I’m trying to remember when I last had a real “free trial” and not these “give me your credit card subscription scams”. A bonafide “try our thing for real” situation made me buy it.
Free food or drinks for sure. Maybe a newspaper or magazine when I was a kid?
Downloadable game demos is the closest I can think of.
Lightburn (laser cutter software) lets you trial the full version for 1 month free. It doubles as an excellent way to get up to speed on the software without tying up the laser cutter’s computer (community machine).
And they even let you extend it. I don’t think I paid for it for like 4 months.
I know exactly. I started getting into music creation with a DAW and wanted a good drums plugin. Toontrack Superior Drums claims to be the industry standard but I couldn’t use their trial without a credit card. Addictive Drums 2, their closest competitor, actually had a free trial. Guess which one I ended up buying after trying it out for a couple months?
TP link’s Tapo Cares thingy for their camera (basically a subscription for cloud camera storage and a few extra app features) has a 28 day free trial with no card needed. It’s also 28 days per camera, rather than 28 days per account, which I thought was nice
Whatpulse offers free trials sometimes, 14 days and don’t require card details. They’ve given me 2 on the same account
Create a virtual card just for that trial, and lock it.
I tried one of those services and the cards were almost never accepted
Some cards let you do it directly. Not sure if it works better.
The couple times I did it using Chase it worked and you set the expiration date to like the next day.
I’ve heard that these often aren’t accepted, particularly at dodgy places that really really want you to forget about your subscriptions. Also, not available outside of the US
Not avalible outside of america
In quebec, it’s actually illegal to do that! That’s why we don’t have Spotify free trials anymore though lol
I mean I don’t even know what the end game is here. Is their business model “maybe a fraction of them will forget to cancel and we will squeeze some juice out of them”? or do they sell card info? what?
yes. Forget to cancel, or even more likely they make cancelling so intransparent that it will takr at least one more billing period to get through. Classic dark pattern
The meal box kit things seem to be the worst for that shit here. They don’t let you cancel your first box, even if you want to do so 10 minutes after you sign up, and you have to cancel a week or sometimes 2 before they prepare (not even send) your box. Then when you do cancel, they have 3 or 4 rounds of questioning where they’ll swap the position of the “yes I’m sure” button, as well as changing the colours to try and trick you into clicking “no I want to stay”.
I also signed up for an online news site once. It was a $1 trial for a month or something like that. Annoying, but I wanted to read an article no other news site had. Then the only way to cancel is to call them. Being ADHD as fuck, it was on my to-do list, but I forgot I even had a to-do list and I forgot. Then the subscription renewed at like 30 bucks a month. They weren’t even transparent about the renewal price, I didn’t see it anywhere when I was signing up, so I assumed it’d be around the same price as Spotify or something.
“maybe a fraction of them will forget to cancel and we will squeeze some juice out of them”
Yes. Quite literally the model used by most subscription services.
It also prevents an user from repeatedly creating account, use free trial, then create another account.
IDK, I have a lot of credit cards.
Forget to cancel is definitely one of them, the other being that if you dont enter your info you likely wont purchase it anyway after the free trial so why waste resources on you, the third is the sunk cost fallacy, you already took the time and effort to enter your info for the free trial, so maybe you dont need it right now but might need it later, so you just let the subscripton run.
Many are just to reduce the amount of leeches trying to use and abuse the trial. Usually happens when it offers too much good stuff and people keep creating new accounts all the time to use the resources.
The logic is that putting a credit card is a much higher level of commitment and ensures people aren’t just creating new accounts with new emails since card numbers are a somewhat smaller set.
I also hate it and walk away from those things, but it makes sense.
hmm I mean if you put an email requirement, I think it will deter most non psychopaths after 3-4 renewals This is based on my own feeling and assumption that I am not a psychopath. I am sure there will be some people with 20 emails for such stuff but I wonder what is the trade off between preventing this and scaring away people like us.
Creating an email is so easy, and email isn’t tied to a real name. A card has more identification info on it
My password manager generates an email in 2 clicks, its a useless identifier.
What cartoon is this from? I swear I’ve seen this, and it’s driving me crazy
Why that’s Winslow T. Oddfellow from CatDog!
Privacy.com is an incredible tool not nearly enough people know about.
A free trial! It looks awesome, but I was worried, this is great! Now I’ll know for sure if I should buy it.
…Ah nevermind, I bet there’s something else out there.
I generate virtual credit cards that are locked to a null balance so if they try to charge it they get nothing.
