Solo, B2B-ish tool, about 40 signups a month from search and one newsletter. I do not do demos and I do not want to start.
Right now it is free with a paid upgrade nobody clicks. I am rewriting the whole signup flow anyway so this is the moment to pick something. Card up front for 14 days, or keep a free tier and make the paid plan more obviously better?
Opposite view, with a condition. Free tier is right when the product gets better with other people in it, or when the value is not visible inside two weeks. A tool where you import data on day one and see the point on day two is a trial product. A tool where the value shows up on the fourth invoice or the second project is not, and a 14-day clock will just make people fail at it.
Which one are you?
Also 14 days is arbitrary. Tie the trial to usage instead - first 100 tasks, or first project completed - so somebody who signs up and then goes on holiday still gets a real trial when they come back. Calendar trials mostly measure whether someone was busy that fortnight.
Reverse trial. Everything unlocked for 14 days, then instead of a wall it drops to a small free plan. You keep the account, the data and the email address, and you keep the option to convert them in month four when their situation changes. A hard wall throws away everyone who was almost ready.
With no sales calls the trial has to do the selling, which means the email sequence is not optional. Day 0 that gets them to the first real action, day 3 that shows them the second thing, day 12 that says specifically what they lose tomorrow. Not "your trial is ending", but "your 4 projects go read-only on Thursday".
I have seen that one email move conversion more than any pricing change.
Skip the trial entirely. Charge from day one with a 30-day money-back promise. Same effect, none of the trial-expiry plumbing.
Not the same effect. A refund promise does not remove the purchase decision, it just moves the regret later. You lose people at the top of the funnel where the decision is made, and a refund guarantee does not help there because they have to believe you first. Trials work because the decision is deferred, not because the risk is.
Whichever you choose, do not change it again in six weeks. At 40 signups a month you need at least two full cohorts through the whole thing before any number means anything, and that is a quarter.
@epsilon_eddie · 2w ago · 2 replies
Card up front, given your numbers. At 40 signups a month you cannot afford to carry a support load of people who were never going to pay, and more importantly you need to know within two weeks whether this thing is worth money to a stranger.
The arithmetic people get wrong: card up front will cut your trial starts, often by half or more. That feels terrible. But conversion from trial to paid goes up dramatically because everyone in the funnel has already made the payment decision. Twenty trials converting at 50% beats forty converting at 8% and it also beats it on support hours.
If you keep any free thing at all, make it a demo or a sample, not an account.
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@aquariumdad · 2w ago
The benefit nobody mentions: people who put in a card write better bug reports. They have skin in it, so instead of leaving they email you.
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