Opt-in Trial

Signing up for a trial used to mean entering a card first. That asked people to hand over a payment method for a product they hadn't used yet, and most of them closed the tab on that screen. Bring 1,000 people in through ads and have 40 of them start a trial, and the product never gets the chance to be judged good or bad at all.

Charging automatically when the period ended caused its own trouble. A forgotten subscription turns into an invoice, the customer asks for a refund, and the first memory attached to the product is a billing dispute. Accounts that paid once and left kept piling up. An opt-in trial pushes both of those thresholds to the back.

It starts by deleting the card field from the sign-up form. You collect an email and a password and open the account. Four steps follow.

1. Set the length. Fourteen days is common, but the number that matters is how long the product takes to show its worth, not convention. On a product where setup alone runs nine days, fourteen means asking for a decision after five.
2. Build the path to payment inside the period. Keep the days remaining visible in the interface, send a message three days before it closes, and put a plan picker at every feature that is about to lock.
3. Decide what happens on the last day. The usual answer is read-only access with data kept for about 30 days. Delete it and anyone who wants to come back a month later starts from nothing. Dropping to a permanent free tier instead is a separate method called a reverse trial.
4. Track two numbers separately: trials started and conversion to paid. Removing the card requirement typically multiplies starts several times over while cutting conversion to something like a quarter of what it was. Either number alone flips the verdict, so the comparison has to land on paying customers retained.

"Starts went up six times without the card, but conversion is a quarter of what it was."

Switching methods moves both numbers in opposite directions, so they have to be multiplied.

"The trial is fourteen days and setup takes nine. We need a longer window."

The length doesn't match how fast the product actually works.

"Refund tickets basically disappeared after we moved to opt-in."

Removing the automatic charge removed the billing disputes with it.

Pagedeck runs its trial opt-in. The share of ad traffic Ravi brings in that actually starts a trial went up sharply compared to the card-first version, and the number of trial accounts Sofia has to deal with went up along with it. Grace set the rule for where a human gets involved: Sofia contacts accounts that have invited three or more colleagues, and everyone else gets email only.