Anyone have any experience with using free trials?

look up price intelligently blog. Tons of resources on this topic. I prefer 21 day money back guarantee or something like that.
I also think people don't understand or investigate the upgrade from free->paid enough.

This is the approach we take at Tettra. For us it’s free pages. I think it better aligns with our customers getting value from the product before deciding to buy.

For more insight into our decision making process and impact to our revenue check out this talk from our CRO Kristen: https://www.productledsummit.com/talks/how-we-went-from-a-free-trial-to-freemium-model-and-survived/

Here are a few ideas.

1. can you benefit from free users who haven't converted yet? If so find out how. Maybe monitor their usage to improve the product. In that sense they're paying you.

2. Don't be lazy about the time. If the people aren't doing what you want it might be due to poor CTAs and other issues so keep optimizing.

3. One of the issues about a time based trial is the idea of scarcity and sense of urgency. If your product is free and they can use it why would they value it? Also, if you tell them if they sign up within the week you can offer them a discount - but that can go away (sense of urgency)

Over the years we have tried just about every approach. In the end, the only real answer is to keep testing until you find what works.

For us, it was limited features, but no expiration. What we found is that the time when someone found us did not always correlate when they truly needed our product. By letting them linger it opened the door when they were ready. Also, it makes it much easier to engage with a potential customer when they always have easy access to your product.

I think you want to make sure they're getting value out of it. For a lot of companies, if someone uses their product for 30 days and likes it, that's enough. However, different types of companies would absolutely benefit from other types of trials. If, for example, you have a lead generating tool and it generates 20 solid leads for your customer — that's a great time to ask for them to convert to paid.

The one downside to this custom approach is people won't be used to it. So, you'll have to explain it and have onboarding around it — or they just won't get it or will ignore it and think it's a regular time-based trial despite your best attempts to tell them otherwise. So, at the end of the day, a time-based approach would probably be best unless you can tie it into your product really neatly.

@AviSilverberg, What I have done in time past is to do both time-based and usage-based trial, but what I have learnt that just time-based with some kind of drip campaign works better.

I think a Slack approach to that may work if you can afford to keep the user even if they don't convert. Slack is a usage based trial period (10,000 messages max). As long as the limit is high enough doesn't actually disincentivize normal usage of the product, it's a solid route.