Card or no card for free trials?
Quick poll for founders (and anyone who tests out new SaaS tools): do you ask for a credit card upfront, or let people straight in?
We went with requiring a card for kōdlo. The thinking was pretty simple: fewer signups overall, but higher intent—people actually kick the tires instead of bouncing after two minutes. Without a card, you get a flood of accounts that log in once and ghost.
But I’m genuinely torn here. A card wall definitely kills casual curiosity, especially when you're an unknown product. On the flip side, no-card trials often just give you vanity metrics that don't convert.
Two quick questions:
As a user: Does an upfront card scare you off immediately, or depends on the tool/pricing?
As a founder: What model did you pick, and if you ever switched, how did it hit your conversion numbers?
Replies
As a user, I’m not against paying for good software at all. What bothers me is having to remember to cancel something I haven’t even decided I like yet. That alone has made me skip tools I was genuinely interested in.
@adilahmed45 I agree that it’s not the money, it’s the mental load of remembering to cancel.
no cards
@moazzam4 I got you!
Asking for a card really stands in for a different question: how do we know this signup is real? A card is one signal, and a blunt one. It stops some fake accounts, but it also turns away plenty of genuine people who just aren't ready yet. I'd rather keep the trial open and look at the signup itself in context: the email, the device, how fast the form was filled in, where it came from. Each of those is noisy on its own, but together they tell you a lot. Has anyone here tried no card plus risk scoring? What did it do to conversion?
When you test the no-card version compare paying customers per visitor too
The trial-to-paid rate can look better just because the card wall filtered people out before the trial began