"Do bootstrapped businesses lose much money on free trials?" No, they don't lose money. If a business is at a net loss offering free trials, then they'd stop o

"Do bootstrapped businesses lose much money on free trials?" No, they don't lose money. If a business is at a net loss offering free trials, then they'd stop offering them. --- start example --- Let's suppose your yearly revenue from an average customer is $96 ($8/mo). And suppose your free trial is 30-days ($8 value per trial). What conversion rate from trial-to-paying do you need to rationalize offering a free trial? Well, 10 trials is a cost of $80, so we would need one customer (+$96) per 10 trials (-$80) to convert in order to make the trial offering a net-gain. If your conversion rate is less than 10% then it wouldn't make sense to offer free trials. Now, this is all assuming that a customer wouldn't sign up straight-away if you didn't have a trial; which is not necessarily the case! --- end example --- The goal of a free trial offer is to convert the trial customer into a paying customer and the cost of non-converted trials is factored into the cost of customer acquisition. Every service is going to have their own implementation - at OwnOcean we spin up a Digital Ocean instance for each customer so that each customer has their own space. So with https://www.OwnOcean.com https://www.OwnOcean.com, we don't have trials but we'll happily give you a refund. It's simpler than offering free-trials and functionally equivalent.