13 ms·

A fourteen-day free trial ain’t gonna cut it

377 points by ezekg 2y ago

bilater 2y ago
Depends on the industry I guess but in my experience customers trying to nickel and dime you / concerned about free trials are not the ones you want.
arnon 2y ago
I made a beeline to the median, because funnily enough my median for other B2B SaaS was also 41. I feel vindicated! For consumer stuff my experience was closer to 25, but for businesses it was 41.
- seurimas 2y ago
  Interesting! 25 business days for a business is close to 41 calendar days, too. I wonder if there's some sort of common, human constant involved. 25 days of engaging with something to decide whether that something is worth keeping around. Maybe the median relationship length is 25 days, too...
PaulHoule 2y ago
As a software dev I can say this is so true. A 14-day free trial is not free, it costs your time. It takes a serious block of time to evaluate any product or service, maybe a few days. If I put a few days into an open source product and I like it I can just use it. If it is a paid product I'm going to have to go to my management, it might be easy or it might be hard, but I have to discount the gains from "I found a product I like" by the probability that "we won't buy it anyway" so that makes me all the more hesitant to complete a trial.
- garciasn 2y ago
  My team is responsible for the research, evaluation, approval, integration, and on-going support for each and every single platform that is within our stack. We have a lengthy standardized process for evaluation/scoring/approval and one of our mandates is a minimum of 30 days, no payment, and no Sharewaresque limitation in functionality. If we cannot get 30 days, it's a simple 'no,' and we move on to the next. Even at 30 days, it's extremely stressful on the team to get the system up and running, ingest our test case data, and run our tests. This is after going through this process >100 times. There's simply no way to get everything that needs to be done with an evaluation of even basic coverage in less than 30. Full stop. Lack of adequate understanding of the potential challenges an org is going to face during implementation and use is, IMO, the single biggest reason implementations run WAY OVER budget, time, and eventually fail at integration w/the rest of the org. This is entirely ignoring the required change management, which is another beast entirely.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    It sounds like you're bragging about a dysfunctional way of working. If what your team is doing is valuable they should get any tools they like without much questions. Just like in any reasonable workplace. Because workers produce more and better when they have better tools. You can also just buy the software to evaluate it. This way you have unlimited time to see if it fits or not. That's what people do in other industries.
    - kfarr 2y ago
      Yeah it is a bit odd to say that the #1 requirement is that the software be free for 30 days, that would disqualify a bunch of critical infrastructure.
      - p_l 2y ago
        A lot of multiple thousand dollars per seat software will offer evaluation licenses, for various lengths of time, sometimes way longer than 30 days.
    - dijit 2y ago
      Theres a quick fall-off. Sourcegraph is $99/u/m and has major network effects. For a moderately sized org this is quickly an entire developer salary. Snyk is similarly priced, unfortunately “just buy” is a really easy way to: a) pay more than something is woth b) have multiple products doing the same thing. (for example, I have Miro and figjam and Mural in my company because each do something slightly better and teams have chosen the tools that work best). That means we often double pay on licenses for ostensibly similar software.
      - sqs 2y ago
        Sourcegraph CEO here. It’s not $99/user/month anymore. It’s great that a lot of companies were willing to pay that, but we and our customers prefer a lower per-user price and a higher % of devs at the company using it (ideally 100%). We reduced prices for our customers (current and future). You can see the posted pricing at https://sourcegraph.com/pricing https://sourcegraph.com/pricing. For any other dev tools companies, I’d strongly recommend having lower prices so that every dev at your customer can use it (if that’s relevant for your product). If you start seeing customers be really picky with who gets a license, it’s probably priced too high.
- dylan604 2y ago
  In my experience, I've only looked at new software when the text on the box says that it'll solve an issue we currently have, dramatically improve existing workflows, or specifically asked by someone else. If you're concerned about time, then maybe you (or your company) are doing it wrong. Depending on the size of your company, there should be a team of people assigned time to specifically evaluate theNewShiny whatever. If the product does not do what is advertised on the tin, then drop it and move on. If it does work as advertised, the team then evaluates next steps in how to utilize it. In this way, that research is already "budgeted" into employee's time.
- gregmac 2y ago
  And the time to evaluate for something you're releasing (vs staying in your control on SaaS) is significantly higher. Things that lock you in, especially between your released software and hosted services -- like authentication, installers/auto-update, and licensing (keygen) -- are even higher than that. It's just really hard to "undo" these things, both technically and because of the optics (user experience). Requiring your users to re-license their software is friction -- it burns user trust and costs a lot of time in support. 14 days is just too short to evaluate if the product will even meet your needs, let alone evaluate how much lock-in there is and what the path away could look like.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Sounds like you need a first filter, and then only do your evaluation process on a given product if it solves a major pain point and even in that case, just evaluate the best/most common product in that category and only if it clearly doesn't work test another product. You are not going to win as a startup by using Teams, even if it is cheaper than Slack+Zoom, you are going to win big or not at all and focusing on things that don't matter for the core success just means less time to make something people want.
- dangus 2y ago
  Implementers failing to prioritize doing some legwork during the free trial period also costs time for the sales organization of the selling party. From the sales side, if we see the prospect the finding a solution is a low enough priority that their engineers can’t spend time in two weeks to simply look at a solution, then they might not be an ideal fit for the product (they don’t enough business pain, don’t have a champion, and/or don’t have an economic buyer to prioritize the purchase of a solution). This is of course highly dependent on the nature of the software and the ideal customer profile of that solution, but the fact that there’s two sides of this coin is something to keep in mind.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    In many orgs, pain points are subtle, product evaluations happen on the back burner, and internal consensus on pulling the trigger might take months. These firms are left on the table by a demo/sales process that can only afford them two weeks. And a trial need not take many sales resources. We can automate that with a demo download and self serve documentation. If it's an on prem demo, a 2 week or 12 week trial costs us the same - it's just a sign up and download. We don't actually need a sales rep to prod them about buying - the demo countdown does that, for people actually gaining value from the demo. Let's acknowledge the article's evidence that longer trials can convert customers with lower pain points. Secure customers like to evaluate things without pressure. And they might be the majority of customers. Let's enable this by building sales resilience, engineering the infrastructure painlessly delivery a longer trial that takes near zero sales or production effort.
    - dangus 2y ago
      I would argue that the companies you describe are poor fits who are likely to churn. Even if your sales team spends zero time on them they are the kind of customer that will end up losing money for the company. This whole thought process is how we get money-losing companies with revenue growth rather than sustainable businesses. The focus is on closing as many deals as possible rather than selectively engaging with the most profitable customer use cases.
    - deleted 2y ago
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  From the ops side my situation's similar. The more so as the team is often small (one-person ops teams are probably the norm, at least by number of establishments), and workload is often already overwhelming. New technology and/or products always come with unanticipated consequences and downsides. Expecting to make a decision on a major, or even minor tool isn't something that can be rushed. One model I'd noted as innovative at the time was for a SAAS company to offer a free tier of service, in the case in mind, with limited data retention of a monitoring tool. That struck me as an exceedingly good way to balance the power of the tool (all other features were otherwise available), whilst also providing a clear and reasonable upgrade path to a paid subscription. When that company IPO'd and revealed its CoS (cost of sales), I was surprised to see how high it remained (on the order of 40--50% of revenues). Selling (and buying) complex information goods is hard, whether that's software, services, consulting, news, or anything else. There's a copious literature on the production side addressing the zero marginal cost / high fixed costs predicament. There's less on the buy side, though Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" addresses this in part. Reducing uncertainty, increasing knowledge, and mitigating purchaser risk without needlessly offsetting revenues seem key to the issue.
alexcaza 2y ago
Nice write-up! This is a great example of throwing out "best practices" and being truly user/product-centred. Even down to your trial strategy. It reminds me of YNAB's trial[^1] strategy of offering 34 days. It gives folks just enough time with their app and process. I wish YNAB's trial extended to ~60 days since my "ah ha!" moment was only around then. That's another conversation, though. ^1: https://www.ynab.com/sign-up https://www.ynab.com/sign-up
- Suppafly 2y ago
  I imagine 34 days is so that you have enough to budget around an entire month. Would be shitty to setup a budget and not be able to follow it for a whole month.
  - alexcaza 2y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Their whole thing is to get ~30 days ahead, too. I think 60–90 days would be a better hook and almost guarantee an "ah ha" moment. Everyone I've spoken to that's had YANB "click" was in that time frame, myself included. I wish I could see how a trial length change would affect their conversions.
simonsarris 2y ago
I sell a JS/TS graphing library, so B2B, developer-to-developer. We decided to just have an indefinite trial period (library has a watermark) and instead offer 30 days of free support. That way we can help people get started and realize their proof of concept, but if they want to start evaluating on their own time they can do so without worrying about any clock. This makes it much easier for customers who are trying to evaluate multiple options at once.
- go_prodev 2y ago
  I'm always exploring new graphing libraries. Are you happy to share a link to yours?
  - martincmartin 2y ago
    If you click on their username, it takes you to their profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris which says: I make GoJS, a powerful canvas-based diagramming library: http://gojs.net/ http://gojs.net/ Which is not what I think of a graphing (time series, x-y points joined by lines), but otherwise seems relevant to their comment.
    - simonsarris 2y ago
      Thank you. I guess I should update that, since GoJS renders to SVG also if that's what you prefer (at a cost to performance of course) Most of us who make such libraries tend to distinguish charting (time series, lines, bars) from graphing (nodes and links). Charting is, in many aspects, a much smaller problem space. Graphing requires a lot more in terms of layouts and interaction tools, grid snapping, guides, undo/redo, copy/paste, grouping, subgraphs, managing user permissions for interactivity, expand/collapse (both subgraphs and tree sections), updating the backing data when the graph is edited, etc.
      - seankurtz 2y ago
        [dead]
nick7376182 2y ago
I wonder if for a larger consumer product this would not work, as word gets around they can stay free for a long time. Though it seems to work for a lot of community software like makeMKV.
TillE 2y ago
Time limited trials are always a feels-bad moment for me, an extra deadline I now have to plan around. Another option I like is providing some amount of free credit that doesn't expire. So you're not on the hook for providing a "free tier" forever, but users can play around with your service at their own pace.
