Software Growth

Free trial

A free trial gives new users full or partial access to a paid product for a limited time, with or without a credit card, before they must pay or leave.

A free trial lets a prospect use your paid product for a fixed period, usually 7 to 30 days, before they have to subscribe. It is the default for self-serve SaaS because it lets the product do the selling, and because the deadline creates a reason to decide.

Opt-in vs opt-out trials

The big design choice is whether you ask for a credit card up front.

  • Opt-in trial: no card required. Signup is easier, so you get more trials, but a smaller share convert because the user has made no commitment.
  • Opt-out trial: card required, and the user is charged automatically when the trial ends unless they cancel. You get fewer signups but a much higher conversion rate among those who start. Expect more refund requests, chargebacks and angry emails from people who forgot to cancel.

Neither is right everywhere. Compare paying customers per 1,000 visitors, not the conversion rate alone, because the two models change the denominator.

How to measure it

If 400 people start a trial in a month and 60 subscribe, your trial-to-paid rate is 15%. At a $39 plan that is $2,340 of new MRR. Track this as a trial conversion rate, and split it by acquisition channel, since visitors from a Google search behave differently from people sent by a friend.

What good looks like

In Lenny Rachitsky's survey of more than 1,000 B2B SaaS products, free trial products converted at 8 to 12% for "good" and 15 to 25% for "great" (source). Treat that as a range to sanity-check against, not a target. Price and audience move it a lot.

How long should a trial be?

Match it to time to value. If a user can reach the point where the product is useful in one session, 7 days is plenty. If they have to import data, invite teammates or wait for results to accumulate, you need 14 to 30 days or the trial ends before they see anything. Elena Verna's examples of trials in the wild include Airtable at 14 days and Asana at 30 days (source). A longer trial rarely fixes a weak first session. Fix onboarding first.

Common mistakes

  • Starting the clock before the user has done anything. Some products start the trial on first meaningful action instead of signup.
  • Offering no way to extend. A "need more time" button that grants 7 more days to engaged users is cheap and works.
  • Dead-ending at expiry. If you want a softer landing, look at a reverse trial or a limited free plan (freemium).

Rob Walling's default advice for bootstrappers is a time-limited trial over freemium because the deadline forces a decision without leaving a pile of free users to support.

Sources

Back to the SaaS glossary