Zombie SaaS: How Europe could work on getting users there money back
TL;DR
To do’s:
Figure out how you would like to payback users when they become inactive
Print the right sticker
Spread the word to other subscription companies!
Call it a payback Modality. It is just an effective, simple way to give users the possibility to get notifications or even to select a way that they get their money back for inactive time on a certain subscription software.
Some horrific data we could look at, researched with a little help of my frainds:
- 48% of US adults have forgotten to cancel a free trial
- A European-based software provider's analysis reveals that SMEs typically waste 20-30% of their software budget on unused or underutilized licenses. For a typical European business with 100 employees, this translates to a recoverable annual - spending of €15,000 to €30,000 through proper license management.
- Data from a UK survey of 2,000 adults shows that consumers waste an average of £61 annually on services they no longer use but have forgotten to cancel. This figure is comparable to the US, where consumers spend an average of over $200 per year on unused subscriptions.
- 85.7% of people having at least one unused paid subscription, and a typical American having an average of 3.3 unused subscriptions each month.
- A report on software usage indicates that more than 50% of SaaS licenses in a typical organization go unused.
- And the list goes on…
Europe has long been trying to build a fortress around digital developments in light of protecting its citizens. While this has led to some protection, it has also produced things that, in the words of David Heinemeier Hansson, are simply awful—namely, the cookie policy.
What Europe has not yet addressed, but definitely could, is the entire issue of payments in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Regulators should also look directly at the wallets of every European citizen.
A lot of software goes unused for months at a time, especially in a professional context where there is no clear oversight. On a personal level, too, automatic billing cycles can easily lead to paying for two or three months of a service you no longer use.
I would applaud that kind of baldness from the Digital Markets Act Enforcement team or any team drafting a propostion to make software consumption fair as well.
In the meanwhile, try these stickers if you as company are already ready to change the way you charge your customers:
https://paybackmodality.lovable.app/
where you can download the following stickers to communicate your payback strategy:
