What your free trial should actually give away

The default free trial is "the whole product, for 14 days." It's the default because it requires no decisions. It's also close to the worst option available, and it fails in two directions at once.

Why the timer is the wrong axis

A 14-day trial gives away the most to the people least likely to buy and the least to the people most likely to.

The serious evaluator has a real problem and wants to know if you solve it. They'll know inside an hour. The other thirteen days are pure cost to you and irrelevant to them. Meanwhile the tourist extracts everything of value on day one, and the timer is the only thing that ever stops them.

Worse, a timer creates an artificial deadline that has nothing to do with the customer's actual decision. They convert when they trust the answer, not when a countdown expires. Pressure applied at the wrong moment reads as pressure, not as urgency.

The better axis: give away the diagnosis

The question worth asking is not how long but which half.

Almost every product does two things: it tells you something, and it helps you act on it. The telling is what earns trust. The acting is what's worth money.

So give away the diagnosis in full, and charge for the treatment:

• An analytics product shows you the problem and charges for the workflow that fixes it.
• A code tool shows you every issue it found and charges to apply the fixes.
• An idea-validation product runs the analysis and shows you every gap it found — and charges when you want to change an assumption, re-run it, and take the output with you.

That's the shape we settled on. The free tier runs one complete viability analysis and shows every gap, in full — nothing blurred, nothing teased. What it doesn't include is changing an assumption and regenerating, the other two analyses, or publishing the site it generated.

Why that split works

It's honest. The free user gets a real answer to a real question. If the answer is "this business doesn't work," they got enormous value and we earned nothing, and that's the right trade — they'll tell people.

It's self-selecting. The person who wants to change an assumption and re-run has already decided the analysis is worth taking seriously. You're charging at the exact moment the value became obvious, which is the only moment price stops being an argument.

It has no cliff. Nothing expires. Nobody gets locked out of work they've done. The free tier is a permanent, useful product rather than a countdown — which means it can sit in your funnel indefinitely instead of burning a lead the moment it ends.

It caps your cost. This is the unglamorous part and it matters most if your marginal cost isn't zero. "Unlimited for 14 days" on a product with a real per-use cost is an invitation to be farmed. One full run has a known, bounded cost you can pay for every visitor without thinking about it.

The test

Ask: what does a free user learn, and could they act on it without paying us?

If the answer to the second half is yes, you've given away the product. If the answer is "they'd have to do it manually, and that's the work" — you've drawn the line in the right place.

And if a free user can't learn anything without paying, you don't have a trial. You have a paywall with a friendlier name, and every visitor can tell.