- kevincox 2y ago
  This is what I am doing (business to consumer) and I am quite happy with it. I am maybe a bit too generous with the free credits (many people can use the service lightly for over a year on the trial) but I like that they get the exact experience as if they were paying and they can pause and resume their trial with no extra complexity on my end. Just sign up and you get some starting credits. Then you can just buy more as you need them. I think it makes things simpler and avoids any sort of pressure.
  - gregmac 2y ago
    This would work for B2B as well. Sometimes there's a shifting business priority, and guess which wins when the choice is "important customer X is on fire" vs "our developer trial for wizbang component xyz is going to expire in 8 days".
- cableshaft 2y ago
  I also don't mind something like '30 days' or '60 days', but it only counts the days when you open the application. Like a few weeks ago I was motivated to learn some music production software, so I downloaded a few trial versions. I worked on it heavily for a few days, but then got busy with other things, and now that 30 day trial or whatever is coming up to an end, but I still don't feel like I've had a chance to decide if it works for me, because I haven't been actively using it that long yet still. I do plan to go back to it, just maybe not for another week or two. But if it only counted the days I opened the application, I'd still have like 26 'days' left to evaluate them (they might, I haven't checked), and it'd be no big deal, and I wouldn't have to feel all stressed out because I'm 'wasting' the demo time by actually having a life and maybe badly timing when to trigger the trial period.
nikolajan 2y ago
I get the sense that a 2 month trial would have been a better option (41 days + buffer). It provides clients with the required amount of time to get up and running while also time boxing them and applying some pressure on them to commit. An unlimited free trial falls into the same trap of customers leaving until they're "ready" to integrate, time boxing it sort of forces them to commit to the integration at some point.
- ezekg 2y ago
  I don't think it would make a considerable difference. Not mentioned in the post, but I have a limited unlimited free trial. Taking into account the usage limits, it's not useful for a production deployment so it applies pressure once integrated. That way I only apply pressure to those that actually integrated. If I were to do a timed trial again, it'd apply pressure to evaluate and plan the integration right now, and the product may not even be at the stage where they're ready to do that yet i.e. still in dev. This needlessly applies friction, which I want to avoid doing until they're ready.
- mason55 2y ago
  I could certainly be abnormal, but I'm much more likely to sign up for something that has a real free tier. There's honestly very little difference to me between 60-day free trial and just having to pay from the start, I know that once I do the work to integrate then I'm committing to having to pay. At least for a startup with little revenue and little cash, 60 days is just too soon to commit to having to pay, unless it's like $10/mo. What's worked better for me is the "startup scholarship" that a lot of companies are doing now. A year is far enough away that we'll either be out of business or have the cash to pay, and I don't need to worry that I'm getting my money's worth by the time the 60-day trial ends. I'm a big fan of Posthog right now because they have both a generous free tier & a generous startup scholarship. I've moved a ton of stuff to their platform. A lot of it probably depends on your product though. If you're solving a very targeted problem then you might not be able to create a reasonable free tier. But a lot of B2B tech stuff is like... sure you can charge a bunch of users $5 apiece, but you risk missing the signup of the one user that was going to pay you $10k. Anything with usage-based pricing is going to have Pareto distributed revenue and you need to do everything you can to make sure you're capturing those customers on the tail.
ang_cire 2y ago
It seems obvious that the conversion rate was higher among people who wanted extensions, because the people who don't are the ones who already decided not to use it; rarely are people going to turn down more free time to use something and rush to ask to be allowed to pay for it (though it does happen- I've been part of procurements that were being rushed to use an existing FY budget, for instance). Another thing you need to work out, imo, is what level of *feature use* in your application best maps to conversions, and from there, how can you improve the likelihood of people seeing the benefits of that feature use. As an example, my current company's app can be used with or without agent deployments, and we saw that trials that deployed agents- even just one-off ones in lab envs- converted at a far higher rate than non-agent trials. So we worked to lower the perceived barrier of entry that agent deployments posed, which meant more people seeing the increased usefulness they provided, which meant more conversions.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  > It seems obvious that the conversion rate was higher among people who wanted extensions, because the people who don't are the ones who already decided not to use it Yeah, exactly! Those two groups are not the same, there's an obvious selection effect there.
- ezekg 2y ago
  I think you misunderstood, or maybe I wasn't clear in my post. This wasn't an experiment on 2 separate groups; this was an experiment on the same group: those that convert from trial to paid. When I did X, conversion rate for the entire group increased, i.e. I made more money. If I stopped X, I'd make less money. That then lead me to the point of the post -- the % difference in conversion rate were the people who weren't actually ready but signed up for a trial anyways, only to run out of time and never come back.
  - ang_cire 2y ago
    Ok, I think I see what you're getting at: You're assuming that the percentage increase in conversions after you extended or removed the trial timeout period across the board corresponds to users who previously would have been kicked out by the trial expiry before they could see the value in converting. My comment was referring to the period you mentioned where you were offering people manual extensions, and you noted that you saw more conversions among that group than among users who didn't extend their trials.
7thaccount 2y ago
Even 30 days is useless for me with my schedule on some items. Some of the optimization solvers are annoying that way if you're trying to get a proof of concept together to get management buy-in, but it'll take a lot of development to get there. You can use one of the generic libraries that abstracts away the solver (where you can plug most vendors in) and start with an open source option, but it's an annoying approach if I think there's a strong chance we'll end up with a particular vendor as I'd want to use their native API and avoid the additional abstraction layer. I totally understand why it makes sense to the business, it's just hard to work it in to my schedule. Another thing for these companies to think about is a potential customer is investing their own time in learning your product. They may not act on it right away, but I've been in situations where we had an "oh crap" moment and I was able to say go get product X, I know it works on our data sets and already have example scripts for how we can use it and the vendor indicated a price of Y last year which is like 1/5 the cost this other vendor just quoted you to start implementing this from scratch. Allowing employees some creativity to scratch that itch seems to constantly pay off in my experience as long as they're still being successful at their main job.
kuschkufan 2y ago
OT, but your HTML is not valid. <!DOCTYPE> is declared twice.
5350-uiop-1130 2y ago
a software i paid for 10 years ago recently got bought by another company. they immediately added bs "features" like dark theme, changed to subscription model with 1 year sub price 3x what i paid to buy it outright, and reduced trial from 30 to 12 days piracy is the only true form of digital ownership.
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Me and Adobe right there. They want me to pay a subscription, but as long as Windows will still open CS6, I'll keep using it. It still gets the job done for me, even though I wouldn't mind some of the newer features (some of my annoyances I know they've improved in the new version) and probably would have paid for an upgrade by now if it wasn't all subscription models now. And hopefully by the time it stops working, another non-subscription option for Illustrator that I don't hate will be available.
  - EricE 2y ago
    A great list of alternatives has been floating around on Twitter after their AI debacle: https://twitter.com/WayneTalbot/status/1786703024330588237 https://twitter.com/WayneTalbot/status/1786703024330588237 I really enjoy the Affinity tools; they more than meet my modest requirements.
    - sib 2y ago
      >> I really enjoy the Affinity tools; they more than meet my modest requirements. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-release/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
    - cableshaft 2y ago
      I didn't like Affinity or Inkscape when I tried them (I even bought Affinity on a sale in order to try it, so I own it). Affinity also had issues importing my CS6 Illustrator files, IIRC, and since I have hundreds of those for various board game designs of mine that I still go back to and rework when I have a new idea for them, the fact that it couldn't play nice with them made it pretty much a nonstarter. It's been a while since I've used Inkscape, but I remember it feeling clunky and buggy for me, and I had difficulty getting into the workflow. I'm sure I could probably force myself to get used to, and probably enjoy alternatives, but the more I invest in these proprietary alternatives, the harder it will be to shift anything back to Illustrator if I need to, especially since I don't think any of them bother to output to a CS6 friendly file format anymore, so I can shift to them, but I can't easily shift out of them. And at this point Illustrator CS6 is just dead simple for me, I don't have to think about where anything is, I know exactly what I need to do for like 98% of what I want to do on it, and most of it is muscle memory, I can whip up some cards in a few hours while watching TV shows in the background. It's going to take something significant (like it no longer working) to motivate me enough to upgrade. I know I'm playing with fire a bit, since these files are getting more and more out of date, and may not import nicely into even the subscription Adobe Illustrator at some point, but I already have too much other shit I have to learn all the time for my day job, I don't have much left outside of that (maybe eventually I will. I am starting to learn Logic Pro and Ableton Live for making music finally, and for the longest time I only used FLStudio). That's a cool graphic though. I'll download it for future reference. Also it'll be easier for me to convert for other Adobe products, like I mostly use Paint.NET instead of Photoshop nowadays, for example. Illustrator is the main one I feel I have to stick with. Also Flash, since it doesn't exist in any newer ones (I used to make Flash games, so if I want to open those FLA files again, I need it).
egberts1 2y ago
Two months and they're hooked ... or not.
- ProllyInfamous 2y ago
  I'd say this is about correct... my new Toyota came with 3 months of free satelite radio, and it was at about 2 months casual usage that I decided "I'm going to actually sign up" [after having enough time to explore multiple channels]. Had it only been "1 month free" I would not have explored enough to sign up.
glonq 2y ago
Just last week, I abandoned a 7-day trial of some project management software because it was not enough time for me to feel comfy with it. Would have preferred a week or two more, even if features were somehow nerfed (watermarks, etc).
batterylow 2y ago
I run a plotting/visualization library. Instead of a time-limited trial, we have just one of the plot types (Sankey) freely available indefinitely (https://plotapi.com/page/sankey/ https://plotapi.com/page/sankey/). We tried a time-limited trial, and we just ended up with people re-registering new accounts every 2 weeks.
semireg 2y ago
I develop barcode and label design software. My app is immediately usable after download, but it will print a watermark when not licensed. Users can start a 14 day free trial to remove the watermark. Since it’s a desktop app, each trial is locked to that one computer. I can keep track of which computers register for a trial and limit the duration for subsequent re-registrations. It’s all based on JWT.
- MPlus88 2y ago
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jt2190 2y ago
