The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

> Generally, though, you want the time period to end after the user has seen the benefits and before they have exhausted their initial enthusiasm or encountered any bugs.

Corollary: do not end the trial, whether it is time-limited or usage-limited, if the user couldn't verify the expected benefits before it's over.

For example, at my company, we help vacation rental owners to publish their property on multiple websites. We've learnt that 1 month was, in fact, too short a trial for people to fully appreciate our service (for reasons that would take a long time to explain here). YMMV.

All a matter of taste, I guess. We've seen good results with it, as have plenty of other people. It's easy to overdo it, but 4-5 helpful emails spread out over 30 days isn't too much I think. This is assuming the emails actually are helpful and not just an annoyance.

A lot of recent tools like Intercom and GetVero and Customer.io can help make this even smarter by emailing about specific abandoned tasks, different emails to those who aren't engaged at all, or not emailing someone who is fully engaged.

I find myself in two conditions.

One is that I really need the product RIGHT NOW in which case I am going to pull out the credit card.

The other is that it's one of the many things I'd like to evaluate someday and sure let's start that 30 day trial but there are so many other things I need to do RIGHT NOW that I never get around to finishing it.

What would you define as helpful?

Just as a data point, let me tell you how my mind works because I'm the person your raw numbers won't tell you about:

Just getting the emails is likely to annoy me unless it's really, really earth-shatteringly useful and I've yet to ever see an example of this. I'll likely open the email and give it 1-2 seconds of scanning time to make sure I'm not missing out and to find the unsubscribe link; if I can't find that, I'm hitting the spam button which (for a service like gmail) will in some small way affect deliverability for other users.

Nagging me about abandoned tasks is really irritating and it would teach me that using the service "improperly" is likely to lead to my inbox filling up with no-shit-sherlock emails, and would make me want to avoid using the service at all just to avoid this fate. If I abandoned a task, I did it deliberately and really don't want to be punished with email.

Begging me to come back because I haven't logged in in x days is likely to piss me off too. If I haven't used a service in x days it's because it wasn't useful to me and an email isn't going to magic it into the opposite. If anything, you might actually be offering me social proof from (my past self, not others) that the service isn't useful!

When I'm evaluating an app during the free trial I've likely made up my mind within the first 30 minutes, if that. I'm looking to see if it's usable, useful, and beautiful, and if I can't determine that from experiencing the app, email isn't going to save the day.

If I abandon it within 24 hours I'm almost certainly never coming back, except to cancel the trial if I've already entered my credit card details.

If there's a high abandonment rate, emailing people after a trial is over to ask them what pissed them off (giving them the option to submit anonymous comments) is more likely to lead to useful information that will increase retention by improving the quality of the app. But nobody is ever going to say they abandoned a service because they didn't get enough email!

Email has never persuaded me to use an app I've abandoned, but I begrudgingly accept my fate of more email whenever I sign up for a free trial as non-monetary price I must pay to experience the app. If irritation is a currency, apparently I'm broke.

I look as the difference in your example that one suction cost $600 at the initial stages. Which to me indicates that you're very price sensitive. Maybe this is how the other company weeds out people who want to pay as little as possible. They basically don't want to fund startups. It's just a different business model.

Too many times I hear here people saying startups should charge more, get paid for your efforts. But then if you do you're critized for being too expensive for startups. So what's the option then?