Gone Freemium

October 25, 2020

Originally I didn’t see a path to making Penance freemium. (That is, free to use, but with certain features requiring payment.) The point of the product is that you pay for your sins. If you haven’t provided a credit card, there’s no way to pay, so why bother?

The problem with that approach is that it makes converting visitors almost impossible. The conventional wisdom with online products is that putting a paywall in front of anything will reduce conversion to a small fraction of what it would be otherwise, and that squares with my experience here. I spent the last month posting about Penance around internet, which drove hundreds of visitors to the homepage, and borderline nobody signed up. A couple people did and I am grateful to those folks. But on aggregate the rate of signups was unacceptable.

Penance also faces the problem of being a weird product. Nobody visiting our homepage has used anything like Penance in the past. So it’s unlikely they are taking out their credit cards without first seeing the app and getting an idea for what it does. Freemium lets them do that.

So how does freemium work on Penance? Although you can still provide a credit at the time you sign up, you can also skip that step and starting tracking your goals and fines without it. If you record a fine, when the bill comes due, instead of charging you for it, Penance sends an email asking if you want to add a card. When you add a card, you have the option to go back and pay old bills, but that’s not required.

Those with cards on file still get charged automatically.

Watch this space for news on whether this approach works out any better.