Hello Entrepreneurs, this message is aimed at second-time founders.
I came across a tweet on X yesterday where the author mentioned that maintaining free trials was expensive and had almost a 0% conversion rate.
There are many factors at play, but the most obvious one is human nature.
When you offer a free trial for a good product, two types of users emerge:
- Those who genuinely need it and are willing to pay.
- Those who need it but prefer not to pay.
The first group will likely use the trial and subscribe afterward, while the second group often resorts to disposable email addresses.
A personal example:
Have you heard of Adobe Podcast Enhance? I needed to edit about 6 hours of audio, so I tried their service, which only allowed 30 minutes before requiring a subscription. To get around this, I split the audio into 30-minute segments and created over 50 temporary accounts.
It’s not ideal, but it’s a common workaround.
To combat this, consider the following:
- Block temporary email addresses during signup.
- Limit sign-ups to social logins (like Google or GitHub).
- Require a credit card before proceeding.
- Collect phone numbers during signup.
If you’re experiencing high traffic but low conversions, along with rising costs for free trials, remember that it’s often just people behaving like people, not necessarily bots.
What is the general consensus regarding users’ willingness to provide their phone numbers? Technically, wouldn’t it be quicker for a person to enter a fictitious number than to set up a temporary email account?
This is my issue with the free trial. It has a time limit. The majority of free trials need you to link a credit card.
Thank you not at all. It turns me off right away, and I’ll look for another product that doesn’t do any of these things and has an indefinite free tier that I can try out and assess in due course.
Yes, it appears that “free, no CC” is popular right now on Google.
Although I personally object to services that demand it in before, it’s a terrific way to distinguish between people who are sincere and those who aren’t
I began by providing basic 7/14/30 day free trial models for my SaaS business. The percentage of “free-loaders” who became paying customers was incredibly low. However, I discovered that I was pursuing free trial cheats nonstop.
I changed the free trial for all but one of my items to a very inexpensive “try us” plan ($9 or $10). It is believed that users are unlikely to subscribe if they cannot afford to spend $10 on our service to test it out.
Our conversion rate to paying users did not decrease after switching to this starter plan, but the expenses we incurred from monitoring and pursuing cheaters were eliminated.
I’d want to provide a risk-free trial to my users. But it’s ruined for everyone by a few cheaters.
If you want to justify not offering a free trial, you better have something incredibly unique and clear for the user to receive. In my estimation, this would be poor counsel 95% of the time.
Individuals use several Google accounts. People are just not interested in paying for software. Even having an email address shouldn’t be free if it were just up to me. It’s terrible that people feel that they should have unrestricted access to software, believe that it should be free to use, and even oppose the sale of their personal information.
This is another topic where the answer varies and shouldn’t be taken as absolute.
I have a B2C app that had very few conversions from its free trial. It’s the type of app that users install once to solve a specific problem, then uninstall afterward. Many users tend to find ways to work around the limitations of the free tier.
In contrast, I have a B2B app that is used daily by a specific niche of businesses. The free trials for this app have a high conversion rate because it’s not practical to sign up the entire team for a new free trial every few weeks.