customer-development, pricingI have a SaaS (let’s people extract data from pdfs and video files) that offer a 14 day trial. The trial is severely limited, the amount of job one can complete in this period is slow on purpose. I have some customers complaining that it’s too slow and give up entirely. But I explain that this is the trial, you are sharing resources with other people.
Should I have a free plan instead with the same limited features? (slow and shared rate of job completion)?
Or should my trial plan have limits removed? Let them use it to the full extent for 14 days. My worry is that somebody will get their money’s worth in 14 days and choose not to buy afterwards. Should I include ‘demo evaluation’ messages in the data they extract?
My rationale is to make it slow and limited until they decide to upgrade. But this might or might not be happening?
Its always a better strategy never to compromise quality over any feature/limitation.
Provide them the best possible (maybe even better) experience so they may be convinced.
Let them explore the app completely and tell(market) them that you are allowing them to do so, this helps build trust with your customer and in the end a good relationship.
You need to experiment further. It’s way more hassle to try out a free version and then decide it was a mistake, so experiment with your free trial.
In my opinion, “free trial” makes me expect I’m trying out the real experience, so if my trial sucks, why would I buy? So my gut says, give a full-strength service, except where you can create limits that make sense to you and to the user. Maybe limiting the file size, or total uses, might fit this. But as you can change this at any time, I would start simple.
So to summarise what I’d do in your case:
Deliver the full experience, for a free trial, with credit card details required
Split test on trial duration - looking at sign-up intentions, completed sign-ups, completed product uses, and post-trial continuation
How about doing both? You could do 3 days of all features enabled full speed trial that then is followed by 14 days slow version. That way your user will get a ‘feel’ of paid version and what he is loosing out for not paying, plus it will give them better first impression.
This does not solve a problem of users that will try to save pennies and will create new account each time. But then again you will be able to track increase in such accounts and will be able to tell how much money you are loosing out as they will be easy to spot.
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