Should You Offer Free Trials?

This is a question I’ve gotten a few times from readers who are starting businesses after reading my free book No-BS WiFi Money.

Guys will launch a service, send out cold emails, hop on sales calls, only to hear the prospect say some version of “I want to try it first. Do you have a trial?”

This is a problem for the business because:

• Free trials you get from cold emails usually do not convert to paying customers. The prospect just uses the service for free and then ghosts you when it’s time to pay for usage.
• If you do not offer something, you lose the prospect, because legitimate customers do want to try the service before they make a commitment.

Free trials are free for customers, but do cost the business time and money.

For example, back at the old startup of mine Repurpose Pie, we were paying for a very expensive text to audio API from ElevenLabs, and it would be financial suicide for us to have a free trial plan because every use of the service cost us money.

Of course there are situations where extra users don’t cost money (e.g. a simple SaaS with no external APIs and little customer support) in which case free trials can be fine, but those are the obvious situations.

In most businesses (one or two founders, no VC funding to burn, limited time to handle customer support, etc.), the answer is not that obvious.

In most cases, this is what I tell people:

Do not offer a free trial, but offer them a steep first month discount.

It could be anywhere from 50% to 90%, but my usual recommendation is 75%.

This makes the price low enough that the prospect can try the service out for very little risk and then make their decision.

It is usually good to explain to the customer that the service you are providing has costs associated with it, so you can’t make it “free” but you can make it “very low risk” and that they can “cancel any time”.

Most serious prospects are reasonable and will agree to pay.

You make enough to earn your costs, and at the same time you verify paying intent.

Someone who takes their card out to pay anything shows that they actually mean business and aren’t just looking to waste your time or trying to get some free services out of you.

If your product actually delivers what they want, they will pay for it.

The freeloader types will not agree to pay you anything, so charging something keeps them all at bay.

Make sure you use a payment system that allows you to have discount codes that apply to the first month only.

This way the customer is charged the full amount from renewal onwards with zero friction.

Most checkout systems can do this easily.

Easy peasy.

That’s all for this piece.

It’s a short one but boy it took me a while and a lot of sales calls before I figured this out. Just like everything else on this blog, this is stuff I learned from my hard earned experience.

And now you know it too.

Good luck.

Your man,

Harsh Strongman