Free Trials: With or Without credit-card ?

Hey there 👋

Maybe asking yourself some hard questions upfront and deciding on the answers that best fit your needs/situation could be helpful to unpack this thorny question.

I was wondering:

Is the customer a business?

If it is, then I’d suggest that requiring a card might be a reasonable filter for preventing people who’d never convert after the trial anyway.

Also, it somewhat depends on the primary purpose of the trial. Is it so they can figure out how it works, take advantage of sunk cost fallacy, or to give comfort and not ask for a commitment blindly? Or to generate leads? Gather info from actual users etc. all of the above?! 😬

If you invest heavily in clearly demonstrating your offers value, using screencasts, how to, FAQ etc then a trial might not be required to understand the value...

If you do have a free trial you’ll really want to think hard about how you’re going to convert trials to paying customers near or when the trial expires.

This seems like moving the commitment down the timeline to me, and I think that brings a bunch of other interesting challenges and opens up a lot of additional questions.

Not a one-size-fits-all situation really 🤷‍♂️

All that said, I guess you can simply start charging once the trial ends if you have a card. In this situation I’d be concerned about the pushback from transitioning from trial to invoicing - it almost seems like an ambush :)

Without the card, as others have pointed out it’s a duel sale/opt-in challenge, so your offer better be rock solid & provide no reason for opting out 😬

@irshadnilam Would you like to check out this? https://onboardflow.com/onboard-summit

without credit card to get traction, and then, start to make A/B testing .
Only A/B testing can provide you a real answer, because each business, each landing page, each design is different...

When I launched Amezmo, there was no trial. I learned from talking to users/people that it's important to able to "get a feel" for a product before buying it. Offering a free trial is very important, unless you're in the enterprise sales business.

Think about yourself personally. For all the SaaS products you've used, or are using, did they have a trial?

I'd bet the answer is yes.

Next, let's talk about time. If you require a credit up front, then you need to make sure your marketing, illustrations, screenshots, and product information is dense. No one will give you a credit card upfront unless you have a lot of product information including all of the assets I've mentioned in the previous sentence.

Finally, You mentioned that considerable resources are required for even a trial account. In this case, I would recommend providing the trial accounts with limited resources. For example, at Amezmo, we offer a 30 day trial without a credit card.

The trial account gets 1 512MB instance. Physical memory is reserved for the trial account, but 512MB is not big enough to cause damage. Can you think about how you can provide the full experience of your product, but without needing to expend considerable amounts of resources?

yes, if it is free you don't need my credit card.
asking for credit if nobody knows and trust you can be very high onboarding friction.

have good wind

I remember to have saw a long discussion on hackernews about this (sadly, I wasn't able to find the link) and my conclusion based on those comments is that trials should not require a credit card, and if there is no trial, a money back guarantee without questions is the way to go.

Personally I tend to not pick trials requiring credit cards, I do understand that you could be losing money by having people on trials but that's better in most cases than having no users at all.

I’d say without. In my workplace we need to ask the finance department for the credit card details etc, so a lot of times it would put us of trialing something if it were asking for card details up front

Hey. I'd suggest that you do collect credit card details. Otherwise you'd have to convince your users twice to sign-up (once for the initial sign-up and again to pay). Unless the free trial version has limited functionality that will entice the users to sign-up on their own I think collections cards initially might be the way to go.