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Question
Why are my free trial subscriptions failing?
I have been getting a lot of free trials on https://aivideo.to recently, but most of these payments in Stripe fail at the end of a free trial. The cards have normal risk evaluation.
Why do the payments not go through? The account owners did not cancel them.
Why do the payments not go through? The account owners did not cancel them.
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Does it work in TEST mode? Have you tried taking a LIVE payment yourself (wait 7 days and see what happens).
Sometimes I find it is that people have cards such as Revolut that they have little balance and will only add credit to the card as and when. Which means they may forget to add sufficient balance for when the trial ends.
I know I purposefully do what Michael said so I get a reminder when something doesn't go through so I can re-evaluate if I want to continue paying the subscription.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
Also, you said "most" don't go through, which mean some are? If so, it's probably not your back-end setup. If you have a 0% conversion rate from trial to paid, I'd look into that ASAP.
@ehthing this 👆
+1 on revolut, this sound like the same issue @marc was having earlier this month x.com/marckohlbrugge/status/1…
I checked people are using different cards from different banks, except for 3 accounts that use the same cc of Adam Bino which is not their name. Mostly these are debit cards, but there are also CC that fail. Stripe reports normal risk and no theft for these cards.
I guess for debit/prepaid cards I can turn off accepting payments in stripe? For credit cards maybe I can start charging $1 at the start of the free trial to filter fake/stolen cards.
It's surprising to me that Stripe still has loopholes.
You should probably remove the free trial. Especially if these trials costs you money to run.
The reason is that there's many people abusing free trials using virtual credit cards in order to try AI apps. I think there are communities where they share with tools which are vulnerable to this type of attack. You're probably on one of those lists.
Happened to me as well. I removed the free trial and costs plummeted and revenue (surprisingly?) shot up.
yep virtual credit cards. just set a 50 cent limit on your card and when the payment goes through it'll fail.
Robinhood has virtual cards now too so it's even more mainstream.
I didn't have a free trial earlier, so many people signed up but didn't pay. To improve the conversion I made the free trial, but I guess it's only those who don't want to pay, who start a free trial on the highest plan thinking they will create all videos before the trial ends. Each video creation costs me money, so I set the limit to 10 videos for free trials irrespective of the selected tier. Some see 10 videos limit and don't even create 10 videos maybe thinking their strategy failed.
I guess, there's no point in losing money. But I still don't want to feel regret about not letting users try before paying and hence losing out on customers. I guess I'll set the $1 trial, so the trial starts only if the card successfully makes a $1 payment. Will do this for a couple of weeks and see.
I checked people are using different cards from different banks, except for 3 accounts that use the same cc of Adam Bino which is not their name. Mostly these are debit cards, but there are also CC that fail. Stripe reports normal risk and no theft for these cards.
I guess for debit/prepaid cards I can turn off accepting payments in Stripe? For credit cards maybe I can start charging $1 at the start of the free trial to filter fake/stolen cards.
It's surprising to me that Stripe still has loopholes.
I've had similar issue in the past with
#beanvest and the solution I found is have a 1$ trial.
However you should try to remove the trial entirely.
This sounds like a good plan. Will give it a try.
Have you checked the Stripe logs? Last month, I tried moving from PayPal to Stripe, but payments failed for the following reason: "A valid Importer/Exporter Code (IEC) is needed to present in USD. Please contact support.stripe.com/contact/em… if you have any questions."
Yet to contact support. Are you seeing a similar error?
I had already setup my IEC code.
I was checking this IEC thing earlier today and understood that it's not required for services, and this is just for physical products. I can see you are offering AI services. Do you still have to set up IEC?
If yes, and if it's not too much trouble, would you be able to share the steps? I'm planning to apply next month. I am offering writing services.
Thank you.
They say it only applies to physical products but don't approve your account for international payments without it, at least in my case.
It's easy to apply for it, there's an online form and you get it almost immediately or within 1 week I guess. Given you only apply for services export IEC.
Thank you.
Applied and got the EIC immediately. I thought this was a big task and kept it on hold. Thank you for the information.
same for me. I kept putting it off for months but got it in one day and felt like a fool.