Free Trial

A free trial gives potential customers temporary access to your product. After the trial period ends, they either convert to a paid subscription or lose access. Most SaaS free trials run 7-30 days, with 14 days being the most common. Airtable, HubSpot, and Shopify all use trial-based acquisition to let prospects evaluate the product under real conditions.

Unlike freemium, which lets users stay on a free tier indefinitely, free trials create urgency. There's a deadline. That urgency drives evaluation, but it also means you need to get users to their "aha moment" quickly. Netflix famously built its early subscriber base on a 30-day free trial before eventually dropping it in 2020 once brand recognition made it unnecessary.

Opt-in vs opt-out trials

The biggest decision is whether to require a credit card upfront.

Opt-in trials (no card required) remove friction at sign-up. More people start the trial, but fewer convert. Typical conversion rates sit around 15-25%. The users who do convert tend to have higher intent because they actively chose to enter payment details after experiencing the product.

Opt-out trials (card required, cancel before it charges) generate higher conversion rates, often 40-60%, because users who don't cancel get charged automatically. The risk is that some of those conversions are passive: the customer forgot to cancel and will churn shortly after being charged. Opt-out trials also produce more support tickets and chargebacks.

In practice, most B2B SaaS companies have shifted toward opt-in trials. The conversion rate is lower, but the customers who convert tend to be higher quality. The exception is products with very short evaluation periods (like productivity tools) where an opt-out trial with a 7-day window can work well.

What drives conversion

Trial length matters less than you'd think. Shortening a trial from 30 days to 14 days often improves conversion because it creates urgency without meaningfully reducing evaluation time. Most users make their decision within the first 3-5 days. The rest of the trial is often wasted.

What actually moves conversion rates:

• Time to value. How quickly can a new user accomplish something meaningful? If it takes a week of setup before your product is useful, a 14-day trial is really only a 7-day trial
• Onboarding quality. Guided setup, progress indicators, and proactive check-ins all correlate with higher conversion
• Feature depth during trial. Giving trial users access to all features (not a restricted subset) produces higher conversion because they evaluate the real product, not a watered-down version

After conversion: the churn risk

The moment a trial user converts to paid, involuntary churn becomes a factor. Their credit card can expire, their bank can decline a charge, their funds can run low. We've seen SaaS companies optimise their trial-to-paid funnel extensively while doing nothing about post-conversion payment failures. That's a gap worth closing with dunning automation.

For a comparison of trials and freemium models, see freemium vs free trial.