Week one of a $4.99 dictation app: buy button dead for 8 days, first clean sale, and the 30-day lag nobody warns you about

I make VocalCode (https://vocalcode.app) - push-to-talk dictation, speech recognition runs on-device, Windows and Apple Silicon, $4.99 once. Some honest numbers from the first real week of promotion, since the IH posts I learned the most from were the unflattering ones.

Downloads: 25-40 a day, spiking to about 40 on the day I spent answering other people's Reddit threads instead of posting my own.

Sales: one clean sale this week that went Stripe -> licence -> email with nobody touching it. That's the number. The 30-day full trial means the real revenue readout is in September, which I knew going in and still find uncomfortable.

The embarrassing part: for eight days the buy button on my own homepage pointed at a deactivated payment link. There's health monitoring now that probes the checkout every 30 minutes and emails me if it dies - and it caught a second, worse misconfiguration before a real buyer hit it.

What moved the needle: answering 'which dictation app should I use' threads with a disclosure line and one verifiable claim (block the app at the firewall, dictate, see if it still types) beat every launch post I wrote.

What didn't: cold emails to 20 reviewers and editors. 0 replies at 48 hours, which I'm told is normal, and which still stings.

Question for anyone who has sold a sub-$5 one-time desktop app: did a 30-day trial help or hurt conversion for you? I'm considering cutting it to 14.