Free trial or not? Run the numbers.
A trial gets more people through the door and fewer of them paying. Nobody can tell you your conversion rate before you run one, but you can work out the rate you’d need to come out ahead.
Three ways in, one number that matters.
However people get in, what decides your revenue is the share of visitors who end up paying, and how long you wait for it.
No trial
Pay to get in
Fewest people through the door, but everyone who comes in pays from day one. No free access to give away, nothing to wait for. Works best when your landing page can show enough to sell the membership on its own.
Trial, no card
8.5% start · 18.2% pay
The widest door. Lots of visitors try it, most of them leave, and the ones who pay chose to. Works best when the product sells itself once someone is inside, and you can afford the free access.
Trial, card first
2.5% start · 48.8% pay
A narrower door. Fewer people start, more of them pay — partly because they're committed, partly because some forget to cancel. Expect a bump of cancellations and refund requests after the first charge.
Trial rates are from First Page Sage's benchmark of 86 SaaS companies (2022–2025). Multiply them out and the two trials land close together: about 1.5% of visitors pay with no card, 1.2% with one. That's why there's no universal answer, and why your own numbers decide it.
Shorter trials usually win
In a field experiment, 337,724 new users of a software product were randomly given a 7, 14 or 30-day trial. If everyone gets the same length, 7 days won: 5.6% more subscriptions than 30. Fitting the length to each user did a little better still. A longer trial isn't just a longer wait for your first payment: for a membership, it's more time to get through your content without paying for it.
Source: Yoganarasimhan, Barzegary & Pani, “Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials”
Make the trial earn its keep.
Every point of trial conversion moves you further past the line. Here's what to set up on your Webflow site before you switch one on.
Memberstack runs free trials on any paid plan, with or without a card up front. See how subscriptions work.
What this model leaves out.
It's built to answer one question clearly. Here's where that clarity costs accuracy.
Your guess is the whole input
The maths is exact. Your trial conversion rate isn't, until you've run one. Treat the break-even as the real output: it tells you how wrong you can afford to be.
Same churn either way
Members who came through a trial might stay longer (they chose with their eyes open) or shorter (some only stayed because they forgot to cancel). The model gives them the same churn, plus the first-charge cancellations you set.
One price, one plan
No annual plans, paid trials, freemium plans or first-month discounts. Each of those is its own way in, with its own trade-offs.
Revenue, not profit
Trial accounts cost something to support, and refunds after a card-required trial cost payment fees. None of that is counted, and all of it works against the trial.
Questions about free trials
How the simulator works, where the benchmarks come from, and what happens to the numbers you type in.
It should if a trial gets enough extra people to pay to make up for everyone who uses it and leaves, and for the wait before anyone pays. Work out how many of your visitors pay today, then ask what share of trialists would need to pay to beat that. If you convert 1% of visitors with no trial and a no-card trial gets 8.5% of visitors to start one, then about 12% of trialists need to pay for a 14-day trial to break even over two years (at 5% monthly churn). The simulator gives you that number for your own price, traffic and churn.
First Page Sage's benchmark of 86 SaaS companies (2022–2025) puts trial-to-paid conversion at about 18% for trials that don't ask for a card and about 49% for trials that do. Card-required trials get far fewer people to start, though: about 2.5% of visitors against 8.5% for no-card trials. Those are SaaS numbers, not membership ones, so a better test of "good" is whether you're above your own break-even rate.
Asking for a card up front cuts the number of people who start a trial and raises the share who pay, because the ones who start are more committed and some forget to cancel. In First Page Sage's benchmark, no-card trials ended up converting about 1.5% of visitors (8.5% start × 18.2% pay) and card-required trials about 1.2% (2.5% × 48.8%). Card-required trials also bring more members who cancel right after the first charge, so which one wins depends on your numbers. Try both in the simulator.
Shorter than most people think. In a field experiment with 337,724 new users of a software product, randomly given 7, 14 or 30-day trials, 7 days was the best length to give everyone, with 5.6% more subscriptions than 30 days (Yoganarasimhan, Barzegary and Pani). A longer trial also delays every member's first payment, and for a membership, it gives trialists more time to get through your content for free. Pick the shortest trial that lets someone see the value.
Three things. Every new member's first payment comes later, once. Everyone who trials and doesn't pay gets free access, which matters most when your content can be consumed within the trial. And there's the support and admin for accounts that never pay. The simulator counts the first two in money and shows the third as how many trialists you handle per paying member.
Built by the team at Memberstack, where over 10,000 businesses run their memberships.