The author does a really good job of describing the tension between the customer’s readiness and the vendor’s need to move leads through the pipeline as fast as possible: > What I was really asking potential customers to do was wait. > Wait until they're ready to start understanding the API. > Wait until they're ready to go through onboarding. > Wait until the PoC is planned. > … > What ends up happening is that people get busy and they end up seeing that 14 day deadline, determine that they're not ready yet, so they bounce until they are ready, but then they never come back. > I decided that I needed to remove that friction. I wanted to capture these leads as soon as they decide Keygen may be the solution for them. So ultimately, I can start nurturing these leads. I’d love to hear more about what “nurturing” looks like.
kennykning 2y ago
great post! off to calculate TTC for my company right now..
dangus 2y ago
In B2B sales something that can happen with extension of free trials is that companies doing window shopping, doing competitive analysis, or who aren’t motivated to find a solution to an immediate need (don’t fit the ideal customer profile) and essentially don’t intend to buy will do half-hearted integration and extend trials. It’s a runaround which ends up costing your sales organization valuable time and effort. Usually it’s just a matter of the implementers on the prospect side not prioritizing the effort. A free trial should usually be followed by a proof of value where both parties are committed to implementing the solution in a realistic way with the expectation of a signed contract if the proof of value delivers on the customer requirements. This could be something to be careful of if that applies to you.
jessriedel 2y ago
> You may be thinking — what does this have to do with time-to-convert? > We'll get there. Just FYI, I consider this tease-based writing to be reader-hostile, the prose equivalent of clickbait. It's the surest way to get me to quit reading.
- ropejumper 2y ago
  Have you read the article? It's not clickbait, it literally goes on to explain it, and it's only a couple paragraphs. I honestly don't see the issue, and the fact that the author acknowledged a potential question is IMO a good thing.
  - jessriedel 2y ago
    If this were really the justification, there are almost always better ways to do it. ("If you're wondering about X, see section N". Or just link to it.) Like other dark patterns, there times when this sort of thing can make sense, but in practice it's usually done (consciously or not) to get the reader to read more than they would otherwise.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  I don't think so. The author is acknowledging that there is a very obvious question they need to answer and doesn't want to leave the reader in doubt about whether they will answer it, but wants to finish making a different point first. It's almost the opposite of reader-hostile.
- Gbox4 2y ago
  I disagree. I feel like this is something they teach you to do in composition classes - i.e. a hook.
  - jessriedel 2y ago
    There are all sorts of things taught in composition class that do not promote learning/understanding
alkonaut 2y ago
Don’t do limited time trials. Please. A limited trial means I’m going to have a worse dev experience with deadlines, activation or loss of functionality. Having a time limited trial or even a requirement to submit an email in order to try something is a big turnoff when evaluating a product. Just make the product free for non commercial use (including a trial in a commercial setting). If I need support or want to buy something please let me contact support or sales. I don’t want an automated email from Jeff at Randomcorp asking me how my trial is going. If a trial has to take 30 days or 365, just let me finish.
youcantcook 2y ago
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aidenn0 2y ago
I wonder how a free-tier compares to a 6- or 12-month free trial period.
999900000999 2y ago
Rate limit free users. If I sign up on Monday, I might not even look at the API docs until Friday. Assume the week after that I personally like it, if I'm at a bigger company I'm probably going to spend a month or two just getting approval to expense it.
- ezekg 2y ago
  Agreed. I have usage limits (e.g. 100 active users), as well as a hard limit of 2k API requests a day for the free tier. This provides freedom i.r.t. PoCs but restricts production usage.
  - liotier 2y ago
    And if the user indefinitely uses the service within the free tier, they are not the target customer anyway - so count the infinitesimal usage as evangelization !
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
Hey SaaS. Here's what I want from you (re: sign-ups): 1. Show me your price, with multiple pricing tiers. The more tiers you have, the more likely I am going to pick one of them, because I will think "well this lower tier is quite the deal compared to the higher tiers!". If I am an Enterprise customer, I will disregard you as an option if I can't see a price. Don't even show me the tier at all if you aren't going to show me your price. I get immediately incensed when I see that "Contact us for pricing!" bullshit, because I know how much bullshit I am in for if I just want to get a quote, so I look for somebody else. I want to use your product right now. But I'm not going to use it if I think it will be painful to work with your company, or that you might have exorbitant pricing, or you're just looking for whales. Don't make me discount you. 2. Let me use your product, immediately. Let me run it from my laptop immediately. Let me spin up a PoC. Show me your complete reference docs immediately. Show me a toy implementation w/source. I want to know if this will [eventually] give me what I want, within 15 minutes. Do that and you will already have gone above and beyond 95% of SaaS (in my mind). 3. Let me have gradient pricing. Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0, for 5 users. Send me an e-mail when I have 7 users, informing me that I have 30 days to either reduce the number of users to 5, or it will automatically upgrade my account and charge me more (or make me confirm, or whatever). Same for the next tier, etc. (or 'pre-purchase' discounts vs 'on-demand' overage cost, etc) This gives me flexibility: I know our workflows won't just stop working when we hit a limit, and I can acquiesce to the new price or clean up old users. 4. Let me start using your product without a card on file. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right corporate person with the right corp card (if they even let me use a corp card, rather than invoicing). If you really need a card, give me 15-30 days, and then pause my account if you have to. The point is to let me get "hooked" on your product without needing to figure out which card to use first. (It goes without saying that when the card expires or a charge doesn't go through, give me 30 days to resolve it, because usually the corp card has hit its limit)
- nlh 2y ago
  So it's interesting. Everything you ask for here is something I, personally, as an independent wanna-get-my-hands-dirty nerd, would ask for too. I totally get where you're coming from. But the thing is - the reason large companies often don't give folks like you and me these things is becuase there are proven reasons to do the contrary that actually end up making them more money. It sucks, but it's reality. 1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website. 2. Offering immediate free trials where you can jump in right away is the ideal world for nerds -- again, I love it personally. But software is often complex, and a guided demo/implementation is often the best path to make sure your buyers are actually successful. Otherwise you risk a lot of folks who sign up, jump in, have no idea what they're doing, and then abandon the trial immediately and go to a competitor who held their hand. 3. "Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0..." If only offering Freemium were so simple. You will immediately have to deal with porn (it's always porn - and often kiddie porn. These people will figure out incredibly creative ways to use your SaaS product to host illegal content one way or another), spam, fraud, customer service issues, etc. There are many valid reasons to offer Freemium. There are many valid reasons not to do so. It's just not so simple. 4. Again, think about the flip side here. Lower friction to sign-ups without a card, but SO much hassle when it comes time to pay -- now you have to nag, bug, etc. to get payment, and then you have to delete accounts that are dormant. And you have much lower buying intent signals, etc. etc. etc. I wish the world of software catered to folks like us, but I fully and completely understand why it doesn't.
nickjj 2y ago
High pressure time offers that are only known after signing up kind of stink too. I've never used Uber in my life but I'll be traveling internationally next month for the first time so I figured it wouldn't hurt to install Uber now to get a feel for what the UI is like. As soon as I signed up Uber was like, hey we'll give you 50% off your 4th ride if you complete 3 rides within 14 days. I won't even be traveling by the time the offer runs out. All this does is make me feel like I made a mistake for signing up too early without knowing anything was going to happen.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  On the bright side Uber now has the right country set for you. I signed up in Belgium and Uber is now convinced that's where I am based for all of time.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    I had something similar once but editing "Location" in https://riders.uber.com/profile https://riders.uber.com/profile fixed it for me. YMMV
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Uber goes nuts with offer notifications until you find the page to turn ALL of them off (quite a few, and broken out by category like Uber Eats vs Uber). The overall app is good enough, it's just a unfortunately spammy. As a ridiculous example: I took an Uber from an office to the Indianapolis airport then an Uber from the Dallas airport to a hotel for the night. As I'm winding down for the night I get a notification from Uber: "Need a ride back to ${indianapolisOffice}?".
  - eszed 2y ago
    Oh, thank you! I just turned all of those off, and am looking forward to fewer emails and push notifications.
  - robocat 2y ago
    I install Uber to use it when I need it because I only need it occasionally, and I deinstall it after I've used it. Solves spam and prvacy issues.
sct202 2y ago
A company recently denied us a trial extension, even though they could tell we barely got to use their software by the time they got around to granting us trial licenses after a series of sales pitch meetings. We ended up signing with their competitor, who was patient and gave us a few free credits instead that we could work thru on our own pace. Both companies knew that we had been paying a different 3rd company quadruple either of their rates, so I was baffled that the first company would basically write us off so quickly when we were openly motivated to switch.
mark242 2y ago
On the contrary - any trial you offer is incorrect. "People won't know the value of my service if they can't use it!" means that you either aren't doing a good enough job showing them the value of your service up front, or you have an incorrect pricing model. Let's take Stripe as an example. It is absolutely free for you to create an account, browse the dashboard, read their API documentation, etc etc etc, but they take their cut of every single financial transaction you do on their platform. There's no trial - either you find value in Stripe's services, or you don't. Notion has a free tier for single user seats because that's their marketing plan. The moment you want to use Notion for what it's built for, team use, you're paying per user - again, there's no trial period there. Same for companies like Atlassian or IFTTT or Zapier or on and on and on. "You get our full service for X days for free, then you have to start paying" is incorrect for _all_ values of X. Either, "you have to pay to be a user of myproduct.com" or "you can be a free user of myproduct.com but once you get to a level where you're serious about using the product, you have to pay" is the correct strategy.
- naltroc 2y ago
  OP provides data on time-to-convert at various timescales. It looks like it's working for them.
  - mark242 2y ago
    Yes, I read the article. 90 percent of their signups are within 130 days. That's not a great funnel. I'd be curious to see the breakdown of SaaS vs self-hosted customers. Again, imagine what the funnel would look like if the page simply said, "First 100 license keys are free forever. Then pay $0.005 per license key issued." That's a very, very easy opex cost for a developer (and a finance department!) to understand. Right now you can get 50 "ALU"s for free per month but the page doesn't say that at all on first glance; you have to move your slider to the left in order to get that offer. Instead there's so much complexity on that page. API requests per day. Number of licenses. "Number of policies" (whatever that means?!?). Number of products. Devs, please please please simplify.
