
Ask HN: Should you offer a free trial for a software product? - vanilla-almond
There is an excellent discussion on Hacker News currently about offering customers a money-back guarantee:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19085526<p>If you sell a software product, what do think about offering a free trial period as an alternative (or addition) to a money-back guarantee? How long should a trial period last?<p>Would you offer both a trial period and a money-back guarantee? Or one only, both not both?<p>Here is one (negative) perspective on free trials from the creator of the Nomad List website:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;levelsio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1088660914352484352<p>Interested to hear you thoughts :-)
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ezekg
I sell B2B software and I've noticed that lot of the customers that trial my
service are developers of a company that want to evaluate it before dealing
with all the red tape of contacting the billing department for approval. I
don't do a money back guarantee, since I do a nice 14 day free trial.

I've had good success with offering an "extended" trial for those in the
development phase, with the prerequisite that they add a payment method to
their account before I extend their trial (usually, I add 30 days). The
initial 14 day trial is usually enough to "evaluate", then the extended trial
goes to billing and is approved quickly, since they already know more or less
that they'll be using my service. A large percentage of my customers go
through the extended trial flow.

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codegeek
What is the conversion rate on those ? Just curious as I have similar
challenges with my B2B software.

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SmushyTaco
I don't think free trials by themselves are a viable solution for you or the
user since you wouldn't profit and the user would only have your product for a
limited amount of time. A solution could be they could get your product ad
free for a week and after a week passes ads would display on your software so
you could profit and in order to remove these ads the user would have to pay a
one-time fee to do so. You could also provide a add-on store where other
developers could make add-ons for your product and also them and you could
take a cut of the profits.

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vanilla-almond
Just to add, the twitter link I posted has changed from public to private and
is no longer visible at the time of this message.

