The difference that matters
A free trial is a deadline. A free tier is a home.
Everything else follows from that. A trial says: look properly, then decide. A free tier says: stay as long as you like on these terms. The first creates a moment. The second creates a population, and populations are much harder to change your mind about.
What a trial is good at
Trials suit sites where the value is obvious once you are inside and hard to describe from the outside. Archives, tools, communities with a particular temperature to them.
A trial does three useful things. It removes the last objection at the point of sale. It gives you a queue of people who are actively looking at your site this week. And it gives you a reason to be in touch that is not a pitch, because there is a clock and the member knows it.
The mistake I see most often is a trial that is too long. Fourteen days sounds generous. In practice a two week trial means the member looks on day one, forgets, and remembers on day thirteen with a feeling of guilt. Seven days, with something specific to finish inside it, converts better and leaves people in a better mood either way.
The second mistake is asking for a card and then hiding the fact that the card will be charged. It works once. It generates chargebacks, angry notes, and the kind of review that follows a site for years. If you take a card up front, say the date and the amount plainly, twice.
From practice
I ran a card free trial for two years and a card up front trial for one. The card up front trial converted at roughly three times the rate, and it also produced every single refund request I handled that year. Once I put the charge date on the confirmation screen and again two days before the charge, the refund requests went back to almost nothing and the conversion held.
What a free tier is good at
A free tier suits sites where the paid thing is a deepening rather than an unlocking. If your free readers get real, finished, useful work and the paid membership is more of it, closer to you, or sooner, then a free tier is honest and it compounds.
The good version of this is a long game. Free readers arrive, some of them stay for years, and a small share convert at the moment their circumstances change. You are not converting a visitor, you are being there when someone is finally ready.
The bad version is a free tier built by taking things away from the paid one. Members can tell. It reads as a demonstration of what you are withholding rather than an invitation.
The costs nobody budgets for
Support
Free members ask questions. Not more per person than paying members, but there are many more of them. If you have not decided in advance whether free members get answers, you will decide it badly at eleven at night.
Moderation
If your free tier includes any kind of posting, you have just changed the job. A paid door is the cheapest moderation tool in existence, and removing it means you now need real rules and real follow through. That is a whole subject of its own, and I have written it up in moderating a members community.
Reversibility
This is the big one. You can end a trial next Tuesday and nobody is harmed. Ending a free tier means telling a group of people who have been with you for years that the terms have changed. It can be done, kindly and slowly, but you should assume it takes a year and costs you some affection.
Choose a trial when you need people to look. Choose a free tier when you can afford to wait.
Doing both
You can, and a few sites should, but only in one order: a free tier for reading and a paid membership with a short trial on top. What does not work is a free tier plus a trial of the same paid thing, because the free member has no clock and no reason to start one.
How to tell which one you have already chosen
Look at what happens to the work when nobody pays for it.
If your best work only makes sense inside the members area, alongside other members, you have a trial site. If your best work stands alone and the membership is what happens next, you have a free tier site and you may already be running one without calling it that.
Measuring it honestly
Trial conversion is easy to measure and easy to fool yourself with. Two numbers to keep next to it:
- Conversions that survive ninety days. A trial that converts brilliantly and then churns at month two is a refund scheme with extra steps. Read reducing member churn alongside this one.
- Support hours per hundred trials. If it climbs, your trial is doing the job your onboarding should be doing.
For a free tier, the only number worth watching is the share of paying members who were free readers first, measured over years rather than months. It is slow, and it is the whole point.
What I would do first
- Decide whether you need a moment or a population. Write the reason down.
- If it is a trial, make it seven days with one finishable thing inside it.
- If you take a card up front, state the date and the amount twice before it is charged.
- If it is a free tier, decide now what free members get from you in support and in the community.
- Whichever you pick, measure it at ninety days, not at signup.
