Feedback: Premium subscription model needs work...
-
As a user for a while, I have often wanted to subscribe to premium to support the site/app. However, your subscription model is a huge ‘turn off’. At issue is the ‘insistence’ that users must subscribe to an automatically renewing subscription, or else they need to pay a significant surcharge to sign up for a single term.
To be clear, I never sign up for anything that is self-renewing on the internet. Having had to battle to end such a subscription in the past, I vowed to never make that mistake in future. Although every company says “we’re different,” the reality is that the public have heard that too many times before. Trust is earned, not given.
Look, I totally understand why you’re doing it this way. You want to encourage auto-renewal so that you keep your subscription numbers high, and thus better support your venture. However, what you fail to consider is that I’m not a unicorn. How many people like me are out there who would subscribe to a year if it was one price for all subscribers, and no ‘mandatory’ auto-renewal?
Here’s the thing... You could still offer auto-renewal as a ‘convenience feature’ for subscribers, and leave it up to the customer to decide. Before you mention that a person who pays by PayPal can go into their account and disable auto-renewal, a person shouldn’t have to do that. Furthermore, there is nothing that bothers a person more than to get charged for something that they didn’t want.
Instead, if you offer people the option—and you deliver a good service—when people pay a second time they will choose auto-renewal. Not because they are compelled to, but because they WANT to. If you did it that way, you would have a far more reliable way to determine whether you will keep customers year-over-year.
In the end, I don’t expect things will change, and that’s totally okay. People are always free to vote with their wallets. My post is simply to point out that I am one (of many) potential customers being ‘left on the table’ with your current subscription model.
However, should I notice in future that ‘mandatory’ auto-renewal is gone; I’ll be one of the first to sign up for a year.
-
@Savant99 Hello and thank you for your feedback regarding to our Premium tier. I will mention your thoughts at out meeting with colleagues.
