How I'm approaching free trials & demos for my three largest projects

Hello Indie Hackers!

I’m Misha Krunic, the founder of Price2Spy, justLikeAPI, and BotMeNot. You may or may not have seen me be active here, but I’ve been reading a lot of discussions lately and I’ve noticed one thing. There has been some debate around how to approach the free trials for your project.

There are numerous questions when it comes to it. Do you need to request credit card info, how long should the free trial be, should you even limit it by time or implement a different type of a limit.

This is why I’ve decided to write a 2-part series on this topic and a closely related one. In this article, I’ll cover how I’ve approached free trials for my three largest projects, and in the next one, I’ll explain their pricing models (make sure to stay tuned!).

Price2Spy - 30-Day Trial, no Credit Cards Required

Price2Spy is a price monitoring tool. In short, it’s used by eCommerce professionals worldwide in order to get a better insight into what’s going on with their competition and the market in general. Being oriented toward business clients of various sizes (from SMBs to Enterprise) Price2Spy falls into the B2B category in the SaaS environment.

Price2Spy has been on the market for over 11 years now, and I have to say that during that time we have gathered significant information about our clients and the way they make their decisions. The chances that a business discovers Price2Spy for the first time and then starts paying for it are not very high. It usually takes up to three months from when our clients (or better yet, prospects at that time) first discover us to when they start paying for Price2Spy.

Before continuing, though, let me emphasize how important it is to understand the decision-making process of your clients. Why? Among many other things, it helps you set realistic expectations and growth predictions for the long term.
We are aware that our clients do not explore Price2Spy as their only price monitoring option. What usually happens is that Price2Spy is compared to other similar services. The comparison is done on two main fields – features and pricing. Depending on the respective business needs, a decision is made on whether Price2Spy is the right solution.

We have decided that one month is the right duration between how much time it takes to get insight into the value Price2Spy provides and how long we’re ready to offer our service to be used for free. There are some limits, though. For example, the number of monitored URLs is limited to 2000 and only basic features are available.

What about our decision to not require credit card information when starting out our trial?

After thinking about it, we have concluded that as a B2B SaaS we have clients whose conversions won’t be affected whether or not they’ve given their credit card info. If they’re dissatisfied with Price2Spy, they’ll simply opt out. On the other hand, there are at least three important things not requiring credit card info does for us.

First of all, it sets us apart. This doesn’t refer only to our direct competitors. In the sea of online services that require credit card info, it comes as a „breath of fresh air“ when you see something that you can use free of charge, without any commitment obligations.

Second thing is that it communicates our confidence in our product. Over the years, we have witnessed numerous clients use our services and grow their business with them. Their numbers have only grown and that fact served as evidence that we’re doing something right.

Also, we always keep an ear out for our clients’ feedback. Based on that, we try to improve our service and adjust to our client’s needs. This approach and a constant feedback stream from our clients is what enables us to stay confident.

Third thing is that it establishes trust between us and our clients. We’re not trying to quickly persuade our clients to convert. We aim at nurturing a long-lasting relationship. We’re simply trying to keep our clients by providing a service of the highest quality we can.

JustLikeAPI – We’re moving from a 14 to 30-day trial

For a long time, we have simultaneously had a 30-day free trial offer for Price2Spy and a 14-day free trial offer for JustLikeAPI. Soon this will change, and we’ll have a 30-day free trial for JustLikeAPI, as well.

The reasons are that JustLikeAPI is growing and it takes more time for our clients to properly assess the value it provides.

Besides, we have become aware of the already mentioned benefits from Price2Spy’s 30-day free trial and want to carry it over to JustLikeAPI.
In essence, we have decided we don’t want to create a false sense of urgency that a short free trial period creates. Instead, we want to focus on nurturing long-term stable relationships with our clients by focusing on providing as much value as we can.

BotMeNot – A Different Kind of Free Trial

BotMeNot is different from Price2Spy and JustLikeAPI. BotMeNot’s purpose is to test, measure, and score any website’s bot protection. The way it works is that our users choose any website by themselves. This is why we are only in control of what kind of test our users want to run. We can’t control what website they choose. This fact is more important for our future pricing model, but it also plays a part in what we plan to offer for our free trial.

Namely, we want to offer our trial users a limited amount of credits. With them, they’ll still be able to choose any website they want to run the tests on. However, the trial amount of credits will not be enough to run our most complex and most comprehensive test.

Our tests work by simulating bot behavior on a website. This means performing various actions with certain goals and measuring the completion rate of those goals. Based on that, we assess the website’s bot protection levels and its vulnerabilities. The point is – the more complex the test, the more nuanced vulnerabilities will it be able to detect.

This way, our trial users will get a glimpse into how BotMeNot works and what can they expect out of it. By this, I mean that the tests our users perform with the free credits they receive are the same as when they start paying. If they see the need for more complex tests or for continuing with the lighter ones, they’ll start paying.

Conclusion

Hopefully, with this article, I’ve answered some of the questions you’ve had when it comes to how to approach free trials.

As you’ve seen, I’m trying out various approaches. Two relatively similar ones for Price2Spy and justLikeAPI, and something different for BotMeNot.

Obviously, we’re going to actively keep track of the results and feedback we receive, and based on those things we’ll adjust accordingly.

If this seemed interesting to you, make sure to keep an eye out for the second part of this series. In it, I’ll write about the different pricing models of my three projects and the reasoning behind them.

If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ask!