Comment by scolson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scolson | Hacker News Reader

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I am a huge fan of the unlimited (duration) free trial. How many of us sign up for something, poke at it, forget for a few weeks, and then go back again more seriously? I'm sure I do it all the time. By the time I remember, I am most of the way through a trial period and haven't actually evaluated wether the product is a good fit for me or not.

Regardless of how long your trial runs, people really need to bake in resource limits. I assume most SaaS companies have offered (or will offer) tiered rate plans based partially on consumption, so if you are starting as a free-only beta, why not bake in some sane resource limits from the start? Some ideas for this might be:

* maximum podcast size/duration (10 min or 3MB free?)

* 4 free uploads, then you pay

* Retention period - free accounts only store data for 30 days from upload

Sure, you are still technically paying for the free folks, but you greatly limit the cost damage while providing reasonable motivation for people to move to a paid tier when they are ready.

the problem is often unlimited free trials == subsidized by paid customers.

I'm sure if Heroku, for instance, was a paid product without free trial,it would potentially cost less to paid customers. This and services like mongohq,mongolab,... clearly subsidize free accounts with paid ones.

I think the amazon free tier model is a better model.You have one year to mess around but you still have to pay if you abuse resources.

Of course in the podcast hosting space,things are different since there is a lot of competition. Not that much in the paas market,where good services are rare. Most paas suck,we all know which are the good and the bad ones.

Of course unlimited free trials are subsidized by paid customers. It is a marketing cost and is baked in to the CAC figure that every SaaS should known and understand.

The trick isn't removing free trials, or changing unlimited to limited. Instead, the trick is to find the sweet spot between costing as little as possible while offering enough functionality that someone can actually figure out if it might be worthwhile for their use without giving them too much that they never pay. It strikes me that the OP was too far to one end of the spectrum--knowing their demographic as they were hoping to, they offered a trial that was bigger than the average podcaster would ever use. Where is the incentive to convert if you can get what you need for free?

While I would never presume to know the OPs business like they do, from a strictly personal standpoint, I find great utility in the unlimited-time aspect if budgeted appropriately.

There's a variant, which I really like, which is the method Beyond Compare uses:

30 uses trial - every time you use it you can use it for the entire day. If you don't use, it doesn't detract from the trial.

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