Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.
You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card surcharge", for example.
Paying sign ups also increased, but not quite as much.
Particularly when software is work-related, the amount of time it takes to evaluate something is usually far more than the product costs. For instance, I'd expect to spend more than an hour writing and promoting my serious post, and if I valued my time at (a very low) $50 an hour, the time costs more than the product does.
(The perverse thing about enterprise software sales is that the same thing is true about $50,000 software purchases)
Anyhow, I can say that 95% of the time I sign up for a 30-day free trial, 30 days go by and I never get around to evaluating the product because time is more dear to me than money.