Free trials - with or without credit card?

Without, for these reasons:

• "Without" converts better to revenue (Neil Patel did a study)
• "Without" allows as many users as possible to use your product (more feedback)
• "With" might be a dark pattern, where many SaaS companies don't warn their trial users before they're charged thus catching them off-guard and resulting in a higher-than-acceptable dispute activity rate (this is how your Stripe gets suspended)

I always go without, because I realize my product speaks for itself. If it's any good, people will upgrade. If not, card or not, they'll cancel.

However, any users who are unlikely to pay up front are also unlikely to pay later.

I'm not so sure about this. Unless you have a really strong brand name, I have no reason to trust a random company with my payment details unless/until they've won some of my trust, and that comes in the form of letting me see what you've got before asking for my money.

Just my two satoshis on the matter

Without

I would personally go for free trial without credit card. When you ask me for my card you are asking to put your hand in my bank account. That's deeply invasive if I haven't yet decided that I like what you are offering!

Unless you have millions of users and dollars to boot, I wouldn't put ANY obstacles in front of ANYONE wanting to try your product, regardless of whether or not they stick around afterwards. Most users will fizzle away within days of trying your product so the worst that can happen is you have dead accounts in your system that you can get rid of after 30 days of inactivity.

The only time I can reasonably recommend free trial WITH credit card is if it is really expensive or risky for you to offer the trial but this only tends to happen in offline products/services (e.g. taking a Ferrari for a test-drive as the "free trial").

Don't be shy about asking for the card later on during the trial when users have gone through the steps required for them to see the value you offer. At that point people are less concerned about whether or not you are legit and are therefore more likely to pony up the cash!

I've curated hundreds of SaaS marketing pages for SaaSFrame.io and 95% of them don't require credit cards to start the trial.

I think that if you have a good product, you should try by all mean to reduce the friction to try the product. If your prospect like it, they'll register their credit card later.

I decided to go without for Firewards and offer a free 14-trial because especially in the beginning I wanted some usage of the product to make sure it works flawlessly. Customers are going to get unsatisfied if they pay for your product and experience glitches. I am placing trial notifications within the product to try to convert the user if the trial is closer to end. I think the notifications start to show up 7 days before the trial ends.

without absolutely

We decided to go without for Arena app to really make it easy for people to sign up. As others have said too, we really want this to be of value and if it isn't, we'll focus on that first.

If you want to ask for a credit card, your leads will be more qualified as it’s customers who are almost ready to buy.

You can segment it by making the sign up multi-step by first asking for the email and then the card at a subsequent step.

Asking for a card up front will also get rid of a lot of tire kickers and minimize support, people who are trying to hack your system, etc.

As others of said, your full signups will be lower.

I tend to prefer no credit card requirement for a trial. If its an unknown company or a relatively new company I'm unlikely to give any card details for a trial. If I find the trial works well and fixes a need I have, I'm more inclined to then add my card details.

For Portabella I'm going without. I already have a free tier, it's only when they want to setup an organisation (and after 7 days) that people will have to pay. I'm trying to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.

Without to start a product (good to get reviews and improve your products)

Then, after a while, depends on the product, but I prefer making a free plan with limited features and paid plans (without trial because there is a free plan)

For one product, where each use cost us money (because product call paid API that we used), so we still make a trial account, but with money-back guarantee (so with a credit card and even payment). that works very well.

I worked for a big Saas company that had a free version and paid version. We decided to allow the pro version to have a trail without credit card. After a week or two into that experiment we stopped doing it because it lead to the pro trials being lower quality leads.

Without and also without sign up (let users test your product without signing up...)