Free plan with no watermark: did removing it help or hurt you?

Last week I changed my free tier. Free exports used to be watermarked. Now they are clean, and the watermark only appears for visitors who have not signed up at all.

My reasoning: the watermark was supposed to push people to upgrade, but it was mostly pushing them to leave. A clean free export gets used, shared and seen. The signup is the new gate, and the paid plans sell on product limits and extra formats instead.

Too early to know if it was right.

For those who have moved a restriction from the free plan to the anonymous tier (or the other way), what happened to signups and to paid conversion?