30 day free trial vs forever free plan?
What are everyone's thoughts on offering new customers a 30 day free trial versus offering a forever free plan with limitations?
Creating a new service, that doesn't cost much to operate. Debating between offering a 30 day trial to customers versus keeping a free forever plan. The plus side of a free forever plan, is that based on my service, people continuing to use the service would advertise our URLs.
Thoughts? Opinions?
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We have been developing a Saas for 4 years, reached 300k users.
95% of paying users come from the free plan, and only 5% start trial.
One of the main principles of the Product-led Growth strategy is the freemium model.
Imagine if Slack had only 30-day trial?
Maybe there are different options for different types of products. slack is a 'communication software' and its genes dictate that it can't do free trial.
But if it is a tool app may be more helpful, in order to 30 days to develop user habits (but I have to admit, due to the emergence of more and more 'alternatives', tool app also faces a difficult choice)
Yeah, different products and use cases need dirrefent approach. There is no universal method for everything in this world.
Freemium is powerful since it provides a set of free features that hooks users to the platform. Once they start using those, they put more effort and "properties" on the platform, this is really a good thing for better retention.
Once they decide to stay, we can charge them by advanced unique value-added features.
Agree. I can say more, I always advise everyone to start the free version ONLY, and think about monetization and premium features much later.
User adoption is much more important than the first $100 earned.
You should do both. X-day trial then make them choose to upgrade to stay on premium plans or downgrade to a free forever plan.
https://userpilot.com/blog/saas-reverse-trial/
It always depends on your product.
If you can offer a good free plan, where the user can enjoy the basic features - do it.
But if you are limited on features, stay with the 30 days free plan.
I definitely have a few features that I could add to paid plans to further separate them from free plans.
Then there is nothing that stop you offering that.
I think it's a plus if you can offer a forever free plan - to keep at least the chance that power users will switch to a paid plan at one point.
Levelsio put it best in his faq: https://nomadlist.com/faq#free
Check the 'Why isn't Nomad list free?'
I hadn't seen this, blunt but accurate - love it!
Unless you it doesnt cost much to keep a forever free plan, don't do a forever free plan. If your service cost increases as the amount of usage increase, then you need to put a limit on free plans. The best would be something like 30 day free trial after which you start charging. If they truly like and need your product, they would be willing to pay else they're just a cost center for you.
It doesn't cost me much for a user to have a free plan. Everything is built off AWS lambda, so it's actually stupid cheap.
Thats a critical business decision you need to make. Can you monetize your free users eventually? Like ads. Do you think these free users will spread word of your product to others? If you dont think so for either , then I would put a limit on free users. Maybe offer longer than 30 days but not free forever.
Yes. I can absolutely monetize free users.
Then go for free forever!
I run BudgetSheet, and use a 45-day time limited trial. I have ongoing costs per bank account connected, so I simply cannot afford any kind of permanent free tier.
It does depend on the business, but I would say that most indie hackers, solo founders, and small startups without funding are not in any kind of position to support a "forever free" tier.
Well sure you can do free tiers. Just do it so that the users want more and higher tiers
It really depends on the product. A free plan I believe is always better, but if your software is B2B then it's possible you can get away with a free trial :)
Provide enough value that there is incentive to convert from free to paid. I always feel rushed with a 30d trial (or less) to see if it's of value.
I don't have a huge deal of experience in this domain, but the answer (like always) probably is "it depends".
Patrick Campbell at Profitwell argues that Freemium should be considered an acquisition strategy. I tend to agree with that.
If your product is not too costly to operate and is not aimed at the enterprise market from day one, Freemium could make sense. But you should weight the pros and cons of doing this in relation to your own business.
If the user is the customer, do a limited free trial at most.
If the user is the product, go free forever.
While imparting a unfastened trial of a products or services is perfectly legal, consumers must nonetheless be wary. So I think we should try free trail although It contains lass features. I might be wrong
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I'm a fan of the freemium model, personally — particularly if you've got marketing baked into it like you do. And I think it's sometimes a good idea to offer a freemium model AND a free trial (for premium).
Something that very few people consider: You can have a paid product without a free trial, but make it very very clear that they have a 30-day money back guarantee. I know this has worked for some.
I'm not sure and I think it depends on the product.
On one hand freemium is superior because it gives your users all the time they need to build trust and cultivate knowledge with your product.
On the other hand limited free trails adds scarcity to your product. This forces users to purchase or churn which acts as a concrete filter.
As a user, free forever. As a product builder, 30 day trail but again it depends.
I'm going to dive deeper into this in a blog post.
Freemium is cool, especially if they will be using the product for a very long time.
That's my hope - it's something they can use for a looooong time
Luca, a member of the WBE Space is going through the same dilemma with his toll hivoe.com. I think it depends on each business. I guess the question is: What will happen to the free users once you remove that tier. What percentage will convert to paid users? Is that percentage worth it?
I'm a big fan of letting users have a free account and then trying to upsell them to your premium plan (give them a very good reason to upgrade). That's what we did with fabform.io
Depend on your product lineup and how you build your GTM in specific competitive landscape. It's really hard to answer without the specific context. Also pricing is something about state of the art that require setting and learning.
In a most generic way I can say:
30-day free, or free trial: Your value requires trying to understand, and the feature set if small and built around the single value. The free trial will offer a time to users to confirm the value that you tell them on the landing page. Once you use it, feel it, and it really solve their problem, so it time to get them pay for stuffs. The exact trial time depend on the "Time to value" metric. Finding a way to measure or discover that helps you choose the best time to charge. Always have a simple way to define this number is to test and adjust. An example of this is that the Github copilot offer me 90 days free trial then $4/month, after 3 weeks I'm ready to pay since I found it amazing.
Free forever with limitation, aka freemium: Means they can use small set of feature forever and need to pay for advanced ones. It's good if you have a part of your product are widely offered by many other products, and those functions are commodity and makes no sense to charge your users. E.g., you can use Notion for your personal note taking purpose, but when you want to work together with your team or family - this is where the unique selling point of Notion that is Collaboration comes - you need to pay for the higher plan.
Free with ads: Always not my taste since it make the product not clean.
With freemium, you can use the free features to hook users and retain them on the platform, then charge them with your unique value
We're currently trying the free forever plan on Squeaky but we're not convinced it's the right approach. It's helped us bring in users and spread the word about our product, but in a way it's not that helpful for us to primarily attract people that want something for free haha.
I think basically if your business has really explosive growth, or is VC-funded, then the free forever plan/approach is valuable because you'll generate enough revenue from upgrades in a short enough time frame to make it work. But if you're bootstrapping like us it's not ideal, as freemium converts at around 2-3% typically. So for every 100 companies that join our platform 2-3 start paying.
If you don't need money - do free plan. But it is better to make the free plan limited and give a trial period for the full functionality, followed by a paid subscription.
It all really depends on how they advertise your URL. For my latest SaaS, since it's a javascript widget and they need to use the widget to use the saas I'm going for freemium since then I get lots of marketing through people seeing the widget and the social proof it provides.
Monetize free users