Hot answers tagged trial
9
We're dealing with this very issue right now at HubSpot.
Right now, we have a free trial of the product, but I'm pushing for moving this to a freemium model.
My primary arguments:
1) There are some number of users that simply will not invest in a trial. But, if there's a free version of the product, they may think "hey, I get the basic features forever". ...
8
While BasicallyMoney.com offers a good consumer's perspective, keep in mind that you're in the business to make money. Everything single thing that you can possibly do (even, say, give away free $100 bills on the street) will turn people off.
Don't be afraid of turning people off. That's called qualifying, and it's a critical process to making sales. But ...
7
Maybe try to decide by looking what you like the most. Have you ever wanted to review some online product yourself?
Well I did and here is my $0.02 on it.
free package - often so unusable that you can't really do anything with it and you abandon the evaluation of it; in rare cases it is fantastically usable, problem can be that my needs are less than a ...
6
Advantage of the freemium model are that your program is more likely to become well-known when there are many users of the free version who spread the word. Optimaly, a community forms that essentially does a large part of the marketing for you. For obvious reasons, the more specialised your software is, i.e. the lower the number of potential users is, the ...
5
You can always ask, but if you plan on charging for usage, it might be a bad idea. Speaking from my personal perspective, if I used an app that asked for a donation, I might give something, but if a month later they started charging me, then I would resent the fact that I had been hit up for a donation earlier.
If, however, the intent is to NEVER charge ...
5
If you ask for a credit card number up front, you will turn people off. I guarantee it.
If you charge if the customer doesn't cancel, i.e. "negative option billing" for your trial, you will turn people off. I guarantee it.
If you charge when the trial starts, it isn't really a trial then, is it? You will turn people off. I guarantee it.
Make it easy ...
5
First: if you take credit cards for payment you are effectively already offering a money back guarantee. See the question Should We Offer a Money Back Guarantee
Second, without a trail version you will definitely lose some portion of your sales to people who will not buy without testing your software first. If you don't mind losing a protion of your sales, ...
4
You said the magic word: new
Give it time, work on marketing via social networks, ads, SEO and constantly improve the looks (aesthetics) and functionality of your web application.
Don't get discouraged now. Keep running it. for two years even if you have to. if your offering is good - "it will come".
Simply keep moving your app onward and upward and never ...
4
We made the switch from having a free and open trial to requiring a credit card and saw the results that you're expecting: Fewer trials, more qualified leads and more conversions. The most striking metric we noticed: While the number of free trial signups was cut in half, the number of conversions stayed the same.
The idea that trials should be ultra easy ...
4
Lot's of SaaS companies have been successful with "Lite" versions (like SurveyMonkey and anything from 37signals) by not calling them "Lite"
I think you have to avoid calling it "Lite" and just have different levels of user experience. That way, you can get a good cross section of users that pay for your service at different levels -- all without losing ...
4
I think the free trial period should give them full access to everything. As long as you are clear about the plans and the restrictions, I don't think it's cheating.
Your main goal during their free trial is to get them to convert to your product, if all the features are going to give them the best experience, then give them all the features. You probably ...
3
Daniel - one approach would be to put yourself in the founder's situation and use Paul Graham's equation: http://paulgraham.com/equity.html.
Obviously you are keen to make sure you get fairly rewarded, and rightly so. Accept that any start-up situation comes with big risks, and if you are not prepared to walk away after 3 months (or more even) with nothing ...
3
I think your general principal is provide a "minimum barrier to entry".
The harder you make it, the less people will adopt it. There were several a BayCHI podcasts and several automate my small business podcasts on this topic (over the last 3 years) looking at barriers on your site and the rate of "drop off" (or "improvement you could make") by reducing ...
3
This is one of those things where testing would help.
Try a few variations and get a sense of what the shape of your funnel is under various scenarios:
What's the percentage of users who take subsequent action when:
When you have no friction
When you have a simple registration form
When you ask for credit card information (but make it clear you're not ...