mvkel 2y ago
I think the opposite. The trial length is simply a proxy for how long it takes the prospect to actually have the meeting to make the decision. By making it 41 days instead of 14, prospects will sign up and then wait 35 days before logging in a second time to -maybe- trial it. I'll get to that later. That said, any-day trials ain't gonna cut it. It's not about the number of days, it's that a trial is offered at all. Software customers these days (especially B2Bs) have an internal list of hurdles that prevent them from signing up at all. Methodically remove each hurdle, and at the end there is nothing left to do but buy, or ghost. A trial is a hurdle to be jumped. I would bet that the number of paying customers who actually -trialed the software- is 20%. Why? It takes time, effort, resources to set things up in order to trial them. To spend those resources means the purchase already needs to be approved. TLDR saying that you offer a trial at all, for any length of time, is objection handling, not conversion optimization. I'd bet you could say you offer a 3 day trial and see zero change to the funnel %s. The story in the post also doesn't seem to address the problem (lowering TTC): > paid sign ups also increased, with conversion rate staying steady, but now with no manual work. Ok, but did TTC (the problem) go down, or up?
crazygringo 2y ago
Even for consumer software, the common 7/14/30-day free trials are bizarre. My general use case is to download and test software to use it a single time, for some random new task I only need that day. To use the software for 5 minutes. Then three months later, oh it turns out I need to do that thing again, or test it out in a new way. It says the trial has expired, even though I only used it for 5 minutes. And I'm not going to pay $$$ just to use it for another 5 minutes and possibly never again. I don't understand why x-day free trials haven't been replaced with usage-based free trials. E.g. whether it's exporting a final result 20 times, or running a filter 50 times, or processing 100 input files, or whatever metric makes sense for the particular product. Or heck, keep it a 14-day free trial but count the days individually -- so if I use it on May 2 and then on May 15, that's only two days. The idea that, as a consumer, I'm going to sit down and fully evaluate a piece of software over the course of 7/14/30 consecutive days to then make a purchasing decision is bizarre.
- groestl 2y ago
  Browser games, they've nailed it. So if you're talking about gamification: this is what you ought to be talking about.
  - tithe 2y ago
    > Browser games, they've nailed it. Could you elaborate how? Admittedly I don't play browser games, but is it as the parent comment says, trials in browser games are usage-based?
    - groestl 2y ago
      > trials in browser games are usage-based? In principle yes. That's because you want your players to be hooked before you first present them with the prospect to pay for an advantage. So you ensure a specific action is ingrained in muscle memory before it requires payment.
  - wmil 2y ago
    It'd be pretty hilarious if GoLand switched to a mobile pricing model where the IDE is free... But you have to use build gems to run things. You get a fixed number of build gems a week then you can buy more fro $9.99 or $19.99. Your debug gems would recharge after watching a short ad.
scosman 2y ago
"open, source-available" That punctuation is so critical; I read as "open source available" first time through. I also make "open, source-available" software (aka, source-available). Do folks like this presentation? Or good old "source-available"?
abcd_f 2y ago
> A fourteen-day free trial ain’t gonna cut it ... ... for things that take longer than that to test. That's rather obvious. There a lot of software that can be evaluated for fit in a couple of hours, especially of a desktop/installable variety.
XCSme 2y ago
Ok, I sell self-hosted software with a one-time payment (no subscription). Isn't a 14 days trial enough? Would a 30-day trial do better? Or a 60 days one? So far, people who start using the trial usually convert, so lengthening the trial will likely only decrease this. What it could improve, is the number of customers who are willing to start using the trial, thinking 60-days is a lot of free usage.
- ezekg 2y ago
  For Keygen EE, my enterprise self-hosted edition, I do a 30 day no-strings-attached-trial. So it's different for self-hosted software, yes.
  - ezekg 2y ago
    Thinking on this more: this wasn't the whole truth. I also have Keygen CE, which is the free self-hosted community edition, which could act as an unlimited-limited free trial (limited in the sense that it excludes EE features).
gnicholas 2y ago
Seems kind of like a submarine article. Without knowing what this product/service is, it's impossible to know whether a 14 day free trial is appropriate. I don't care to spend the time learning what it is, and without knowing that it's hard to tell if this advice is relevant to other types of products. I also found this data point to tend to indicate that this testing/experimentation was not especially rigorous: > out those that did [ask for an extension] and those that didn't, my conversion rate was higher when they did ask for one. My first thought was that there is selection bias among people who ask for an extension. People who are pretty sure it's not a useful tool for them aren't going to take the time to reach out.
KaiMagnus 2y ago
Yeah, fully agree. Tried to get into Sketch (multiple) times actually via their 30 day trial. But I've repeatedly run out of time testing details and special cases next to the job, so Figma it is. For note taking tools it's also hard. You only get to know the tool and how well you can work with it only after you spend time with it and have some content in there. Hard to do in 14 days. So letting users evaluate the core part of your service without time limit makes sense and it's good to see a successful example of that.
datarez 2y ago
>I added an unlimited trial, a.k.a. a free tier. >What happened next? >Overall sign ups increased Top of the funnel increase is great, but I would be keen to understand whether overall revenue went up. Sometimes free tier attract the wrong type of customers
pseudosavant 2y ago
It is my experience that unless you have high variable costs, you should be far more worried about people adopting and using your product than you should be about giving too much away for free.
siva7 2y ago
It's bizarre how many people think that offering free trials doesn't cost the company real money. Especially with a SaaS your trial will be a real bill for someone else.
g4zj 2y ago
The very sight of the word "trial" makes a bad impression on me. It puts me on the defensive. I'm immediately reminded that I'm being sold a product, rather than offered a solution. I stop thinking about the task I was working on, or what lead me to the product in the first place, and start worrying about the details of the trial. "Am I going to need to enter credit card information to start the trial?" "Will any images I create be watermarked unless I pay a premium?" "Are the features I actually need even available within the trial, and are they actually useful during that time?" I don't want a free trial of anything, ever. I'd rather have a free, community-supported version and a premium version with official support. Or a basic version with free, unlimited access to only the most basic features, and a pro version with more advanced features at a cost. I just need something I can actually use without worry, and when my use case extends beyond the most basic of features, or the software becomes an important part of my daily workflow, I'll happily pay (and I have) for a more powerful version.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > I don't want a free trial of anything, ever. Is this true? You don't take a new make and model of automobile for a test drive? Are you saying you want to pay cash for the test drive? How do you propose comparison shopping for the primary experience of a car which is how it feels driving it?
nutrie 2y ago
Whenever I'm on the purchasing end working for a larger org, it is one of my initial requirements that the potential business partner is willing to extend their trial period, sometimes "indefinitely" (i. e. without an initial spec, cause I gotta talk to teams while getting familiar with Foo myself). I don't think anyone has ever refused, quite the opposite. But if they did, they're automatically off the table, unless they're a big deal such as Autodesk. They usually are not. I've done it a few times as an individual, with the same result. Hence I don't pay too much attention to whatever they say on their website.
rhdunn 2y ago
I signed up for a trial for WoW back in the day. It was about 3 seasons in, and the way the install worked was that you had to download and install each update separately, each of which was 2-3 GB each. I was using a slow dial-up at the time and spent the duration of the trial downloading the game. When I got to log in for the first time in a playable state, it said my trial expired! So ended my WoW journey. It would have made more sense to start the trial from the first login/entering character creation. I like the Path of Exile model. The game is free to play, and you pay the price of a game to unlock inventory management. -- By that time you know if you are invested in the game or not.
- em-bee 2y ago
  similar thing with steam demo days. for a weekend or so a bunch of games are available for free to try them out. sounds nice until you find out that they are really only available for the duration of the demo days. so one time i looked and i found a dozen games that i wanted to try, but then i realized that i would have to spend the whole weekend playing games in order to try them all. i ended up trying not a single one of them because i just can't tell my family that i won't be available for a few days until i tested all those games. what would have made sense is to allow downloading all the games for free and then give each of them a time limit of a few hours to play. still not ideal (i am a slow player so i'd like to have a bit more time to evaluate a game) but way better than terminating the trial before i have even had the time to play anything.
underdeserver 2y ago
Ironic. Keygens used to be how, as kids, we got around 14-day trials :)
sonicanatidae 2y ago
The only ones that really bother me are crippleware. Either provide the full product, for a limited time/usage, OR, just skip it. The last fucking thing ANYONE needs is to work through the UI of an app, get everything staged, then get a fucking "buy me" prompt when they click "ok" to start the process. As far as the 7/14/30 day trials, I'm fine with those, as long as the above is respected, otherwise, GTFO.
esafak 2y ago
The ideal is usage-based trials, which directly translates to value derived, but that's harder to implement, so you get time-based trials. There, I said it in one sentence.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Actual title is: "Your 14-day free trial ain't gonna cut it"
- ezekg 2y ago
  Not sure why it was editorialized but w/e.
b3ing 2y ago
Some software can take days to learn to be able to test a more advanced feature. For example a unique niche 3D software
nedt 2y ago
The very least that could be done is not having a trial period in calendar days, but actually usage days. I signup today, login and play around - that's day 1. Then I get to do other things. Two weeks later I come back and that should be day 2 of the trial period, and not day 15 and can't use it anymore.
Netcob 2y ago
There's a lot of software I would pay for, if there was some offer that made sense for my use case. For example,I use hwinfo64 because I like having some system stats on my stream deck. The free version cuts off the shared memory access after 12h and you have to re-enable it manually. Now this is just a fun nerd thing for me, not something I'm using for work. It's a tiny part of the software's feature set. But I would have to buy a yearls subscription, or a lifetime one for $130 - too much for some colorful graphs. Just yesterday showed my dad a tennis game on my Quest 3. 15 minutes trial / ~$30 to buy. What am I going to do with 15 minutes? That's hardly enough to get through a tutorial, and definitely not enough to make a decision whether the game is good enough. A sports game on a VR headset is basically workout equipment. I'm not going to play that for a day, "beat it" and move on to the next game - I'll either play it every night for weeks, or not at all. So 15 minutes only makes sense if that's well below the time most people find out that the game is garbage (if it is), and if this is a way to trick people. We live in a time where you can't trust online reviews at all, and where most people just blatantly lie in product descriptions (when have you seen "4K" actually refer to something remotely close to reality?). We need proper trials.

