Attract high-quality users who’re intentional and purposeful about trying your platform.
In some cases, people may:
Charge a small fee for your trial.
We’re used to free trials, but in some cases, adding a small price to provide limited access to your platform will help you achieve higher trial user engagement and not only.
► Quick note: Do you remember Ahrefs’ $7 seven-day trial? The company moved from paid to free trial a few months ago.
However, according to Tom Hunt, the founder of SaaS Marketer and bCast, before switching from free to a $7 seven-day trial, Ahrefs had twice as many prospects on trial as customers. All these people were consuming way too much computation and human resources, clogging up the inboxes of the support team.
There are few SaaS companies bold enough to deploy this strategy, and Content Harmony is one of them.
Instead of a free trial, the company offers 10 briefs for $10.
Considering that Content Harmony works based on a limited-usage fee, once they’ve paid the fee, users have full access to Content Harmony for the entire year. Obviously, after generating 10 briefs, they won’t be allowed to keep using the software except if they upgrade.
Also, as the Content Harmony team notes:
“We fetch nearly 100 API calls for each Keyword Report & Brief Workflow we produce, and we want your team to have full access to our product during your trial, so we charge a nominal fee to keep out the spammers.”
This SaaS growth idea works for product-led companies only. Otherwise, there are no reasons why you couldn’t test it.
✅ Decide what type of paid trial suits your platform best. If people can automatically make or generate a search, a brief, or any other type of project, choose a usage fee. If not, go with a time fee. It all depends on your platform type.
► Quick note: If you choose to charge a small fee for usage, decide how much time your users will have to burn all of their credits. It can be a few days, a month, or a year. It’s worth noting, though, that a larger period may negatively impact your growth. After all, people won’t be incentivized to burn all of their credits fast or generate the projects or the briefs in a short timeframe. As a result, there will be a significant delay in transforming trial users into paying customers.
✅ If you want, you can follow the example of Content Harmony and explain the reasons for your paid trial on the payment page.
✅ Create an email sequence around your paid trial. Inform people about the time or usage limits and their option to upgrade.
✅ Be very intentional with this growth idea and test it. Measure KPIs such as the number of users who:
By tracking these numbers, you’ll understand whether this growth idea works for your platform/target group or not.