How About 30-use Free Trials Instead of 30-days?

I feel that limiting the number of uses may be counter-productive and may actually make users try it less so as to preserve the number of trials remaining and stretch out the trial.<p>Fixed number of days encourage people to try more knowing that their trial would expire whether they use it or not.<p>I have no data to back this up though and would be interested in actual results if anyone has tested the two approaches.

Free trials aren't free to the company. It's a promise given to customers that they will be able to make use of company's assets without payment. Company normally has to pay for both the actual usage that occurs and the option of usage it has granted to it's customers so far. Trial subscription and expiry mechanism lets company control the maximum amount of free usage they have agreed to at any point in time.<p>Let's say you came up with a new and innovative service that let's people publish pictures they took with a mobile phone into the cloud. Because you calculate it will cost you on average one dollar per user account per month to provide the service you decide to charge your users $5 per month.<p>To attract new users you also decide to give them opportunity to try the service before they commit. You have a few options:<p>1. Let users upload the pictures in reduced quality for free unless they convert into premium. You're worried that this strategy will distort your user base: people who actually need best possible quality will not get a true impression of your service. On the other hand you will have to pay indefinitely for the storage and bandwidth of a whole lot of inferior quality pictures. Even worse the policy will attract whole group of non-paying users that will be content with the inferior picture quality and will make a heavy use of your service.<p>2. Let people upload up to 50 pictures free. In which case again you'll end up with having to pay for non-paying customers storing their pictures forever. Even worse some unscrupulous people will end up opening hundreds of accounts and some kid in Russia will write a utility working on top of your service seamlessly opening and amalgamating free accounts for a single user.<p>3. Set a free trial period of 30 days when users can upload pictures for free. After 30 days they will either have to convert into paying customers or download their data because you're going to automatically purge the free accounts. You're worried that 30 days may not be enough for some people to evaluate your service, but then you decide to look at the conversion stats; after-all if the prospect couldn't make up their mind after 30 days maybe the need wasn't that pressing and you shouldn't be wasting your company resource trying to convert them?

Panic's apps do this if I recall correctly, the day counter of your trial only decrements for days you've actually run it.

Lots of apps do this or use a combined approach. It aint new and it's a fine idea.<p>Try this on: Lock app after 30 uses if 30 days has passed.

Microsoft Office does this too. I think you get 100 runs, which is almost too long, since people may use the app for 6 months to a year before hitting the wall. Or maybe that is the point.

free trials aren't free to the consumer.<p>pretty frequently I sign up for free trials for programming tools and never get around to evaluating them in the allotted time. i'm just too busy doing other things.

I limit use of my product to a certain number of transactions. You can unlock more transactions through social media or with a credit card. :)<p>As my product is transactional, limiting it on number of days did not make sense.

I don't like pay-per-use trials (or billing strategies) because it disincentivizes people from using your product. I want people to pay for my service, and then I want them to use it as much as possible.

I once had a crap work laptop that continually crashed. Every crash counted as one use - and that was incredibly annoying. So I'd rather something like one use equate to one day.

Isn't this really just similar to a freemium model? You get limited interaction forever and must upgrade to a paid plan if you get hooked and need more.