377 points by ezekg 2y ago

Depends on the industry I guess but in my experience customers trying to nickel and dime you / concerned about free trials are not the ones you want.

arnon 2y ago

I made a beeline to the median, because funnily enough my median for other B2B SaaS was also 41. I feel vindicated! For consumer stuff my experience was closer to 25, but for businesses it was 41.

seurimas 2y ago
Interesting! 25 business days for a business is close to 41 calendar days, too. I wonder if there's some sort of common, human constant involved. 25 days of engaging with something to decide whether that something is worth keeping around. Maybe the median relationship length is 25 days, too...

PaulHoule 2y ago

As a software dev I can say this is so true. A 14-day free trial is not free, it costs your time. It takes a serious block of time to evaluate any product or service, maybe a few days. If I put a few days into an open source product and I like it I can just use it. If it is a paid product I'm going to have to go to my management, it might be easy or it might be hard, but I have to discount the gains from "I found a product I like" by the probability that "we won't buy it anyway" so that makes me all the more hesitant to complete a trial.

garciasn 2y ago
My team is responsible for the research, evaluation, approval, integration, and on-going support for each and every single platform that is within our stack. We have a lengthy standardized process for evaluation/scoring/approval and one of our mandates is a minimum of 30 days, no payment, and no Sharewaresque limitation in functionality. If we cannot get 30 days, it's a simple 'no,' and we move on to the next. Even at 30 days, it's extremely stressful on the team to get the system up and running, ingest our test case data, and run our tests. This is after going through this process >100 times. There's simply no way to get everything that needs to be done with an evaluation of even basic coverage in less than 30. Full stop. Lack of adequate understanding of the potential challenges an org is going to face during implementation and use is, IMO, the single biggest reason implementations run WAY OVER budget, time, and eventually fail at integration w/the rest of the org. This is entirely ignoring the required change management, which is another beast entirely.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  It sounds like you're bragging about a dysfunctional way of working. If what your team is doing is valuable they should get any tools they like without much questions. Just like in any reasonable workplace. Because workers produce more and better when they have better tools. You can also just buy the software to evaluate it. This way you have unlimited time to see if it fits or not. That's what people do in other industries.
  - kfarr 2y ago
    Yeah it is a bit odd to say that the #1 requirement is that the software be free for 30 days, that would disqualify a bunch of critical infrastructure.
    - p_l 2y ago
      A lot of multiple thousand dollars per seat software will offer evaluation licenses, for various lengths of time, sometimes way longer than 30 days.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Theres a quick fall-off. Sourcegraph is $99/u/m and has major network effects. For a moderately sized org this is quickly an entire developer salary. Snyk is similarly priced, unfortunately “just buy” is a really easy way to: a) pay more than something is woth b) have multiple products doing the same thing. (for example, I have Miro and figjam and Mural in my company because each do something slightly better and teams have chosen the tools that work best). That means we often double pay on licenses for ostensibly similar software.
    - sqs 2y ago
      Sourcegraph CEO here. It’s not $99/user/month anymore. It’s great that a lot of companies were willing to pay that, but we and our customers prefer a lower per-user price and a higher % of devs at the company using it (ideally 100%). We reduced prices for our customers (current and future). You can see the posted pricing at https://sourcegraph.com/pricing https://sourcegraph.com/pricing. For any other dev tools companies, I’d strongly recommend having lower prices so that every dev at your customer can use it (if that’s relevant for your product). If you start seeing customers be really picky with who gets a license, it’s probably priced too high.
dylan604 2y ago
In my experience, I've only looked at new software when the text on the box says that it'll solve an issue we currently have, dramatically improve existing workflows, or specifically asked by someone else. If you're concerned about time, then maybe you (or your company) are doing it wrong. Depending on the size of your company, there should be a team of people assigned time to specifically evaluate theNewShiny whatever. If the product does not do what is advertised on the tin, then drop it and move on. If it does work as advertised, the team then evaluates next steps in how to utilize it. In this way, that research is already "budgeted" into employee's time.
gregmac 2y ago
And the time to evaluate for something you're releasing (vs staying in your control on SaaS) is significantly higher. Things that lock you in, especially between your released software and hosted services -- like authentication, installers/auto-update, and licensing (keygen) -- are even higher than that. It's just really hard to "undo" these things, both technically and because of the optics (user experience). Requiring your users to re-license their software is friction -- it burns user trust and costs a lot of time in support. 14 days is just too short to evaluate if the product will even meet your needs, let alone evaluate how much lock-in there is and what the path away could look like.
tomjen3 2y ago
Sounds like you need a first filter, and then only do your evaluation process on a given product if it solves a major pain point and even in that case, just evaluate the best/most common product in that category and only if it clearly doesn't work test another product. You are not going to win as a startup by using Teams, even if it is cheaper than Slack+Zoom, you are going to win big or not at all and focusing on things that don't matter for the core success just means less time to make something people want.
dangus 2y ago
Implementers failing to prioritize doing some legwork during the free trial period also costs time for the sales organization of the selling party. From the sales side, if we see the prospect the finding a solution is a low enough priority that their engineers can’t spend time in two weeks to simply look at a solution, then they might not be an ideal fit for the product (they don’t enough business pain, don’t have a champion, and/or don’t have an economic buyer to prioritize the purchase of a solution). This is of course highly dependent on the nature of the software and the ideal customer profile of that solution, but the fact that there’s two sides of this coin is something to keep in mind.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  In many orgs, pain points are subtle, product evaluations happen on the back burner, and internal consensus on pulling the trigger might take months. These firms are left on the table by a demo/sales process that can only afford them two weeks. And a trial need not take many sales resources. We can automate that with a demo download and self serve documentation. If it's an on prem demo, a 2 week or 12 week trial costs us the same - it's just a sign up and download. We don't actually need a sales rep to prod them about buying - the demo countdown does that, for people actually gaining value from the demo. Let's acknowledge the article's evidence that longer trials can convert customers with lower pain points. Secure customers like to evaluate things without pressure. And they might be the majority of customers. Let's enable this by building sales resilience, engineering the infrastructure painlessly delivery a longer trial that takes near zero sales or production effort.
  - dangus 2y ago
    I would argue that the companies you describe are poor fits who are likely to churn. Even if your sales team spends zero time on them they are the kind of customer that will end up losing money for the company. This whole thought process is how we get money-losing companies with revenue growth rather than sustainable businesses. The focus is on closing as many deals as possible rather than selectively engaging with the most profitable customer use cases.
  - deleted 2y ago
dredmorbius 2y ago
From the ops side my situation's similar. The more so as the team is often small (one-person ops teams are probably the norm, at least by number of establishments), and workload is often already overwhelming. New technology and/or products always come with unanticipated consequences and downsides. Expecting to make a decision on a major, or even minor tool isn't something that can be rushed. One model I'd noted as innovative at the time was for a SAAS company to offer a free tier of service, in the case in mind, with limited data retention of a monitoring tool. That struck me as an exceedingly good way to balance the power of the tool (all other features were otherwise available), whilst also providing a clear and reasonable upgrade path to a paid subscription. When that company IPO'd and revealed its CoS (cost of sales), I was surprised to see how high it remained (on the order of 40--50% of revenues). Selling (and buying) complex information goods is hard, whether that's software, services, consulting, news, or anything else. There's a copious literature on the production side addressing the zero marginal cost / high fixed costs predicament. There's less on the buy side, though Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" addresses this in part. Reducing uncertainty, increasing knowledge, and mitigating purchaser risk without needlessly offsetting revenues seem key to the issue.

alexcaza 2y ago

Nice write-up! This is a great example of throwing out "best practices" and being truly user/product-centred. Even down to your trial strategy. It reminds me of YNAB's trial[^1] strategy of offering 34 days. It gives folks just enough time with their app and process. I wish YNAB's trial extended to ~60 days since my "ah ha!" moment was only around then. That's another conversation, though. ^1: https://www.ynab.com/sign-up https://www.ynab.com/sign-up

Suppafly 2y ago
I imagine 34 days is so that you have enough to budget around an entire month. Would be shitty to setup a budget and not be able to follow it for a whole month.
- alexcaza 2y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Their whole thing is to get ~30 days ahead, too. I think 60–90 days would be a better hook and almost guarantee an "ah ha" moment. Everyone I've spoken to that's had YANB "click" was in that time frame, myself included. I wish I could see how a trial length change would affect their conversions.

simonsarris 2y ago

I sell a JS/TS graphing library, so B2B, developer-to-developer. We decided to just have an indefinite trial period (library has a watermark) and instead offer 30 days of free support. That way we can help people get started and realize their proof of concept, but if they want to start evaluating on their own time they can do so without worrying about any clock. This makes it much easier for customers who are trying to evaluate multiple options at once.

go_prodev 2y ago
I'm always exploring new graphing libraries. Are you happy to share a link to yours?
- martincmartin 2y ago
  If you click on their username, it takes you to their profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris which says: I make GoJS, a powerful canvas-based diagramming library: http://gojs.net/ http://gojs.net/ Which is not what I think of a graphing (time series, x-y points joined by lines), but otherwise seems relevant to their comment.
  - simonsarris 2y ago
    Thank you. I guess I should update that, since GoJS renders to SVG also if that's what you prefer (at a cost to performance of course) Most of us who make such libraries tend to distinguish charting (time series, lines, bars) from graphing (nodes and links). Charting is, in many aspects, a much smaller problem space. Graphing requires a lot more in terms of layouts and interaction tools, grid snapping, guides, undo/redo, copy/paste, grouping, subgraphs, managing user permissions for interactivity, expand/collapse (both subgraphs and tree sections), updating the backing data when the graph is edited, etc.
    - seankurtz 2y ago
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nick7376182 2y ago

I wonder if for a larger consumer product this would not work, as word gets around they can stay free for a long time. Though it seems to work for a lot of community software like makeMKV.

