Has anyone seen higher paid conversions by switching from Freemium to a hard Free Trial?
by•
We offered a generous free forever plan for over a year hoping users would naturally upgrade as they grew. Most stayed on the free tier forever and treated us like a free utility.
Last month, we killed the freemium plan and switched to a strict 14-day free trial. Sign ups dropped slightly, but our paid conversion rate doubled almost immediately.
Did freemium work as a growth engine for you, or did it just cannibalize your revenue?
15 views
Replies
I ended up with neither, a free first result. My app makes songs. A new account gets ten welcome credits, enough for the first song, and that song plays in full in the app but cannot be downloaded. After that it is a subscription that refills credits weekly. So there is no free tier to live on, the free utility problem you describe cannot happen, but there is also no clock: the person decides after hearing their own song, not after fourteen days of a calendar. What pushed me there was the web side. For a while the funnel showed the price before the song and about 230 people reached the payment form without one of them paying. Since mid October everyone goes to the app and hears the song first, and I am still too early to quote a conversion number, so I will not. My read of your result: the trial did not convert better because it was strict, it converted because the people who stayed had to decide while the value was fresh.