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Ask HN: Should you offer a free trial for a software product?

There is an excellent discussion on Hacker News currently about offering customers a money-back guarantee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19085526 If you sell a software product, what do think about offering a free trial period as an alternative (or addition) to a money-back guarantee? How long should a trial period last? Would you offer both a trial period and a money-back guarantee? Or one only, both not both? Here is one (negative) perspective on free trials from the creator of the Nomad List website: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1088660914352484352 Interested to hear you thoughts :-)

vanilla-almond 8y ago
Just to add, the twitter link I posted has changed from public to private and is no longer visible at the time of this message.
ezekg 8y ago
I sell B2B software and I've noticed that lot of the customers that trial my service are developers of a company that want to evaluate it before dealing with all the red tape of contacting the billing department for approval. I don't do a money back guarantee, since I do a nice 14 day free trial. I've had good success with offering an "extended" trial for those in the development phase, with the prerequisite that they add a payment method to their account before I extend their trial (usually, I add 30 days). The initial 14 day trial is usually enough to "evaluate", then the extended trial goes to billing and is approved quickly, since they already know more or less that they'll be using my service. A large percentage of my customers go through the extended trial flow.
- codegeek 8y ago
  What is the conversion rate on those ? Just curious as I have similar challenges with my B2B software.
SmushyTaco 8y ago
I don't think free trials by themselves are a viable solution for you or the user since you wouldn't profit and the user would only have your product for a limited amount of time. A solution could be they could get your product ad free for a week and after a week passes ads would display on your software so you could profit and in order to remove these ads the user would have to pay a one-time fee to do so. You could also provide a add-on store where other developers could make add-ons for your product and also them and you could take a cut of the profits.

vanilla-almond 8y ago

Just to add, the twitter link I posted has changed from public to private and is no longer visible at the time of this message.

ezekg 8y ago

I sell B2B software and I've noticed that lot of the customers that trial my service are developers of a company that want to evaluate it before dealing with all the red tape of contacting the billing department for approval. I don't do a money back guarantee, since I do a nice 14 day free trial. I've had good success with offering an "extended" trial for those in the development phase, with the prerequisite that they add a payment method to their account before I extend their trial (usually, I add 30 days). The initial 14 day trial is usually enough to "evaluate", then the extended trial goes to billing and is approved quickly, since they already know more or less that they'll be using my service. A large percentage of my customers go through the extended trial flow.

codegeek 8y ago
What is the conversion rate on those ? Just curious as I have similar challenges with my B2B software.

SmushyTaco 8y ago

I don't think free trials by themselves are a viable solution for you or the user since you wouldn't profit and the user would only have your product for a limited amount of time. A solution could be they could get your product ad free for a week and after a week passes ads would display on your software so you could profit and in order to remove these ads the user would have to pay a one-time fee to do so. You could also provide a add-on store where other developers could make add-ons for your product and also them and you could take a cut of the profits.