Free Trial vs Freemium

When I was in grade 2, I used to stand in a queue in front of stores to buy goods, and the seller handed goods to me. That is no choice and no voice of our own to select and compare.

Today my children like going to departmental stores because they want the power to choose, compare prices, touch it, read the ingredients, and in a short time develop a sense of ownership the moment we keep it in our cart. We sometimes buy more than what we need and develop trust in what we buy.

This is how SaaS products have become, the consumers want to try, use to see if the need is getting replaced with the product. The consumers want freemium products so they later decide to buy and become premium customers.

Most B2C products are Bottom-UP products, where:

1. The contract size is small.
2. Non-paying customers are more.
3. The product owner has to spend more to develop a product.
4. Difficult to launch the product due to so many products available, ability switch is very high.
5. The cost of acquiring a customer, i.e. downloading and installing the app is very high.
6. The customers downloading the app won't know if they really want this app.
7. 95% of customers uninstall the app in 1st week of installing it.

We might have read this in the books and blogs etc. Let us take an example of an Educational App— A wonderful educational app for children. I was exploring the app with my child.

1. Offers free trial for 14 days. After the trial period is over, the user needs to become a customer, or can't use the app. This is a poor experience in today's world.
2. If the child logs in after 14 days, most probably he or she will not remember the password. The good thing is the user can reset the password with an OTP. Improvement can be the app auto reads the OTP from SMS.
3. Simple passwords are remembered better by children. In the app, to set a new password, the user needs to have 8 to 14 character password, containing 1 number, 1 alphabet, and 1 special character. Better to simple numeric 4 number password.

4. After login, I could see the app remembered me, I tapped on the user, but I hit a paywall. The moment user hits the paywall and is not able to see the content it gives no experience and does not make a habit. Hence the user does not become a customer and leaves.

5. I was able to add another user, a nice feature to have. But no access to content without payment.

6. The app says contact us, but inside the app, no contact details are provided.

While making an onboarding experience for the app, avoid these roadblocks to make the app more accessible. This blog is for learning and not criticizing the app, we are all working to improve ourselves.

About Me — I am working as an AVP, Products & Solutions at Educational Initiatives. I am part of the team which is making the best learning product ‘Mindspark’ in India.