sparkygoblue

Hello HN, I’m Brad. I have been a computer programming and technology teacher for twelve years.

Collecting digital documents from my students via email or a learning management system has always been such a pain for me. Downloading the documents, writing notes, then reattaching/uploading the documents and sending them back to my students was very time consuming and tedious.

I decided to start working on solving this problem by creating a webapp built on top of Dropbox that allows teachers to collect documents from their students via a landing page and have the files put directly into their Dropbox account and have the documents organized by class, assignment, and student. Sort of like dropItTo.Me with extra features designed for teachers. I’ve had several of the teachers at my school using it for the last few months and they love it.

After getting some feedback from my alpha users and adding some features, I finally am ready to release it (in beta) to the world. If you’re an educator that finds collecting digital documents from your students to be a pain, please check out submitbox.

getsubmitbox.com

I've been debating whether taking credit card info during free trial signups is the best way to go for my SaaS app. Obviously, asking for this information will turn some (many? too many?) possible users away, but it also seems like a good way to acquire paying customers smoothly (as opposed to trying to acquire credit card info once the free trial is up).

I've looked at how several other successful SaaS apps have handled this, and it seems to be a bit divided. Many ask for credit card info up front, while others are much more interested in just getting you to sign up and try them. I can see positives to both approaches.

I'd be curious what other think about this...

I've spent a lot of time adding UI features to my new (mostly CRUD) webapp that I know I'm going to either tweak or totally override via javascript/ajax. I feel an obligation to get the app working with no javascript/jquery, even though I know that the group of people using the site with javascript turned off are going to very small.

Is this the "right" way to be doing this? Should I just be using javascript based UI elements and ajax from the start? Is there a standard practice with regards to this issue?