2
Absolutely agree that the term and business plans around "shareware" are behind the times. I saw in one of your other questions that someone recommended your release a web app of your product. Good advice, if it is relevant.
I would check out the following products / companies / movements to help bring you up to speed with new software companies making ...
2
Shareware does tend to be an old word now, but what you may want to do is release a version that has some limited functionality, so that people can get an idea. If you have it for a 30 day trial that can generally be worked around by the user, so it would be better to just let them use the limited one if they want, as, if they like it and it meets their ...
2
The only time I see the word shareware nowadays is when I am installing some productivity app from download.com or something. It would be helpful to know what sort of software you are providing and who is targeted at.
Generally the pattern I am seeing these days is "30 Days Free Trial" or something along those lines. I think once you further define your ...
2
We've gone a couple different ways with our apps. And it's really depended on who your target customer is. In one of our apps we offer a 45 day free pilot, no credit card upfront, etc. But this app's primary customers are large businesses whose employees don't have the authority at the "let's try this out" point to pay with a credit card.
With another ...
2
We went through a similar decision making process at my company. What we learnt was that a time-bound "free trial" with access to all features of the product had a higher conversion rate than a cannibalized time-unlimited free product. The key is to get the correct time limit for the free trial and nurturing users over the free trial so that they convert. As ...
2
Yes there are statistics.
Mailchimp has an excellent blog post about this very thing.
Going Freemium: One Year Later
and this great article
Why free plans don't work
2
Here's what we do for our Virtual Time Clock software:
Ship separate versions (ours are Basic and Pro)
In our evaluation (unlicensed) Basic version, we add a dialog at quit that tells outlines a few benefits of the Pro version and a link to a full feature comparison page (and download) on our web site. The dialog has a 'Do not show again' checkbox so users ...
2
Many ASP members have run detailed studies on your question. The most important thing to understand is that there is no general optimal length of a trial period, no optimal extent of crippling, and no optimal trial period. Everything depends on your application and target audience.
There are, however, a number of important things that have been revealed by ...
2
I'm not sure this question has a general answer.
Yes, I've seen a correlation. No, I don't think it applies to other software.
It all depends on what your software does, how often people use it, now much of a pain point it solves.
Quick answer to your two questions:
1) Trial expiry: As a rule of thumb, start with 30 days trial, and then devise of a series ...
2
Pierre is correct in stating it varies by industry. Ill give you this without spilling too much of my personal beans.
I have a really specific b2b subscription service, with a 14 day trial. Our cancellation ratio is about 4/5. It is expensive, and very specific.
We also have a few consumer based products, that allow free unlimited versions and 30 day ...
2
Check Don't just roll the dice. This is a free (and nice) ebook on software pricing. I remember the author has dedicated some pages on trial strategy too.
I'm sure you will get something out of it.
All the best!
2
We've tried both and for the last decade we've exclusively employed usage based trials.
The reason usage based trials convert much better is that a large number of trials are explored in one period of time (the 'research' stage) and actually demoed at a later time (the 'trial' stage). When a user does research they most often look over your product ...
2
Another thing to consider:
How do you charge people? Are you using an "external" company like PayPal or any other payment provider or do you have a secure form that looks as an integral part of your website? What about the design of the payment page? Is it designed to instill trust and peace of mind? Is it bothersome? too hard to follow? Payment pages are ...
1
I would recommend you let your offering be free during beta. I'm generally opposed to freemium but it depends on the use case. Could you offer a free version that's rate limited/throttled? For something like, e.g., a twilio integration it would make sense to start charging above a certain amount of usage.
The key in my mind is not leaving beta until ...
1
We have tried some different strategies: Started with a 60 day free trial and found that was too long to encourage decision making and use of the trial. We reduced this to 30 days free so we get a quicker decision on the subscription and can communicate with users during that time to answer questions and suggest different ways of using the system.
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