How About 30-use Free Trials Instead of 30-days?

How About 30-use Free Trials Instead of 30-days?(evhead.com)

32 points by rlivsey 14 years ago | 17 comments

aqrashik 14 years ago |

I feel that limiting the number of uses may be counter-productive and may actually make users try it less so as to preserve the number of trials remaining and stretch out the trial.

Fixed number of days encourage people to try more knowing that their trial would expire whether they use it or not.

I have no data to back this up though and would be interested in actual results if anyone has tested the two approaches.

judofyr 14 years ago | |

What about sending an email like this a few days before the trial expires:

    Hey <name>, You signed up for our trial, but you've
    almost never used it. Click HERE to extend your trial
    for another month if you feel you need some more time.

mikeleeorg 14 years ago | | |

I like this idea. You could also check to see if the user has used your product frequently within the trial period or not. An infrequent user could be sent such an email to give him/her more time.

This email also acts as a nice reminder for users who may have forgotten about your product. I've signed up for so many betas that I sometimes forget.

Unosolo 14 years ago |

Free trials aren't free to the company. It's a promise given to customers that they will be able to make use of company's assets without payment. Company normally has to pay for both the actual usage that occurs and the option of usage it has granted to it's customers so far. Trial subscription and expiry mechanism lets company control the maximum amount of free usage they have agreed to at any point in time.

Let's say you came up with a new and innovative service that let's people publish pictures they took with a mobile phone into the cloud. Because you calculate it will cost you on average one dollar per user account per month to provide the service you decide to charge your users $5 per month.

To attract new users you also decide to give them opportunity to try the service before they commit. You have a few options:

1. Let users upload the pictures in reduced quality for free unless they convert into premium. You're worried that this strategy will distort your user base: people who actually need best possible quality will not get a true impression of your service. On the other hand you will have to pay indefinitely for the storage and bandwidth of a whole lot of inferior quality pictures. Even worse the policy will attract whole group of non-paying users that will be content with the inferior picture quality and will make a heavy use of your service.

2. Let people upload up to 50 pictures free. In which case again you'll end up with having to pay for non-paying customers storing their pictures forever. Even worse some unscrupulous people will end up opening hundreds of accounts and some kid in Russia will write a utility working on top of your service seamlessly opening and amalgamating free accounts for a single user.

3. Set a free trial period of 30 days when users can upload pictures for free. After 30 days they will either have to convert into paying customers or download their data because you're going to automatically purge the free accounts. You're worried that 30 days may not be enough for some people to evaluate your service, but then you decide to look at the conversion stats; after-all if the prospect couldn't make up their mind after 30 days maybe the need wasn't that pressing and you shouldn't be wasting your company resource trying to convert them?

michael_dorfman 14 years ago | |

This depends upon the type of service offered. If the are significant user-based storage or bandwidth costs, the analysis you offer is correct. If, on the other hand, the usage does not increase costs-- oh, let's say an online bingo-card creation program-- you've got a completely different segmentation picture.

Kudos 14 years ago |

Panic's apps do this if I recall correctly, the day counter of your trial only decrements for days you've actually run it.

pflats 14 years ago | |

As a user, this is my preferred way of having things work out. For SaaS, though, I can understand why a company would eventually want to purge incomplete, unconverted trials from their servers.

Perhaps a system that offered 14 free days of use could expire the account after 60 or days. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

forensic 14 years ago |

Lots of apps do this or use a combined approach. It aint new and it's a fine idea.

Try this on: Lock app after 30 uses if 30 days has passed.

smackfu 14 years ago |

Microsoft Office does this too. I think you get 100 runs, which is almost too long, since people may use the app for 6 months to a year before hitting the wall. Or maybe that is the point.

dmethvin 14 years ago | |

One advantage of a really long trial (say, six months) is that if your product/service has become useful to them at that point, it's unlikely they'll bail out. As the deadline approaches you can send them an email or on-site alert reminding them that they'll lose the time/data/learning/connections they've invested in. That kind of pitch doesn't hold water for a 14-day trial.

PaulHoule 14 years ago |

free trials aren't free to the consumer.

pretty frequently I sign up for free trials for programming tools and never get around to evaluating them in the allotted time. i'm just too busy doing other things.

wiseleo 14 years ago |

I limit use of my product to a certain number of transactions. You can unlock more transactions through social media or with a credit card. :)

As my product is transactional, limiting it on number of days did not make sense.

freerobby 14 years ago |

I don't like pay-per-use trials (or billing strategies) because it disincentivizes people from using your product. I want people to pay for my service, and then I want them to use it as much as possible.

fluidcruft 14 years ago | |

I agree. Hook your users using operant conditioning. Give them random positive rewards for using your software.

bilban 14 years ago |

I once had a crap work laptop that continually crashed. Every crash counted as one use - and that was incredibly annoying. So I'd rather something like one use equate to one day.

seanmccann 14 years ago |

Isn't this really just similar to a freemium model? You get limited interaction forever and must upgrade to a paid plan if you get hooked and need more.

webwright 14 years ago | |

This would be a subset of Freemium. Freemium can be trialware (time based), crippleware (feature-based), metered (usage based, like Dropbox or Flickr), etc.

It'd be interested to see someone measure the effect of this. By offering a timed trial, you can (theoretically) create a sense of urgency. On day 7 of a 14 day trial, you can email "Only 7 days left! You haven't logged in much yet, so you better hurry up and take it for a spin!". If you removed that time pressure and replaced it with a "Looks like you haven't used OurApp much yet. You still have 14 logins left!", would it perform as well? From a marketing point of view, I think saying "take your time" wouldn't be a win.