The lower barrier to entry does show a pretty significant uptick from unique visitors to trial customers as well. On the other side of that coin, the data shows that converting trial users to paid customers is way more likely when you have already collected payment information at the start of the trial. I think your customer base really defines willingness to put up a card up front.

On another hand, as mentioned in the report, if a SaaS operator does manage to close a sale to a larger business then that larger business is likely to provide the SaaS operator a much higher lifetime value due to lower price sensitivity and lower churn rate. But at some point it crosses over into high-touch enterprise sales process with multiple approvals from multiple stakeholders, long time horizons.

It'd be quite interesting to have survey data on what the sales process is like. But probably only relevant for SaaS businesses that sell to government / large business customers.

I'm with you on that.

But my understanding of slide 55 is that requiring a credit card up front doesn't pose much of a problem to growth.

It looks that way to me too.

I converted the conversion rates from unique-trial-paid for each scenario. It looks like 0.846% for credit card required upfront and 0.264% for no credit card required. So *net conversion is ~3.2x higher when a credit card __is__ required upfront.*

Showing my work:

I eyeballed each bar chart and turned it into a data table. I'm getting median unique-to-trial conversion rates of 3.1% (credit card required) and 6.1% (credit card not required). I'm then adjusting these to account for the % of "don't know" responses. So, adjusted medians of 1.8% (cc required) and 3.3% (cc not required).

Following the same process for trial-to-paid yields medians of 47% (cc required) and 8% (cc not required).

Multiplying each pair yields 0.846% (cc required) and 0.264% (cc not required) unique-to-trial-to-paid.