[Slightly Off Topic]How to handle downgrades

Rails
1

Let’s say that there is a web application which comes in several
different plans. Each plan has a different number of users and content
items allowed for an account. Obviously we can allow the user to
upgrade to a higher level plan by just increasing their limits but how
do we handle downgrades? If the user is only allowed x items on the
downgraded plan and they currently have x+10 items what do we do?

The way I see it there are a few options.

  1. Don’t let a user downgrade their plan until they have deleted enough
    users and items to meet the requirements for the plan they are
    downgrading to.
  2. Let a user downgrade but don’t let them add any new users or items
    until they are below their new plan’s requirements. Allows for people
    to kind of cheat the system. I believe that overall people are pretty
    honest and this would not be much of an issue. I do however think this
    might be confusing for a customer.
  3. Don’t allow for downgrades at all. This would make it easier on the
    developer but would pretty much suck from the customer perspective.

What have you all done and what approach would you recommend for an up
and coming web application?

Thank you,
Matthew M.
blog.mattmargolis.net

2

Matthew M. wrote:

downgrading to.
You could do a variation on this theme. When they select to downgrade,
display a screen saying that the new account can only have x users/items
and that they currently have more than this. Then display a list of what
they have with checkboxes and ask them to select the users/items that
they want to keep up to a max of x.

You could even just disable the unselected ones, so that if they upgrade
again in the future they are there again and they don’t have to re-input
that data - again, depends on what the application does.

hth

3

Richard L. wrote:

  1. Don’t let a user downgrade their plan until they have deleted
    upgrade again in the future they are there again and they don’t have
    to re-input that data - again, depends on what the application does.

hth

Sounds like a good idea. I do think that approach #1 is probably the
nicest to the user and just disabling their content would be pretty cool
if they ever wanted to upgrade again. I don’t know if disabling will
mesh too well with my product’s requirements but I will give it a shot.

Thank you,
Matthew M.
blog.mattmargolis.net