Free Trial

A free trial gives a prospective customer full or near-full access to a product for a fixed period, after which access ends unless they convert to a paid plan. It is the dominant acquisition model in self-serve SaaS because it moves the buying decision from a claim the vendor makes to an experience the user has, which is a much shorter argument. The main design choices are length, whether a credit card is required up front, and how much of the product the trial exposes. Length should follow the product's natural evaluation cycle rather than convention. Fourteen days is a default rather than an answer: a tool used daily can be judged in a week, while one tied to a monthly close or a reporting cadence cannot be evaluated at all inside fourteen days, and a trial shorter than the cycle it serves guarantees a decision made without the evidence that would have justified it. Requiring a card up front raises conversion rate and lowers trial volume, because it filters for intent before the product has demonstrated anything; leaving it out does the reverse. Neither is correct in general, and the two produce numbers that cannot be compared — a card-required funnel and a card-free funnel measure different populations, so a conversion rate quoted without that context says very little. What actually determines outcomes is what happens in the first session. Trials are decided by activation, not by expiry: a user who reaches a meaningful outcome early converts at a rate that dwarfs anything a reminder email can recover, and a user who never sets the product up is not persuadable by the fourteenth day. This is why the productive work is almost always in onboarding rather than in trial mechanics, and why extending trials rarely lifts conversion — the users who did not activate simply have more days in which not to activate. The reverse trial, where a user starts on a paid tier and drops to a free plan rather than to nothing at expiry, exists to keep that relationship alive. Practical note: instrument the trial as a funnel from signup to activation to conversion, and segment conversion by whether the activation milestone was hit rather than by acquisition channel — that single cut usually explains more of the variance than anything else you can measure.