I thought offering free trials is impossible if you're a poor, but I was wrong

2 points by xucian 82 days ago | 2 comments

i finally embraced free trials

the key is: have a shared communal amount of credits, and it's first come, first served. calculate how much you can afford at max per day and that's it

i got burned by free trials in 2023 when people automated account creation to abuse the system, so i just dumped them altogether, but i think this variation is the sweet spot. thoughts?

it's way harder to implement in an existing system than when you're just getting started, so i recommend everyone consider this when building their next projects, especially if you bootstrap and probably can't afford free trials for everyone

the app in question is a midjourney-like image/video generator: maginary.ai

pavel_lishin 82 days ago |

> the key is: have a shared communal amount of credits, and it's first come, first served. calculate how much you can afford at max per day and that's it

Wouldn't this very likely mean that a lot of your users hit a wall immediately, without being able to use any credits?

xucian 82 days ago | |

yes, that's the point, but you will rise the ceiling the more paying users you get. as opposed to having to deal with per-user limits, you have a global limit you fully control

for example, i have 900 users, 7% paying, but it's 3-6 new users per day, it's manageable at 5 credits per user per day (non-renewable), and 20 communal (so in theory 4 users)

when i grow, i just raise the communal credits from 20 to, let's say 100, so 5x more free happy users per day. i think it's beautiful in its simplicity and flexibility