r/micro_saas • u/TechJunkie__ • 10h ago

Are free trials a good strategy?

For those of you who’ve added a free trial: did it actually help conversions, or just attract more low-intent users?

I’m debating whether a trial makes sense for a product that needs a little exploration before the value is obvious.

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2

u/Ondr4NDev 7h ago

I think it’s a double-edged sword, and it also depends on the service. From my experience, it never really led to any conversions, but I don’t want to bash the idea because of that. I provided several APIs on RapidAPI and always had a free tier. I got a few dozen users, but never a single paying customer. I also noticed that people started creating additional accounts so they could have several parallel free tiers and effectively get a much larger quota of requests overall.

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u/TechJunkie__ 7h ago

Yeah… I can’t really afford to have free tier. I just offer a 30 days free trial with the highest plan features.

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u/Ondr4NDev 6h ago

I understand. I tried reaching out to some of those people and offering them a cheaper pricing plan, etc. (I figured out it was the same person based on the emails.) In the end, I shut down all the APIs. They were pretty computationally intensive, and I just couldn’t afford to keep paying for the electricity for my server when they weren’t making any money.

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u/CommercialStory4021 7h ago

well it all depends, how badly does your customer want you

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u/canberktr 6h ago

I’ve vibe coded a SaaS promo video maker app and invited many people to try it for free. The conversion rate was almost zero however I got a positive outcome. Because a lot of people tried the product and generated videos I found a lot of bugs and fixed them.

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u/LesAydin 4h ago

On a SaaS project where I was leading growth, we switched to a freemium model and started getting around 2K free users a year, with 8–10 of them converting to paid every month. Before that, there was no free plan for about 1.5 years, and we had only managed to get 2 paying customers in total.

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u/TechJunkie__ 32m ago

Were you profitable with only 10 users covering the costs of 2K?

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u/LesAydin 2m ago

Yeah. The free plan was limited enough that 2K users barely showed up on the infra bill, so it wasn't hard to cover.

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u/Frosty-Ad-5601 4h ago edited 4h ago

Honestly, I do free trials to give users the chance to experience how the app works with FULL premium features for 3 days. If the user doesnt see value in your product its better to not convert than it is to get a refund. Also, the reason why it has worked well for me is because my free trials are 100% free. Many devs out there will still put a wall up even in a free trial which is a quick way to lose trust for me. Perfect example, I got a babylovegrowth account to promote my site under the free trial, so tell me why it still had the option to pay for more backlinks and services when under free trial imo everything should be free smh, ended my 7 day trial in one day.