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I have had 3-4 subscribers now who were with me for months when the system was free, then suddenly when the charging time come up, their credit cards couldn’t be charged, so they were kicked off.
Solution, everybody should be charged for $1 at the beginning of any trial. That is a tiny amount but ensures that the CCs are real.
I have subscribers unsubscribing at the end of the trial period but almost at the same time, someone else signing up. Since I don’t have that many subscribers, the coincidence of this happening 2-3 times in a row is very low.
Solution, the same as above, charge everyone a little even for trials, so at least it is harder for them to keep changing names… They were from the same country too, making the coincidence even smaller.
If similar thing is going to happen again, I am either going down to 1-3 days trial period or none at all… I like a free lunch as anybody else, but we vendors are also trying to make a buck here and there…
Oh yeah, my system made 140% in the first 6 months, so it isn’t like they are not liking the system.
Well, I have just tried to change the trial period to 3 days, but C2 only allows me a minimum of 7 days. Because of the above issues, I think the 7 days trial to be way too long , so at this point I am thinking going no trial period whatsoever. It is really sad, because a few freeloaders screws it up for everybody else. Unless C2 allows me to go 3 days…
Charging a dollar for trials AND letting 3 days free trials would make it at least much harder for any freeloader. That would mean he needs to have access to 10 different CCs in a month, and it could be too much of a hassle instead of just paying the fee.
As a prospect who has not yet signed up for any trading system (trial or otherwise), I think the $1 idea is a good one and would not discourage any bona-fide potential customer from signing up.
The question of the trial duration is an interesting one, though. One of the reasons that I haven’t yet started any trials is that 7 days just isn’t long enough for me to evaluate a system and then decide to go “all-in”.
Let’s say the typical system costs $100 per month. If I invest only $10,000, that turns out to be a 12% expense ratio, which is pretty steep. To get things reasonable, I would really need to commit around $100,000 to get that down to 1.2%.
But, $100,000 could be a steep commitment to make after just 7 days for some. What might be more comfortable, perhaps, is starting with a $10,000 commitment for 6 months, then perhaps $50,000 for 6 more months, and then $100,000 after a year. During that “ramp up” period, I think most subscribers would be willing to pay something (I certainly would), but 12% is pretty expensive.
Taking the $1 idea further, maybe there could be no period of totally free trial, but rather a ramp up period that is much longer (on the order of months) with a diminishing discount schedule?
It took a while until I figured your expense ratio calculation, but I got it, the annual cost of the system would be 12% for you, using only 10K account. This expense ratio discussion belongs to the Why systems are so cheap/so expensive? threads though.
You can’t just look at expense alone without looking at the returns too. In my case you get a huge return, so the expense justifies it. A 15-20% annual return obviously wouldn’t.
The real question for you is this: Can you get the same fills with the autotrade what the vendor is getting? If so, the above expense ratio should be worth it for you to be a subscriber. And I think 1 week of trading should be plenty to try that out, specially with a system that trades 7 trades per day. Sure, less frequent systems could be problematic, but my system trades a lot.
So the way I see it, there are already plenty of trades to analyze and 3 days should be enough to trial run the autotrade feature. But again, I don’t have a problem with 7 days trials as long as we actually charge the return users…
Anyhow, I don’t really expect C2 to change anything, so from April, if everything stays the same I am going no free trials anymore. After all, there isn’t much to lose
for me at this point…
Most followers are honest here but few try to cheat by giving false credit card or subscribing again and again with different names and mail.
I don’t know if c2 check and monitor this but I had false subscriber that followed all my systems as well as 40 others.
When you have great system you can delete the trail and give nice price but not free for serious subscribers - I do this with 2 of my systems and soon the last one will be close to real followers only.
It’s good the PayPal idea buy for me the bad people isn’t such big problem.
There is no a big difference between free trial or not free trial. I don’t care about loss suscribers. Anyone can see closed trades and make their own landscape about the system. But I don’t want to give my system for free to those people who sign over and over again to free trial periode.
Yes it is kind offtopic, and so are the 140% you mentioned in the beginning, but it’s very important.
And yes, I would risk 50 cents, but not 15000$ of real money. Doesn’t matter how many times you recover.
I am new to this forum, and I just wanted to show you the reason why you don’t have that many subscribers.
From the moment you trade your own money and use proper risk&money management, you will attract many real subscribers, maybe even me. So you don’t have to worry about the few ones with false credit cards.
And about your topic.
As a honest subscriber I wouldn’t mind paying a 1$ creditcard trial fee, but it’s odd.
Some people need more than 7 days to test a system. So do I, but then I stick forever with a good trader.
I didn’t complain about too few subscribers. I complained about subscribers canceling and signing up again. If you think my system is too risky for you, no problem, you are not going to do the trial anyway.
Since I stopped the free trial period, the problem was kind of solved. So I am closing this thread with this general note:
When you take your car to the mechanic you can get it fixed good, quick or cheap, but you have to pick 2, because those 3 don’t come together. The same with systems, you can have them high return, low DD and cheap, but you have to pick 2 of those. If my system had low DD, I would be charging twice as much and then you guys would be crying about the price.
There is no system with low DD, high return and small fees. Pick your poison, but you can have only 2 of those. If you know such a system, let me know and I will sing up…
TL;DR: No more free trial for my system, thanks to those subscribers who played games…
I’m joining those above who have pulled their free trials. My system Drunk Uncle has reached a point where it’s drawing subscribers but they are all people gaming the system–accounts created on the day of the subscription and all subscribed to 6 other systems with free trials. They will cancel at the end of the trial. So I always have a list of subscribers but nobody ever pays despite a very low fee. So no more free trial. Maybe in another few months there will be enough history to draw people that actually have capital and are interested enough to subscribe for a fee.
The site redesign has a cool new feature “Latest” which shows the latest subscribers to a system. One side effect of the feature is you can now see the free trial gamers who are chasing developers off of providing free trials… Go look at the “Latest” subscriber list on Simple Swing:
Pretty much the entire list is made up of newly created accounts subscribed to the same group of systems with free trials.
