How Long Should Your Free Trial Be? Use Your Usage Frequency

Most people pick their trial length by copying someone else. 14 days, because everybody else does 14 days.

But there's an actual way to figure this out and do it properly, because every product has a natural usage frequency. That's how often somebody would come back without a notification pushing them.

Messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have a daily usage pattern. Project tools are weekly. You open them when the week starts. Things like accounting tools are monthly. You do your accounts once a month, hopefully. And then my favourite, tax software, that's yearly. People do their taxes once a year.

And some things are just genuinely one-off. You would only move house once a year if you're renting, or once every 10 years if you own a place.

So your trial just needs to be long enough for somebody to complete the cycle of getting value from it, maybe once, twice, or three times. Once is a demo, and twice is the start of a habit. Three times, maybe not.

So a daily use product needs roughly about a week. A weekly product needs a month. And a monthly product needs almost three months. But nobody gives that.

And if you're yearly or a once-off, then a trial is completely the wrong model for you, because you're not building a habit, you're selling an outcome.

So if that's the case, stop selling for the habit, sell for the outcome. One-time payment. Stop trying to make a one-off payment a monthly recurring revenue. Stop trying to force a subscription onto something people only need once.

So if you work out your frequency first, your trial length will pick itself.