I'm a founder of one of the examples you list: https://circleci.com https://circleci.com Most of the people on this thread have it right: acquiring customers c

I'm a founder of one of the examples you list: https://circleci.com https://circleci.com Most of the people on this thread have it right: acquiring customers costs money but you make it up in the long run. You should be doing your SaaS metrics and include the cost of trials in your CAC, which should of course be less than 1/3 of your LTV. Because we're an infrastructure-based business, there is a bit of cost in giving people a trial, but it's not really that big a deal, and free trials are largely noise considering our overall run-rate (in January, we announced that this was over $1m ARR). And of course, raising money makes this easier too: we've raised about $7.5m at this point (http://blog.circleci.com/we-raised-a-6m-series-a/ http://blog.circleci.com/we-raised-a-6m-series-a/), so even if our trial was expensive it wouldn't break the bank.