One of my biggest dilemmas in app growth is whether to remove the free trial.
The case for keeping it
Plenty of apps offer 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 product before paying for it.
If your app converts 50% from trial to purchase, and I have seen that, keep the trial, because that is a funnel that works. For a wider view than one app, RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2026 breaks trial to paid conversion down by trial length and category.
The case for cutting it
The other side points to how many apps barely convert trial to paid, and that is where the harder questions start.
When someone starts a trial for a complex app and never pays, are they not taking it seriously? Or is it a sign the product market fit is not there yet?
And should you treat a high intent channel like Apple Ads, where someone is actively searching for what you do, the same as a discovery channel like Meta or TikTok, where nobody was looking for you? Those two users arrive with different levels of commitment, and giving both the same free entry is a decision, even when you make it by default.
I do not have a clean answer to all of it. But it is worth running a campaign for purchases only and seeing for yourself what happens.
The Meta constraint that often decides it
Meta adds a dilemma of its own, which is how to 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 I tested this, I optimized for purchases the whole time, even while the paywall still offered a trial. When I removed the trial, I kept optimizing for purchases and the numbers looked a lot better. A result now meant a purchase only, which is worth thinking about.
How to decide
- What is your trial to paid conversion, and how many installs start a trial at all?
- High, on a healthy share of installs: the trial is doing its job, so keep it.
- Barely converting: go to 2.
- Where does your paid traffic come from? If it mixes high intent and discovery channels, consider treating them differently. Then go to 3.
- What do your Meta campaigns actually optimize for today? Also check whether your pricing favors ROAS bidding or purchase bidding on Meta.
- Purchases already: the trial dilutes what you judge your paywall on and does not help your bidding. You can test on the paywall instead of launching a new campaign. Remove the trial for paid Meta traffic only, keep the same campaign, creatives and event, and compare the weeks before and after. If your paywall tool can split new paid users between trial and no trial, do that, because a before and after comparison also picks up whatever trend the account was already on.
- Something else: run a campaign for purchases only against your current setup before changing the paywall for everyone.
I ran something close to that paywall test on one subscription app with paid Meta traffic, where the campaign already optimized for purchases. The full result is in What happens when I remove the trial from my app?, week by week, with what happened to conversion rate and cost per result.