Hmm, but what would make you upgrade from the free tier to premium? Because you still can't try the premium features. Wouldn't I still need to provide a trial for the premium features, for you to decide whether they are worth upgrading?
Usually if you think hard, you can find something that a casual user could progress to wanting more of. Or you can do what a lot of companies do and start everyone on a free trial of premium, and then fall back to free. Or the evil route, and make them opt out of premium to downgrade, or it bills them by default. (May they get chargebacked to hell and dropped by their payment processor)
I try to avoid all routes that are not win-win or feel "evil".
After reading more of those comments, I am still unsure what's the way to go. Maybe simply keep the trial but make it 30 days instead of 14 days.
The problem with premium features, is that I would then need a free version of the product. But I don't want to provide a free version without support, as it's a self-hosted product.
Yeah, that's fair. Many projects just let the free community edition support itself by hosting a forum for them to swap notes. And if a trial is about the level of complexity that you feel you can support, that's also ok.
A lot of companies are firmly on the evil track, looking for any dark pattern that makes the numbers go up, sadly. Good on you for not being there.
