Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and offer a refund if they don't like it. I wonder if this strategy will net you more or less sales. My gut tells me that it will be less, because more people will be driven away by the fact that they can't even test it before paying, but who knows, really. Might be an interesting thing to A/B test and write about the results.
I was debating this as well. I'm not sure which method is the best, either. I was thinking that if it were free then I would just get a bunch of 'vanity metrics' rather than active users who are serious about writing stuff and using the platform.
Particularly when software is work-related, the amount of time it takes to evaluate something is usually far more than the product costs. For instance, I'd expect to spend more than an hour writing and promoting my serious post, and if I valued my time at (a very low) $50 an hour, the time costs more than the product does.
(The perverse thing about enterprise software sales is that the same thing is true about $50,000 software purchases)
Anyhow, I can say that 95% of the time I sign up for a 30-day free trial, 30 days go by and I never get around to evaluating the product because time is more dear to me than money.
