In theory this makes sense, but when we offered 30-day free trials on paid plans at GitHub, our signups spiked and we ended up with over 50% conversion on those

In theory this makes sense, but when we offered 30-day free trials on paid plans at GitHub, our signups spiked and we ended up with over 50% conversion on those accounts. Keep in mind that we have a free plan that provides identical service to the paid accounts except for the ability to create private repositories. There may have been other factors at work, people could have seen this as the catalyst to finally take the plunge after the site had already been active for nearly a year, but the results were fairly compelling. That said, I'm not sure what this would translate to if we made the trial our default offering. Only one way for us to find out...