Free Trial

Full access for a limited time, compared with a freemium tier.

Also known as: free trial, trial period, 14-day trial

A free trial gives full (or near-full) product access for a limited time — typically around two weeks — then requires payment. Unlike freemium’s permanent free tier, trials create urgency: evaluate now, decide by the date. They suit products whose value shows quickly and whose buyers decide fast.

trial:    full value, 14 days, card upfront-or-not → convert or expire (urgency engine)
freemium: partial value forever → convert on need (distribution engine)

The design variables: length (short enough for urgency, long enough to reach value — anchored to your time-to-value data), card upfront (fewer, better-qualified trials vs more, noisier ones), and what happens at expiry (graceful downgrade beats hard lockout for goodwill and win-back).

The classic mistakes:

Trial longer than time-to-value. Thirty days for a product whose aha arrives in one session just delays decisions (and revenue) by 29 days. Match length to measured value timing (activation).
No onboarding during trial. Trial users left alone churn at trial end having seen nothing. Guided first-run, check-in emails, concierge touches for promising accounts — trials are sold, not hosted.
Card-upfront dogma either way. Requiring cards filters tire-kickers and scares the cautious; skipping floods support with tourists. Test both against paid conversion, not trial starts.
Expiry as an ending. Trial ends, account locks, relationship dies. Expired trials are the warmest leads in the building — downgrade gracefully, follow up personally, win back systematically.
Trial metrics confused with business metrics. Trial starts flatter every dashboard while conversions tell the truth. Optimize conversion rate and time-to-value, never starts.

Pair with: activation instrumentation (trial success = value reached in time) and annual-default offers at conversion (annual billing). The trial is a sales process with a clock — run it like one.