. Once value is proven internally, they can make the case to a manager to upgrade to a paid plan.
Mature Business with Resources ("Opening the Floodgates"):
- Use Case: You are an established business (e.g., >$20k Monthly Recurring Revenue) with a deep understanding of your metrics and the resources to handle a 5-10x increase in trial volume and support load.
- Strategy: Dropping the requirement can fill the top of your funnel and give your sales team more leads to work with. This should be treated as a deliberate experiment, carefully tracking the impact on all downstream metrics.

If you are struggling to get sign-ups with a credit card requirement, the solution is not to drop the requirement. The solution is to fix the underlying problem: you either haven't built something people want, or you haven't learned how to market it effectively.

Tags: #SaaS #pricing #free-trial #conversion #onboarding #strategy #sales-funnel