TillE 2y ago

Time limited trials are always a feels-bad moment for me, an extra deadline I now have to plan around. Another option I like is providing some amount of free credit that doesn't expire. So you're not on the hook for providing a "free tier" forever, but users can play around with your service at their own pace.

kevincox 2y ago
This is what I am doing (business to consumer) and I am quite happy with it. I am maybe a bit too generous with the free credits (many people can use the service lightly for over a year on the trial) but I like that they get the exact experience as if they were paying and they can pause and resume their trial with no extra complexity on my end. Just sign up and you get some starting credits. Then you can just buy more as you need them. I think it makes things simpler and avoids any sort of pressure.
- gregmac 2y ago
  This would work for B2B as well. Sometimes there's a shifting business priority, and guess which wins when the choice is "important customer X is on fire" vs "our developer trial for wizbang component xyz is going to expire in 8 days".
cableshaft 2y ago
I also don't mind something like '30 days' or '60 days', but it only counts the days when you open the application. Like a few weeks ago I was motivated to learn some music production software, so I downloaded a few trial versions. I worked on it heavily for a few days, but then got busy with other things, and now that 30 day trial or whatever is coming up to an end, but I still don't feel like I've had a chance to decide if it works for me, because I haven't been actively using it that long yet still. I do plan to go back to it, just maybe not for another week or two. But if it only counted the days I opened the application, I'd still have like 26 'days' left to evaluate them (they might, I haven't checked), and it'd be no big deal, and I wouldn't have to feel all stressed out because I'm 'wasting' the demo time by actually having a life and maybe badly timing when to trigger the trial period.

nikolajan 2y ago

I get the sense that a 2 month trial would have been a better option (41 days + buffer). It provides clients with the required amount of time to get up and running while also time boxing them and applying some pressure on them to commit. An unlimited free trial falls into the same trap of customers leaving until they're "ready" to integrate, time boxing it sort of forces them to commit to the integration at some point.

ezekg 2y ago
I don't think it would make a considerable difference. Not mentioned in the post, but I have a limited unlimited free trial. Taking into account the usage limits, it's not useful for a production deployment so it applies pressure once integrated. That way I only apply pressure to those that actually integrated. If I were to do a timed trial again, it'd apply pressure to evaluate and plan the integration right now, and the product may not even be at the stage where they're ready to do that yet i.e. still in dev. This needlessly applies friction, which I want to avoid doing until they're ready.
mason55 2y ago
I could certainly be abnormal, but I'm much more likely to sign up for something that has a real free tier. There's honestly very little difference to me between 60-day free trial and just having to pay from the start, I know that once I do the work to integrate then I'm committing to having to pay. At least for a startup with little revenue and little cash, 60 days is just too soon to commit to having to pay, unless it's like $10/mo. What's worked better for me is the "startup scholarship" that a lot of companies are doing now. A year is far enough away that we'll either be out of business or have the cash to pay, and I don't need to worry that I'm getting my money's worth by the time the 60-day trial ends. I'm a big fan of Posthog right now because they have both a generous free tier & a generous startup scholarship. I've moved a ton of stuff to their platform. A lot of it probably depends on your product though. If you're solving a very targeted problem then you might not be able to create a reasonable free tier. But a lot of B2B tech stuff is like... sure you can charge a bunch of users $5 apiece, but you risk missing the signup of the one user that was going to pay you $10k. Anything with usage-based pricing is going to have Pareto distributed revenue and you need to do everything you can to make sure you're capturing those customers on the tail.

ang_cire 2y ago

It seems obvious that the conversion rate was higher among people who wanted extensions, because the people who don't are the ones who already decided not to use it; rarely are people going to turn down more free time to use something and rush to ask to be allowed to pay for it (though it does happen- I've been part of procurements that were being rushed to use an existing FY budget, for instance). Another thing you need to work out, imo, is what level of *feature use* in your application best maps to conversions, and from there, how can you improve the likelihood of people seeing the benefits of that feature use. As an example, my current company's app can be used with or without agent deployments, and we saw that trials that deployed agents- even just one-off ones in lab envs- converted at a far higher rate than non-agent trials. So we worked to lower the perceived barrier of entry that agent deployments posed, which meant more people seeing the increased usefulness they provided, which meant more conversions.

Sharlin 2y ago
> It seems obvious that the conversion rate was higher among people who wanted extensions, because the people who don't are the ones who already decided not to use it Yeah, exactly! Those two groups are not the same, there's an obvious selection effect there.
ezekg 2y ago
I think you misunderstood, or maybe I wasn't clear in my post. This wasn't an experiment on 2 separate groups; this was an experiment on the same group: those that convert from trial to paid. When I did X, conversion rate for the entire group increased, i.e. I made more money. If I stopped X, I'd make less money. That then lead me to the point of the post -- the % difference in conversion rate were the people who weren't actually ready but signed up for a trial anyways, only to run out of time and never come back.
- ang_cire 2y ago
  Ok, I think I see what you're getting at: You're assuming that the percentage increase in conversions after you extended or removed the trial timeout period across the board corresponds to users who previously would have been kicked out by the trial expiry before they could see the value in converting. My comment was referring to the period you mentioned where you were offering people manual extensions, and you noted that you saw more conversions among that group than among users who didn't extend their trials.

7thaccount 2y ago

Even 30 days is useless for me with my schedule on some items. Some of the optimization solvers are annoying that way if you're trying to get a proof of concept together to get management buy-in, but it'll take a lot of development to get there. You can use one of the generic libraries that abstracts away the solver (where you can plug most vendors in) and start with an open source option, but it's an annoying approach if I think there's a strong chance we'll end up with a particular vendor as I'd want to use their native API and avoid the additional abstraction layer. I totally understand why it makes sense to the business, it's just hard to work it in to my schedule. Another thing for these companies to think about is a potential customer is investing their own time in learning your product. They may not act on it right away, but I've been in situations where we had an "oh crap" moment and I was able to say go get product X, I know it works on our data sets and already have example scripts for how we can use it and the vendor indicated a price of Y last year which is like 1/5 the cost this other vendor just quoted you to start implementing this from scratch. Allowing employees some creativity to scratch that itch seems to constantly pay off in my experience as long as they're still being successful at their main job.

kuschkufan 2y ago

OT, but your HTML is not valid. <!DOCTYPE> is declared twice.

5350-uiop-1130 2y ago

a software i paid for 10 years ago recently got bought by another company. they immediately added bs "features" like dark theme, changed to subscription model with 1 year sub price 3x what i paid to buy it outright, and reduced trial from 30 to 12 days piracy is the only true form of digital ownership.

cableshaft 2y ago
Me and Adobe right there. They want me to pay a subscription, but as long as Windows will still open CS6, I'll keep using it. It still gets the job done for me, even though I wouldn't mind some of the newer features (some of my annoyances I know they've improved in the new version) and probably would have paid for an upgrade by now if it wasn't all subscription models now. And hopefully by the time it stops working, another non-subscription option for Illustrator that I don't hate will be available.
- EricE 2y ago
  A great list of alternatives has been floating around on Twitter after their AI debacle: https://twitter.com/WayneTalbot/status/1786703024330588237 https://twitter.com/WayneTalbot/status/1786703024330588237 I really enjoy the Affinity tools; they more than meet my modest requirements.
  - sib 2y ago
    >> I really enjoy the Affinity tools; they more than meet my modest requirements. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-release/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
  - cableshaft 2y ago
    I didn't like Affinity or Inkscape when I tried them (I even bought Affinity on a sale in order to try it, so I own it). Affinity also had issues importing my CS6 Illustrator files, IIRC, and since I have hundreds of those for various board game designs of mine that I still go back to and rework when I have a new idea for them, the fact that it couldn't play nice with them made it pretty much a nonstarter. It's been a while since I've used Inkscape, but I remember it feeling clunky and buggy for me, and I had difficulty getting into the workflow. I'm sure I could probably force myself to get used to, and probably enjoy alternatives, but the more I invest in these proprietary alternatives, the harder it will be to shift anything back to Illustrator if I need to, especially since I don't think any of them bother to output to a CS6 friendly file format anymore, so I can shift to them, but I can't easily shift out of them. And at this point Illustrator CS6 is just dead simple for me, I don't have to think about where anything is, I know exactly what I need to do for like 98% of what I want to do on it, and most of it is muscle memory, I can whip up some cards in a few hours while watching TV shows in the background. It's going to take something significant (like it no longer working) to motivate me enough to upgrade. I know I'm playing with fire a bit, since these files are getting more and more out of date, and may not import nicely into even the subscription Adobe Illustrator at some point, but I already have too much other shit I have to learn all the time for my day job, I don't have much left outside of that (maybe eventually I will. I am starting to learn Logic Pro and Ableton Live for making music finally, and for the longest time I only used FLStudio). That's a cool graphic though. I'll download it for future reference. Also it'll be easier for me to convert for other Adobe products, like I mostly use Paint.NET instead of Photoshop nowadays, for example. Illustrator is the main one I feel I have to stick with. Also Flash, since it doesn't exist in any newer ones (I used to make Flash games, so if I want to open those FLA files again, I need it).

egberts1 2y ago

Two months and they're hooked ... or not.

ProllyInfamous 2y ago
I'd say this is about correct... my new Toyota came with 3 months of free satelite radio, and it was at about 2 months casual usage that I decided "I'm going to actually sign up" [after having enough time to explore multiple channels]. Had it only been "1 month free" I would not have explored enough to sign up.

glonq 2y ago

Just last week, I abandoned a 7-day trial of some project management software because it was not enough time for me to feel comfy with it. Would have preferred a week or two more, even if features were somehow nerfed (watermarks, etc).

batterylow 2y ago

I run a plotting/visualization library. Instead of a time-limited trial, we have just one of the plot types (Sankey) freely available indefinitely (https://plotapi.com/page/sankey/ https://plotapi.com/page/sankey/). We tried a time-limited trial, and we just ended up with people re-registering new accounts every 2 weeks.

semireg 2y ago

I develop barcode and label design software. My app is immediately usable after download, but it will print a watermark when not licensed. Users can start a 14 day free trial to remove the watermark. Since it’s a desktop app, each trial is locked to that one computer. I can keep track of which computers register for a trial and limit the duration for subsequent re-registrations. It’s all based on JWT.

