One of my biggest dilemmas in app growth: should you remove the free trial?
The case for keeping it
Plenty of apps give a trial, sometimes even on a weekly plan, and they grow just fine. It also makes sense for the user, who gets to see the thing before paying for it.
If your app converts 50% from trial to purchase, and I have seen that, keep the trial. That is a funnel working.
The case for cutting it
The other side looks at how many apps barely convert trial to paid, and the harder questions start.
When someone starts a trial for a complex app and never pays, are they just not taking it seriously? Or is it a sign the product market fit is not there yet?
And should a high intent channel like Apple Search Ads, where someone is actively searching for what you do, be treated the same as a discovery channel like Meta or TikTok, where nobody was looking for you? Those two users arrive with completely different levels of commitment, and giving both the same free entry is a decision, even when it is made by default.
I do not have a clean answer to all of it. But there is real value in running a purchase-only campaign and seeing what happens for yourself.
The Meta constraint that often decides it
There is a dilemma specific to Meta: how do you optimize?
You can build a custom event and assign values so you bid for trials and direct purchases together. But there is no clean way to optimize for trial starts and purchases at the same time.
So on the app where we tested this, we optimized for purchases the whole time, even while the paywall still offered a trial. When we removed the trial, we kept optimizing for purchases, and the numbers looked a lot better.
That is worth sitting with. If you are already optimizing for purchases, the trial dilutes the thing your paywall is being judged on without helping your bidding.
How to decide
- Check your trial to paid conversion first. High, and the trial is doing its job
- Check whether your paid channels are high intent or discovery, and consider splitting the treatment
- Check what your Meta campaigns actually optimize for today
- Run a purchase-only campaign against your current setup before changing the paywall for everyone
We ran exactly that test on one subscription app spending $1,500 a day on Meta. The full week-by-week result, including what happened to conversion rate and cost per result, is in What happens when I remove the trial from my app?.