Why we ship every new account with $50 of credits and no credit card
An onboarding bet, said plainly: we believe more people should try open-source inference before they decide whether to use it. Removing the credit card is the cheapest way to make that happen.
Every new Hoonify account ships with $50 of usable credits and no credit card on file. The credits are real — they pay for real tokens on real hardware. The lack of a credit card requirement is not a trick. There is no auto-renewal that fires once the credits run out. When the credits are gone, your account stops serving requests until you decide to top up.
This was not the original plan. The original plan was the standard SaaS onboarding: credit card up front, a small free tier, watch the conversion funnel. We changed it after watching the funnel for three months.
What the data showed
The conversion problem with closed-API onboarding for open-source inference was not the credit card. It was the signup form's implicit promise: enter your card, run a few tokens, and you will know whether this is right for you. That promise was wrong. The customers who actually got value did so after a real workload, with real volume, over real days. Five free tokens did not surface that.
The customers who churned in the first week were the ones who tried to evaluate us with synthetic test traffic, hit a sharp edge, and bounced. The ones who succeeded were the ones who had a meaningful workload to throw at us in the first 72 hours. The credit card was upstream of the wrong question.
What we changed
We removed the credit card from signup. We expanded the free credit grant to enough volume to evaluate a serious workload (a few hundred million tokens, depending on model). We added a soft cap that pauses requests at the limit instead of charging the customer.
Our 30-day retention is up about 40% since the change. Our acquisition cost is down because the signup conversion went up. The customers who graduate to paying are happier because they paid after they knew the product worked, not before.
Onboarding is the part of the product where most customers form their permanent opinion. We stopped pretending it was a billing problem.
What this is not
It is not a permanent loss leader. We make money on customers who run real workloads, and the cost of the free credits is a customer acquisition expense like any other. It compares favorably to outbound marketing on a per-paying-customer basis.
It is also not unique to us. Several other open-source-friendly inference providers have moved in the same direction in the last six months. We expect the credit-card-required onboarding to look as quaint as 'fax us your purchase order' by the end of the year.