

Ask HN: 30, 45 or 60-day free trial conversion rates? - FreshCode

Has anyone done any A/B testing on SaaS conversion rates for the number of free trial days, e.g. 30 vs 45 vs 60-day trials?<p>FogBugz and Basecamp both offer 45-day trials, but 30 day trials also seem common.<p>I'd argue that 1 day should be enough to demonstrate your product's value, but I have no data to back this up with.<p>Is there some aspect of hitting/missing a billing cycle? Why is a 45-day trial the sweet spot?
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chrisacky
It really depends on what kind of value that your service is offering.

For instance, Pivotal Tracker offers a 90 day free trial. Their product
requires that the users/teams become dependant on their service so that they
can't live without it.

Offering a 1 day trial here, when it works on weekly iterations just wouldn't
work. Equally, offering a 30 day trial, really only provides 4 iterations, or
probably about 20-30 stories. This definitely isn't enough to "hook" the users
and lock them in due to the amount of time that they have invested.

If you are in it for the long haul and your service really does provide great
value for the users then getting your users invested in the product might come
at the cost of giving more free trials away for free.

Some services are freemium remember. They are unlimited trial times in effect,
because the upsells and bolt ons are where they make money.

Equally, however, some services 45-60-90 days would definitely be too much,
and you could be losing money.

You can't just say in isolation, 45 days is the sweetspot for 100% of
startups, because it ignores any other factors such as the service value that
the product fills.

Equally, if your product takes time to kick in, you wouldn't want to offer 30
day trial. For instance, if you were a marketing platform like HomeAway or a
_paid_ version of AirBnB. Offering a short trial might not be the best idea
because it takes time for the value of the service to really kick in.

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anthony_franco
Exactly agree with chrisacky.

That's why we all have to A/B test our own products. There's no one manual for
maximizing revenue. We each have to do our own research to determine what our
individual user bases feel comfortable with.

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MattBearman
When I launched <http://bugmuncher.com> I offered a 7 day free trial. Not too
sure why, I think with it being a very MVP launch I wanted to find out if
people would be willing to pay as soon as possible.

Later I A-B tested 7 days against 30 days, and found 30 days did perform
better, but not actually by that much. The 7 day free trail had a 9.95%
conversion rate, where as 30 day had an 11% conversion rate.

I personally was expecting 30 days to do much better, but after seeing these
results I suspect the length of the trail isn't very important to users, they
just want to know that they _can_ try before they buy.

I may try A-B testing 45 days (and maybe 60 days) if I get bored and can't
think of anything else to test.

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blazzar
By the sounds of it 30 days did do much better. In conversion rate
optimisation a 10% conversion improvement is a big improvement.

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MattBearman
That's actually a very good point, hadn't thought of it that way. Can you
guess I'm new to A-B testing? :)

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tommi
You can probably _demonstrate_ the value in couple of minutes but many
products don't _provide_ value until after a longer period of use.

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ckluis
Interesting. Is there any software that makes it really easy to integrate
multi-variate testing instead of just A/B?

How many people are really doing A/B testing on conversion rates (meaning
assigning a value to a user and giving different trial lengths randomly) vs
changing the trial length for fixed intervals?

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luckystrike
> _Is there any software that makes it really easy to integrate multi-variate
> testing instead of just A/B?_

You might find this useful - <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/>

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ckluis
Thanks. I had looked at them a long time ago and they either didn't have or I
forgot about multivariate testing.

I would still love a plugin or framework for wordpress that allowed
multivariate testing native to the CMS, but at the pricing for VWO it's hard
to complain.

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deckardt
I feel like there two things that should be A/B test here: 1) Best length of
trial to get someone to sign-up for a free trial 2) Best length of trial to
get someone to convert to paid user. Your actual conversion is going to be a
combination of those two factors.

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skrish
A 30 day trial period with user engagement at the end of trial asking them if
they need additional time to evaluate will work better. Offer them 15 day
extension if they need.

There are two advantages to this approach: 1\. engage in conversation with
user asking for feedback and understand their needs. 2\. treat them special
with an offer to extend trial, earning their respect for personal attention
and better chances of conversion.

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fastspring
Wise to test different trial expiration scenarios against each other, some
based on usage time, some based on product feature usage, some a combination
of the two. You'll often be surprised which scenario is optimal and by how
much.

