Software Growth

Trial conversion rate

Trial conversion rate is the percentage of free trial users who become paying customers, and it depends heavily on whether your trial asks for a credit card.

Trial conversion rate tells you how many people who tried your product decided to pay for it. It is the most direct measure of whether your trial, your product and your price work together. For a self-serve SaaS it is often the single biggest driver of growth.

How to calculate trial conversion rate

Only count trials that have had time to finish. Example: 240 people start a 14-day trial in May and 48 are paying by the end of the trial window.

At a $40 monthly plan, those 48 customers add $1,920 in new MRR from that cohort.

Opt-in versus opt-out trials

  • Opt-in (no card): the user signs up freely and chooses to pay at the end. Most SaaS use this model.
  • Opt-out (card required): the user enters a card up front and is charged automatically unless they cancel.

Flint's analysis reports that about 68% of companies use opt-in and 12% opt-out, with opt-in trials converting around 18.2%. Opt-out trials converted at a higher rate and generated about 10.5 paying customers per 1,000 visitors against 3.6 for no-card trials, because fewer people start but more of those convert. Powered by Search cites a Totango study in which requiring a card cut visitor-to-trial conversion from 10% to 2%. So opt-out gives you fewer, better-qualified trials. Which is right depends on how many leads you can afford to waste and how much you want volume for feedback. Card-required trials can also cause a spike of refund requests and unhappy cancellations if the billing step is not clear.

What good looks like

Flint reports a median trial-to-paid rate of 18.5% across B2B SaaS companies and 35 to 45% for top performers. It also finds shorter trials converting better (24% median at 7 days, 19% at 14 days, 14% at 30 days), likely due to urgency. A caution: these are vendor datasets with different definitions, so use them to sanity-check, not to set targets.

How to improve it

  • Raise activation first. Flint finds users who complete key activation actions convert at 3 to 5 times the rate of those who do not.
  • Make onboarding fast so value arrives before the trial ends.
  • Send reminders as the trial ends, tied to what the user did.
  • Talk to trial users who did not convert. Their reasons are usually specific and fixable.

A reverse trial starts users on a paid plan and drops them to free. Freemium converts at much lower rates but has no clock. For small SaaS, test one trial length and one change at a time, and keep a record, since you have few trials to learn from.

Sources

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