SaaS Free Trial Policies
Discussions center on best practices for free trials in SaaS products, particularly whether to require credit card information upfront, user trust issues, conversion strategies, and alternatives like free tiers or no-payment trials.
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Would it make your experience worse if a free trial just ended and you got a notification telling you to click to continue for $x/mo?
Can't you offer a free trial for everyone to test your service and potentially convert if they like it?
Note that the 30-day trial is free ONLY if you give them your credit card number. Why should I worry about them having that information if I decide not to do it? Why shouldn't they do the work on their end of just killing my trial account if I don't sign up after 30 days? "Free" should be FREE. Not provisionally so.
Weird proposition. In both cases you would pay for the second usage and the free trial just proved that you need their product and they definitely should not let you use it for free
literally any service with a free trial--i.e. literally any service--has this "problem". it's an integral part of the equation in setting up free trials in the first place, and by no means a "trap". you're always going to have a % of users who do this, the business model relies on the users who forget and let the subscription cross over to the next month or simply feel its worth paying
It is pretty normal to put payment details in place for a free trial.
Create an amazing free trial and give them some real value. They will always want more at the end of it.
I take this a bit further for S3stat. Not only do we not ask for payment info when you sign up for the trial, we don't allow you to pay at all in the first 7 days, even if you want to.This essentially forces you to actually use the thing and decide if you want it before buying. Before switching to this mode, we used to get a lot of signup/pay/cancel cycles in the first few days of an account's lifetime. Since it sometimes takes a few days before our product is up and running at full force,
I happen to signup for a 30 day free trial for a service using my credit card. Yet I always put it aside to try it until my first payment was sent. I guess shorter trials will force the user to actually try it quickly and see if it fits for his requirements.
Something else to take away: don't require people to give away their billing information upfront when signing up for a trial; simply downgrade their account if the trial period ends and they haven't paid yet.