Free tier or free trial for a brand new SaaS?
I keep going back and forth on this.
A free tier gets more people in the door, but it can fill up with users who will never pay. A trial pushes people to decide, but it can scare off the ones who just want to poke around first.
What did you pick for your product, and would you pick the same again?
And if you switched later, what made you switch?
(Disclosure: I'm the founder of IndieNeed, a free directory for indie products, and I'm genuinely curious how makers decide this before they launch.)
For a brand-new SaaS I'd lean free trial (or a tight usage cap that forces a decision) unless the product needs a network/habit to prove value. Free tiers are great for top-of-funnel, but early on they can bury you in support from people who were never going to pay. A 7–14 day trial with a clear "aha" checklist tends to teach you more about conversion.
We went with a third option on swapfile.live: free with no tier and no trial, because file conversion costs us almost nothing to serve (all in-browser, static hosting). The deciding factor was marginal cost - if each free user costs you real money, do a trial; if free users cost nothing, a free tier buys goodwill and word of mouth forever. What's your per-user cost look like?