Free is whatever lets someone feel the value before they owe you anything. For us that's building a website. Paid starts when it goes live and starts working for them. If the free part doesn't produce an "oh, this is real" moment, it's just a cost.
Ask a question you actually want answered. Nobody minds "what would you need to see before you trusted this?" People tune out "check out our amazing launch." The other thing that works: show the bad week too. Real numbers, including the ugly ones, read as honest.
I trust them about as far as I can check them. What earned my trust was never autonomy, it was a record: every action logged, a human able to see it the next morning, and a number that ties back to money. Supervised beats "fully autonomous" for anything that spends a client's budget.
