[nikolajan]

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.

[mason55]

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.

[ezekg]

> 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.

Yep. That's the problem with timed free trials. It applies pressure to sign up only within your magical goldilocks timeframe, otherwise you'll likely bounce because you're not ready to start your 14/30/41/60/etc. day eval.

[ezekg]

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.