Should a SaaS have a free plan?

What is your product that you are offering? Is there a free plan feature set that makes sense? What do you gain from the free plan (i.e data usage, insights etc)? What's the uptake on the 14 day trial? What if you offer 30 day trial instead.

Have you read Product-Led Growth by @wesbush? Chapter Two is all about choosing the right selling tactic for YOUR SaaS startup: free trial, freemium, or demo. Inside the book, he includes a framework called MOAT, which will help you make an informed decision.

A free plan allows people to understand what makes you different from competitors. It's your time to shine and get user referrals in the process. Also it depends on the cost of your product. If it's less than $20 / mo then I probably would not do a trial. The more expensive it is, then a 14 or 30 day trial make sense

I think to grow your total user base, you do need a free plan. Like Canva started free and still kept its free plan for basic features, but they have 1 billion USD revenue now with a 40 billion valuation. They won't be able to achieve this kind of dominance in the market without their free plan.

I think having a free plan is great for introducing users to your application, but I don't think it's necessary. For T.LY, users are able to create short links for free, but all accounts require a valid subscription once the trial expires.

A free plan can be an effective marketing approach for some apps, particularly if there's some element of virality to the app. But the kind of freemium model where a tiny percentage of people convert to paid isn't generally going to work for a bootstrapped startup where the focus is generally on growth in revenue over growth in users, and I think more often a free trial is better for bootstrappers.