MPlus88 2y ago
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jt2190 2y ago

The author does a really good job of describing the tension between the customer’s readiness and the vendor’s need to move leads through the pipeline as fast as possible: > What I was really asking potential customers to do was wait. > Wait until they're ready to start understanding the API. > Wait until they're ready to go through onboarding. > Wait until the PoC is planned. > … > What ends up happening is that people get busy and they end up seeing that 14 day deadline, determine that they're not ready yet, so they bounce until they are ready, but then they never come back. > I decided that I needed to remove that friction. I wanted to capture these leads as soon as they decide Keygen may be the solution for them. So ultimately, I can start nurturing these leads. I’d love to hear more about what “nurturing” looks like.

kennykning 2y ago

great post! off to calculate TTC for my company right now..

dangus 2y ago

In B2B sales something that can happen with extension of free trials is that companies doing window shopping, doing competitive analysis, or who aren’t motivated to find a solution to an immediate need (don’t fit the ideal customer profile) and essentially don’t intend to buy will do half-hearted integration and extend trials. It’s a runaround which ends up costing your sales organization valuable time and effort. Usually it’s just a matter of the implementers on the prospect side not prioritizing the effort. A free trial should usually be followed by a proof of value where both parties are committed to implementing the solution in a realistic way with the expectation of a signed contract if the proof of value delivers on the customer requirements. This could be something to be careful of if that applies to you.

jessriedel 2y ago

> You may be thinking — what does this have to do with time-to-convert? > We'll get there. Just FYI, I consider this tease-based writing to be reader-hostile, the prose equivalent of clickbait. It's the surest way to get me to quit reading.

ropejumper 2y ago
Have you read the article? It's not clickbait, it literally goes on to explain it, and it's only a couple paragraphs. I honestly don't see the issue, and the fact that the author acknowledged a potential question is IMO a good thing.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  If this were really the justification, there are almost always better ways to do it. ("If you're wondering about X, see section N". Or just link to it.) Like other dark patterns, there times when this sort of thing can make sense, but in practice it's usually done (consciously or not) to get the reader to read more than they would otherwise.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
I don't think so. The author is acknowledging that there is a very obvious question they need to answer and doesn't want to leave the reader in doubt about whether they will answer it, but wants to finish making a different point first. It's almost the opposite of reader-hostile.
Gbox4 2y ago
I disagree. I feel like this is something they teach you to do in composition classes - i.e. a hook.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  There are all sorts of things taught in composition class that do not promote learning/understanding

alkonaut 2y ago

Don’t do limited time trials. Please. A limited trial means I’m going to have a worse dev experience with deadlines, activation or loss of functionality. Having a time limited trial or even a requirement to submit an email in order to try something is a big turnoff when evaluating a product. Just make the product free for non commercial use (including a trial in a commercial setting). If I need support or want to buy something please let me contact support or sales. I don’t want an automated email from Jeff at Randomcorp asking me how my trial is going. If a trial has to take 30 days or 365, just let me finish.

youcantcook 2y ago

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aidenn0 2y ago

I wonder how a free-tier compares to a 6- or 12-month free trial period.

999900000999 2y ago

Rate limit free users. If I sign up on Monday, I might not even look at the API docs until Friday. Assume the week after that I personally like it, if I'm at a bigger company I'm probably going to spend a month or two just getting approval to expense it.

ezekg 2y ago
Agreed. I have usage limits (e.g. 100 active users), as well as a hard limit of 2k API requests a day for the free tier. This provides freedom i.r.t. PoCs but restricts production usage.
- liotier 2y ago
  And if the user indefinitely uses the service within the free tier, they are not the target customer anyway - so count the infinitesimal usage as evangelization !

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

Hey SaaS. Here's what I want from you (re: sign-ups): 1. Show me your price, with multiple pricing tiers. The more tiers you have, the more likely I am going to pick one of them, because I will think "well this lower tier is quite the deal compared to the higher tiers!". If I am an Enterprise customer, I will disregard you as an option if I can't see a price. Don't even show me the tier at all if you aren't going to show me your price. I get immediately incensed when I see that "Contact us for pricing!" bullshit, because I know how much bullshit I am in for if I just want to get a quote, so I look for somebody else. I want to use your product right now. But I'm not going to use it if I think it will be painful to work with your company, or that you might have exorbitant pricing, or you're just looking for whales. Don't make me discount you. 2. Let me use your product, immediately. Let me run it from my laptop immediately. Let me spin up a PoC. Show me your complete reference docs immediately. Show me a toy implementation w/source. I want to know if this will [eventually] give me what I want, within 15 minutes. Do that and you will already have gone above and beyond 95% of SaaS (in my mind). 3. Let me have gradient pricing. Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0, for 5 users. Send me an e-mail when I have 7 users, informing me that I have 30 days to either reduce the number of users to 5, or it will automatically upgrade my account and charge me more (or make me confirm, or whatever). Same for the next tier, etc. (or 'pre-purchase' discounts vs 'on-demand' overage cost, etc) This gives me flexibility: I know our workflows won't just stop working when we hit a limit, and I can acquiesce to the new price or clean up old users. 4. Let me start using your product without a card on file. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right corporate person with the right corp card (if they even let me use a corp card, rather than invoicing). If you really need a card, give me 15-30 days, and then pause my account if you have to. The point is to let me get "hooked" on your product without needing to figure out which card to use first. (It goes without saying that when the card expires or a charge doesn't go through, give me 30 days to resolve it, because usually the corp card has hit its limit)

nlh 2y ago
So it's interesting. Everything you ask for here is something I, personally, as an independent wanna-get-my-hands-dirty nerd, would ask for too. I totally get where you're coming from. But the thing is - the reason large companies often don't give folks like you and me these things is becuase there are proven reasons to do the contrary that actually end up making them more money. It sucks, but it's reality. 1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website. 2. Offering immediate free trials where you can jump in right away is the ideal world for nerds -- again, I love it personally. But software is often complex, and a guided demo/implementation is often the best path to make sure your buyers are actually successful. Otherwise you risk a lot of folks who sign up, jump in, have no idea what they're doing, and then abandon the trial immediately and go to a competitor who held their hand. 3. "Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0..." If only offering Freemium were so simple. You will immediately have to deal with porn (it's always porn - and often kiddie porn. These people will figure out incredibly creative ways to use your SaaS product to host illegal content one way or another), spam, fraud, customer service issues, etc. There are many valid reasons to offer Freemium. There are many valid reasons not to do so. It's just not so simple. 4. Again, think about the flip side here. Lower friction to sign-ups without a card, but SO much hassle when it comes time to pay -- now you have to nag, bug, etc. to get payment, and then you have to delete accounts that are dormant. And you have much lower buying intent signals, etc. etc. etc. I wish the world of software catered to folks like us, but I fully and completely understand why it doesn't.

nickjj 2y ago

High pressure time offers that are only known after signing up kind of stink too. I've never used Uber in my life but I'll be traveling internationally next month for the first time so I figured it wouldn't hurt to install Uber now to get a feel for what the UI is like. As soon as I signed up Uber was like, hey we'll give you 50% off your 4th ride if you complete 3 rides within 14 days. I won't even be traveling by the time the offer runs out. All this does is make me feel like I made a mistake for signing up too early without knowing anything was going to happen.

JonChesterfield 2y ago
On the bright side Uber now has the right country set for you. I signed up in Belgium and Uber is now convinced that's where I am based for all of time.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  I had something similar once but editing "Location" in https://riders.uber.com/profile https://riders.uber.com/profile fixed it for me. YMMV
zamadatix 2y ago
Uber goes nuts with offer notifications until you find the page to turn ALL of them off (quite a few, and broken out by category like Uber Eats vs Uber). The overall app is good enough, it's just a unfortunately spammy. As a ridiculous example: I took an Uber from an office to the Indianapolis airport then an Uber from the Dallas airport to a hotel for the night. As I'm winding down for the night I get a notification from Uber: "Need a ride back to ${indianapolisOffice}?".
- eszed 2y ago
  Oh, thank you! I just turned all of those off, and am looking forward to fewer emails and push notifications.
- robocat 2y ago
  I install Uber to use it when I need it because I only need it occasionally, and I deinstall it after I've used it. Solves spam and prvacy issues.

sct202 2y ago

A company recently denied us a trial extension, even though they could tell we barely got to use their software by the time they got around to granting us trial licenses after a series of sales pitch meetings. We ended up signing with their competitor, who was patient and gave us a few free credits instead that we could work thru on our own pace. Both companies knew that we had been paying a different 3rd company quadruple either of their rates, so I was baffled that the first company would basically write us off so quickly when we were openly motivated to switch.

mark242 2y ago

On the contrary - any trial you offer is incorrect. "People won't know the value of my service if they can't use it!" means that you either aren't doing a good enough job showing them the value of your service up front, or you have an incorrect pricing model. Let's take Stripe as an example. It is absolutely free for you to create an account, browse the dashboard, read their API documentation, etc etc etc, but they take their cut of every single financial transaction you do on their platform. There's no trial - either you find value in Stripe's services, or you don't. Notion has a free tier for single user seats because that's their marketing plan. The moment you want to use Notion for what it's built for, team use, you're paying per user - again, there's no trial period there. Same for companies like Atlassian or IFTTT or Zapier or on and on and on. "You get our full service for X days for free, then you have to start paying" is incorrect for _all_ values of X. Either, "you have to pay to be a user of myproduct.com" or "you can be a free user of myproduct.com but once you get to a level where you're serious about using the product, you have to pay" is the correct strategy.

naltroc 2y ago
OP provides data on time-to-convert at various timescales. It looks like it's working for them.
- mark242 2y ago
  Yes, I read the article. 90 percent of their signups are within 130 days. That's not a great funnel. I'd be curious to see the breakdown of SaaS vs self-hosted customers. Again, imagine what the funnel would look like if the page simply said, "First 100 license keys are free forever. Then pay $0.005 per license key issued." That's a very, very easy opex cost for a developer (and a finance department!) to understand. Right now you can get 50 "ALU"s for free per month but the page doesn't say that at all on first glance; you have to move your slider to the left in order to get that offer. Instead there's so much complexity on that page. API requests per day. Number of licenses. "Number of policies" (whatever that means?!?). Number of products. Devs, please please please simplify.

