Don't give out free trials!

This seems like a “this worked for me, so this is the only way” type of post.

Free trials are great. Try before you buy has been a thing for decades.

PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS POST AS LAW!!

Why?

I would not deny it can backfire in some cases but the experience indicates in most industries giving the customer the opportunity to try a partial or total version of the product is worth the effort.

As a customer, if a SAAS company does not give me a low friction way to see what the product is about and how it works I will not try it, period.

Having said that, there are some companies for which a trial is not convenient (if you are selling your time) or if you need to do custom things for each customer. But if giving a customer a trial implies low overhead you need to have a good justification (as in backed by numbers) to not do it.

I think it makes sense. We, at https://scrapingfish.com, also initially offered a fee trial - 1,000 API requests for our web scraping API. Now, we only give them on request if someone contacts us and describes their use case. At least we can learn from this how people want to use our product. This is really important in the product early stage to shape it in a way that fits the market and lets us focus on the most important features.

Congratz on the 7k MMR! That's really good news.
But giving out free trials can be great if your digital product is in a niche industry or it's complex to use.
Trials can really help get those first-hand users and help them understand the value of a product. But agree, it is not for every business!

Thanks for sharing @gay. It seems like your community is really valuable for it's members and their willingness to pay makes them even "stickier" customers. Happy for you! Congratulations on getting to PMF!

If not feee trial - then some limits based usage like Notion. "No free trials" sounds like a luxury item/membership pricing model. Such as your country golf club - no feee trials; only referals and wait lists. Doubt it works for most software unless what are your selling is really access to some exclusive network.

As @Primer said, this is a "works for me, so everyone should do it fallacy". I think if you narrow it down to what @gay is doing with FoundersCafe it makes sense as there's an "exclusivity" aspect to the community. However I still don't think this is good advice for other communities as I probably wouldn't join a community I've never interacted with if I had to pay money up front.

Then again, maybe I'm a low-value community member ;)

I think it really depends on the product itself. Lots of startups give free trials and it seems to work for them. It's probably better to just focus on what the customer wants, if a free trial increase conversions and go from there.

I think it really depends. If you are running a B2B SaaS company where onboarding can potentially be long or it takes a bit longer to see the "value" then a free trial may be a best way to get users actually using the product. Then the name of the game becomes nurturing somebody to become a paid user. But in my opinion, better to nurture a non-paying user than to not have them in your funnel at all.

I would probably amend the statement to "Do not give out free trials indefinitely", or maybe something like "it's free till this much usage - then you gotta pay"

As a customer, a free trial is a great way for me to gauge a product and see whether it fits my requirements. If I had to pay to find that out, I would immediately bounce, even if that product actually could have been a good fit.

So this is a topic we have talked about a lot at WunderGraph. So I have a bit of experience with this.

As a SAAS, you kinda always need a free offering. Free offerings are your hook to your target audience. It's important to offer something for free to users to try out. We Open Sourced WunderGraph and let anyone use it and run it locally. The community we built and the feedback we got was the equivalent of 10K MRR.

But FREE does need lead to sales eventually. If you are a startup or business. The absolute best way to get the most critical feedback is through PAID customers. These customers like your product enough to pay for it. These are the people who get priority support (one of the benefits of a community, is that others help people get support for free), these are the people who get custom features. This is super important because the chances are if someone is willing to pay for a feature, most likely someone else will as well.

We think you should have both. Have a FREE and PAID TIER, and stay strict on what you offer to FREE users and PAID users. Both will help you grow your product to places to places you never thought were possible.

Free trials may not work, but grow with us definitely does. At Notik for example, we have free plans for companies under 10 employees. By the time they are 11 employees they switch to a paid plan but they are happy to stick around because they are used to it and Notik makes them 10x more productive.

No one size fits all I guess.

Hm i don't know Jack... but in some cases a Free Trial ist really nice to have to check if the Product really offers you that what you want.

Btw. What do you Guys think about my Extension (auto-swiper.ch)? Should i stop allowing to Sing Up for a Free Trial on the Premium feature?

I don't think this is a rule of thumb; complex product sometimes needs a trial to experience the product however congratulations to your achievements!

Congratulations on your success. I imagine it is not free trials per-se that are the problem. It is that you attracted the wrong audience to sign up and use the free trials. If you are producing something that students can make good use of for free with no intention of upgrading (or not even a small chance they will) then that is a problem.

Giving out free trials works in most cases provided it's been planned properly. One should know the product offering, target audience, and market conditions well. Know these three things inside out and most of the target audience, it's their behavior that makes or breaks a company's approach.

This is interesting but for some businesses you need a snowball effect. For example marketplaces need both offer and demand. Who would pay to be the first in an empty marketplace?

thanks for sharing

Maybe this could work, but the free trials is everywhere and the industry "trained" me to not even look at software that doesn't have that option. My 2 cents.

Yes, but somehow you need to spread the word... I am giving away trials, not too much, but when I reach out to someone I will offer him free access for a limited time, for his feedback on the product

I think even offering free version is more like a culture in the tech world. This they do probably to have the interest of users and see how best they can make the product be before going fully live.

I believe in simple demo site. See the demo should be enough. If I like how it works then I can buy a month. If it doesn't work then cancel it.
I prefer it better than contact us for a trial. Since I am not yet sure I want to invest in it.

Example: https://matomo.org/ click "live demo" at the top. Would be enough for me.

I don't agree

Good for you in trying all these trial-and-error method. I think it does really depend on the industry and the initiation of the founders to give our their products/service for free in exchange for a review and so on.

I found some brands who started giving our lifetime deals, and getting the most of out the deal. Meanwhile, I totally heard of brands where 'free-offers/packages' doesn't do them justice. :)