We are about to launch. Should we go with freemium or a free trial?
Start with a free trial unless you have a specific reason not to. The benchmark data is consistent: freemium brings in more signups but converts far fewer of them, while a trial brings in fewer, better-qualified people and roughly doubles the free to paid rate. Freemium earns its keep when your product gets more useful as more people in a company use it, or when a free user creates something other people see, because then the free tier is a distribution channel rather than a discount. If neither is true, freemium just gives away revenue and fills your funnel with people who will never pay. You can always add a free tier later once you know which single action predicts that someone will pay.
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5 resources, 1 India-specific, 5 link-checked.
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It settles the freemium versus trial argument with numbers from 150 plus companies rather than opinion: freemium brings 33 percent more signups but converts at half the rate. That trade-off is the whole decision.
A short, specific list of what to instrument on a self-serve funnel, including time to activation and time to convert, which are the two most people forget to track at all.
Written from Chennai by a team that runs billing for thousands of self-serve SaaS businesses, so the AARRR breakdown here is grounded in what actually happens to free to paid transitions.
The book that gave most teams their shared vocabulary for this, and the PDF edition is cheap enough to be a rounding error. Read it once for the frameworks, then never re-read it.
The short answer says pick a trial unless you have a specific reason not to, and this is the session that gives you the reasons. Wes Bush walks the MOAT test (market strategy, ocean, audience, time to value) so you can argue the choice from your own product rather than from a benchmark table.
