Who this is for
Your connected Stripe account sits between $10,000 and $250,000 of monthly recurring revenue. You have a marketing lead or a growth engineer, a support inbox that sees billing questions, and a trial funnel that already produces paying customers. The question is no longer whether trials work. It is how much revenue leaks between the trial start and the first successful charge.
Challenges this solves
- Unplanned churn at trial end, when a card that looked fine at signup is declined on the first invoice.
- Page tests that never ship because every variant needs a designer and a deploy.
- High-value trials that sit unnoticed in a list until someone happens to look.
- Disputes that arrive weeks later with no record of what the buyer was shown.
- Statement lines that buyers do not recognize, which turn into support tickets and chargebacks.
How the fee scales with your revenue
Three plans cover this stage. The price is a flat monthly amount for the band your MRR sits in, and the share of revenue it represents falls as you move up inside a band and across bands.
| Plan | Price per month | Connected-account MRR |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | $95 | $10,000 up to $50,000 |
| Scale | $295 | $50,000 up to $150,000 |
| Pro | $595 | $150,000 up to $250,000 |
| Plan | Fee at the bottom of the band | Fee just under the top of the band |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | 0.95% | 0.19% |
| Scale | 0.59% | 0.20% |
| Pro | 0.40% | 0.24% |
Another way to read the fee is in customers. The table below shows how many paying customers at a given monthly price it takes to cover the Growth fee of $95.
| Your monthly price | Customers to cover Growth | Customers to cover Scale |
|---|---|---|
| $29 | 4 | 11 |
| $49 | 2 | 7 |
| $99 | 1 | 3 |
These are arithmetic on list prices, not a prediction of how many customers a card hold will add. Use your own conversion data to decide what a held trial is worth.
Your first 30 days
Days 1 to 7: measure the leak you have today
Before changing anything, pull last quarter from Stripe: trials started, trials that produced a successful first payment, and first invoices that failed. Put those into the failed payment recovery calculator and the MRR calculator so you have a baseline in your own numbers.
Days 8 to 14: run TrialValid beside the existing flow
Connect Stripe, publish a page for your best selling plan, and send around a fifth of signup traffic to it from a single channel. Keep attribution tags on every link so the first-touch data lines up with the campaign you are testing.
Days 15 to 21: add variants and alerts
Have the model write two or three variants from your product description, edit them to match your voice, and switch them on together. Set the Slack high-value threshold to a plan price that deserves a personal note from your team, and keep the capture failure alert on for the person who owns billing.
Days 22 to 30: promote, widen, and compare
Look at visits, signups, conversions and revenue per variant, and compare the held-card trials against your baseline. Promote the leading variant, raise the traffic share toward half, and write down what you would need to see before moving everyone over.
Recommended setup
- Two or three page variants active at once, so the split is meaningful without diluting traffic.
- The failure setting chosen deliberately: leave to Stripe if your own retry settings are tuned, or cancel on failure if you want a clean stop.
- A custom statement descriptor that matches the name on your invoices.
- A Slack channel shared by sales and billing for high-value trials and disputes.
- The webhooks documented on the webhooks page wired into your own systems if you track trials elsewhere.
First features to use
- Card holds for free trials for the capture window, retries and renewal of long holds.
- AI page variants for the second and third versions of your page.
- High-value trial alerts so large trials get a personal reply.
- Dispute readiness for the record you will want if a charge is questioned.
- Statement descriptors that make the charge recognizable.
How is my plan picked as I grow?
From your connected account's MRR, which is rechecked about every 7 days. The bands are on the plans and MRR page: Growth runs $10,000 up to $50,000, Scale runs $50,000 up to $150,000 and Pro runs $150,000 up to $250,000.
Can I keep my current Stripe retry settings?
Yes. The default setting leaves a failed first capture to Stripe, which charges the saved card on the first invoice and keeps retrying under your own billing settings.
Will a hold last through a long trial?
Holds on long trials are renewed with a fresh hold before the old one lapses. A renewal that needs buyer authentication counts as failed, and you are alerted if a hold is lost.
Can my team see results per variant?
Yes. Visits, signups, conversions and revenue are kept for each variant, and you can record your own events against a visitor.
Does it replace my billing system?
No. Subscriptions live in your Stripe account. TrialValid places the hold, starts the trial, captures, and credits the customer balance so the first invoice nets to zero.
What is the cost of a failed trial?
You pay no per-transaction fee. A failed capture releases the hold and alerts you. What the subscription does next follows the setting you chose.