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Ask HN: Conversion rates for free trials for Freemium

8 points by shafqat ↗ HN
Would love to hear from the community about their conversion rates and any tips with regards to free trials.

In my view, there are generally to types of free trials: with and without asking for a credit card upfront. Has anyone done any comparisons re: conversion rates?

Also, if anyone has any rates or stats to share regarding Paypal vs roll-your-own, would be interested in that too. Basically, all metrics welcome!

Finally, if you dont ask for CC info upfront, how much chasing do you have to do to get them to provide that info at the end of the free month? There's probably a dev effort to build the emails, reminders, warnings and eventual expiry right?

1 comment

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cullenking
On our site, we have only free accounts and are working on producing paid accounts. Signing up for an account requires no information aside from email and password, plus name for displaying onsite.

Right now our conversion rate is hovering around 6%, with obvious shortcomings that we are working on ironing out. I believe hitting 10% is practical with some serious tweaking and a/b testing, and that is my current goal.

I don't have any actual experience with asking for a credit card upfront, however I have a serious personal revulsion to handing my card to a company without them earning my trust. If I can't see their offering with a free trial, I will not hand them my card. Many people I have talked to have the same revulsion, unless the product comes with strong recommendations from friends or other family. I think the problemis getting your product to enough people to generate those strong recommendations needed to tip wary people over the edge.

Personally, I feel that in an internet world where it can extremely difficult to gain traction, throwing up another barrier is a bad idea. However, I am interested in the numbers as well, because I could be completely off base with this opinion!