mvkel 2y ago

I think the opposite. The trial length is simply a proxy for how long it takes the prospect to actually have the meeting to make the decision. By making it 41 days instead of 14, prospects will sign up and then wait 35 days before logging in a second time to -maybe- trial it. I'll get to that later. That said, any-day trials ain't gonna cut it. It's not about the number of days, it's that a trial is offered at all. Software customers these days (especially B2Bs) have an internal list of hurdles that prevent them from signing up at all. Methodically remove each hurdle, and at the end there is nothing left to do but buy, or ghost. A trial is a hurdle to be jumped. I would bet that the number of paying customers who actually -trialed the software- is 20%. Why? It takes time, effort, resources to set things up in order to trial them. To spend those resources means the purchase already needs to be approved. TLDR saying that you offer a trial at all, for any length of time, is objection handling, not conversion optimization. I'd bet you could say you offer a 3 day trial and see zero change to the funnel %s. The story in the post also doesn't seem to address the problem (lowering TTC): > paid sign ups also increased, with conversion rate staying steady, but now with no manual work. Ok, but did TTC (the problem) go down, or up?

crazygringo 2y ago

Even for consumer software, the common 7/14/30-day free trials are bizarre. My general use case is to download and test software to use it a single time, for some random new task I only need that day. To use the software for 5 minutes. Then three months later, oh it turns out I need to do that thing again, or test it out in a new way. It says the trial has expired, even though I only used it for 5 minutes. And I'm not going to pay $$$ just to use it for another 5 minutes and possibly never again. I don't understand why x-day free trials haven't been replaced with usage-based free trials. E.g. whether it's exporting a final result 20 times, or running a filter 50 times, or processing 100 input files, or whatever metric makes sense for the particular product. Or heck, keep it a 14-day free trial but count the days individually -- so if I use it on May 2 and then on May 15, that's only two days. The idea that, as a consumer, I'm going to sit down and fully evaluate a piece of software over the course of 7/14/30 consecutive days to then make a purchasing decision is bizarre.

groestl 2y ago
Browser games, they've nailed it. So if you're talking about gamification: this is what you ought to be talking about.
- tithe 2y ago
  > Browser games, they've nailed it. Could you elaborate how? Admittedly I don't play browser games, but is it as the parent comment says, trials in browser games are usage-based?
  - groestl 2y ago
    > trials in browser games are usage-based? In principle yes. That's because you want your players to be hooked before you first present them with the prospect to pay for an advantage. So you ensure a specific action is ingrained in muscle memory before it requires payment.
- wmil 2y ago
  It'd be pretty hilarious if GoLand switched to a mobile pricing model where the IDE is free... But you have to use build gems to run things. You get a fixed number of build gems a week then you can buy more fro $9.99 or $19.99. Your debug gems would recharge after watching a short ad.

scosman 2y ago

"open, source-available" That punctuation is so critical; I read as "open source available" first time through. I also make "open, source-available" software (aka, source-available). Do folks like this presentation? Or good old "source-available"?

abcd_f 2y ago

> A fourteen-day free trial ain’t gonna cut it ... ... for things that take longer than that to test. That's rather obvious. There a lot of software that can be evaluated for fit in a couple of hours, especially of a desktop/installable variety.

XCSme 2y ago

Ok, I sell self-hosted software with a one-time payment (no subscription). Isn't a 14 days trial enough? Would a 30-day trial do better? Or a 60 days one? So far, people who start using the trial usually convert, so lengthening the trial will likely only decrease this. What it could improve, is the number of customers who are willing to start using the trial, thinking 60-days is a lot of free usage.

ezekg 2y ago
For Keygen EE, my enterprise self-hosted edition, I do a 30 day no-strings-attached-trial. So it's different for self-hosted software, yes.
- ezekg 2y ago
  Thinking on this more: this wasn't the whole truth. I also have Keygen CE, which is the free self-hosted community edition, which could act as an unlimited-limited free trial (limited in the sense that it excludes EE features).

gnicholas 2y ago

Seems kind of like a submarine article. Without knowing what this product/service is, it's impossible to know whether a 14 day free trial is appropriate. I don't care to spend the time learning what it is, and without knowing that it's hard to tell if this advice is relevant to other types of products. I also found this data point to tend to indicate that this testing/experimentation was not especially rigorous: > out those that did [ask for an extension] and those that didn't, my conversion rate was higher when they did ask for one. My first thought was that there is selection bias among people who ask for an extension. People who are pretty sure it's not a useful tool for them aren't going to take the time to reach out.

KaiMagnus 2y ago

Yeah, fully agree. Tried to get into Sketch (multiple) times actually via their 30 day trial. But I've repeatedly run out of time testing details and special cases next to the job, so Figma it is. For note taking tools it's also hard. You only get to know the tool and how well you can work with it only after you spend time with it and have some content in there. Hard to do in 14 days. So letting users evaluate the core part of your service without time limit makes sense and it's good to see a successful example of that.

datarez 2y ago

>I added an unlimited trial, a.k.a. a free tier. >What happened next? >Overall sign ups increased Top of the funnel increase is great, but I would be keen to understand whether overall revenue went up. Sometimes free tier attract the wrong type of customers

pseudosavant 2y ago

It is my experience that unless you have high variable costs, you should be far more worried about people adopting and using your product than you should be about giving too much away for free.

siva7 2y ago

It's bizarre how many people think that offering free trials doesn't cost the company real money. Especially with a SaaS your trial will be a real bill for someone else.

g4zj 2y ago

The very sight of the word "trial" makes a bad impression on me. It puts me on the defensive. I'm immediately reminded that I'm being sold a product, rather than offered a solution. I stop thinking about the task I was working on, or what lead me to the product in the first place, and start worrying about the details of the trial. "Am I going to need to enter credit card information to start the trial?" "Will any images I create be watermarked unless I pay a premium?" "Are the features I actually need even available within the trial, and are they actually useful during that time?" I don't want a free trial of anything, ever. I'd rather have a free, community-supported version and a premium version with official support. Or a basic version with free, unlimited access to only the most basic features, and a pro version with more advanced features at a cost. I just need something I can actually use without worry, and when my use case extends beyond the most basic of features, or the software becomes an important part of my daily workflow, I'll happily pay (and I have) for a more powerful version.

Terretta 2y ago
> I don't want a free trial of anything, ever. Is this true? You don't take a new make and model of automobile for a test drive? Are you saying you want to pay cash for the test drive? How do you propose comparison shopping for the primary experience of a car which is how it feels driving it?

nutrie 2y ago

Whenever I'm on the purchasing end working for a larger org, it is one of my initial requirements that the potential business partner is willing to extend their trial period, sometimes "indefinitely" (i. e. without an initial spec, cause I gotta talk to teams while getting familiar with Foo myself). I don't think anyone has ever refused, quite the opposite. But if they did, they're automatically off the table, unless they're a big deal such as Autodesk. They usually are not. I've done it a few times as an individual, with the same result. Hence I don't pay too much attention to whatever they say on their website.

rhdunn 2y ago

I signed up for a trial for WoW back in the day. It was about 3 seasons in, and the way the install worked was that you had to download and install each update separately, each of which was 2-3 GB each. I was using a slow dial-up at the time and spent the duration of the trial downloading the game. When I got to log in for the first time in a playable state, it said my trial expired! So ended my WoW journey. It would have made more sense to start the trial from the first login/entering character creation. I like the Path of Exile model. The game is free to play, and you pay the price of a game to unlock inventory management. -- By that time you know if you are invested in the game or not.

em-bee 2y ago
similar thing with steam demo days. for a weekend or so a bunch of games are available for free to try them out. sounds nice until you find out that they are really only available for the duration of the demo days. so one time i looked and i found a dozen games that i wanted to try, but then i realized that i would have to spend the whole weekend playing games in order to try them all. i ended up trying not a single one of them because i just can't tell my family that i won't be available for a few days until i tested all those games. what would have made sense is to allow downloading all the games for free and then give each of them a time limit of a few hours to play. still not ideal (i am a slow player so i'd like to have a bit more time to evaluate a game) but way better than terminating the trial before i have even had the time to play anything.

underdeserver 2y ago

Ironic. Keygens used to be how, as kids, we got around 14-day trials :)

sonicanatidae 2y ago

The only ones that really bother me are crippleware. Either provide the full product, for a limited time/usage, OR, just skip it. The last fucking thing ANYONE needs is to work through the UI of an app, get everything staged, then get a fucking "buy me" prompt when they click "ok" to start the process. As far as the 7/14/30 day trials, I'm fine with those, as long as the above is respected, otherwise, GTFO.

esafak 2y ago

The ideal is usage-based trials, which directly translates to value derived, but that's harder to implement, so you get time-based trials. There, I said it in one sentence.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Actual title is: "Your 14-day free trial ain't gonna cut it"

ezekg 2y ago
Not sure why it was editorialized but w/e.

b3ing 2y ago

Some software can take days to learn to be able to test a more advanced feature. For example a unique niche 3D software

nedt 2y ago

The very least that could be done is not having a trial period in calendar days, but actually usage days. I signup today, login and play around - that's day 1. Then I get to do other things. Two weeks later I come back and that should be day 2 of the trial period, and not day 15 and can't use it anymore.

Netcob 2y ago

There's a lot of software I would pay for, if there was some offer that made sense for my use case. For example,I use hwinfo64 because I like having some system stats on my stream deck. The free version cuts off the shared memory access after 12h and you have to re-enable it manually. Now this is just a fun nerd thing for me, not something I'm using for work. It's a tiny part of the software's feature set. But I would have to buy a yearls subscription, or a lifetime one for $130 - too much for some colorful graphs. Just yesterday showed my dad a tennis game on my Quest 3. 15 minutes trial / ~$30 to buy. What am I going to do with 15 minutes? That's hardly enough to get through a tutorial, and definitely not enough to make a decision whether the game is good enough. A sports game on a VR headset is basically workout equipment. I'm not going to play that for a day, "beat it" and move on to the next game - I'll either play it every night for weeks, or not at all. So 15 minutes only makes sense if that's well below the time most people find out that the game is garbage (if it is), and if this is a way to trick people. We live in a time where you can't trust online reviews at all, and where most people just blatantly lie in product descriptions (when have you seen "4K" actually refer to something remotely close to reality?). We need proper trials.