Freemium vs Free Trial: What Live Pricing Pages Actually Ship
Freemium vs free trial, from live pricing data: 44.7% of SaaS products offer a free plan, 52.5% a free trial, and many run both. How to pick, and what to gate.
The freemium vs free trial debate is usually framed as a fork: give the product away forever, or give it away for two weeks. Live pricing pages do not treat it as a fork. As of our directory’s last fetch, 44.7% of SaaS products publish a free plan, 52.5% publish a free trial, and a large share of them do both.
So the useful question is not which model wins. It is which one your category expects, what you gate, and whether running both costs less than it sounds.
Freemium vs free trial: what the directory shows
The headline numbers from the latest fetch of our pricing directory:
- 44.7% of products offer a free plan, meaning a freemium tier with no end date.
- 52.5% offer a free trial of a paid tier.
- $25 a month is the median starting price among products that publish a monthly number.
The two shares add up to nearly 100%, but the market does not split neatly in half. Plenty of products sit in both columns, and some sit in neither: the demo-gated, contact-sales pages that dominate enterprise categories. Four pricing pages show the range.
Notion runs both. The Free plan includes basic forms and sites, databases, and a trial of Notion AI. Plus is $10 and Business is $20 per member per month on yearly billing, and the latest capture lists a free trial with no credit card required.
Linear runs a free plan and no trial. Free includes unlimited members but caps you at 2 teams and 250 issues. Basic is $10 and Business is $16 per user per month with the yearly billing toggle on.
HubSpot runs a free plan capped at 2 users, and Starter lists at $20 a month on monthly billing. The latest capture shows no free trial.
Jobber runs a trial and no free plan, with a listed entry price of $49 a month.
Four products, four answers. The pattern behind them shows up when you split the directory by category.
The split follows the category
| Category | Free plan | Free trial | Median entry price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management | 67.7% | 83.9% | $10/mo |
| AI | 67.7% | 30.6% | $20/mo |
| Developer Tools | 66.2% | 52.3% | $25/mo |
| Security | 48.8% | 65.1% | $8/mo |
| CRM | 24.0% | 80.0% | $29/mo |
| Field Service | 23.5% | 50.0% | $49/mo |
| HR | 19.3% | 42.1% | $25/mo |
All figures are as of the directory’s last fetch. Category samples are far smaller than the directory as a whole, so read them as direction rather than precision. We covered the entry-price side of these categories in SaaS pricing benchmarks; here the point is the acquisition motion, not the price. Three readings stand out.
Project Management runs both by default. The two shares add up to more than 150%, which means at least half of the project management tools in our directory offer a free plan and a free trial at the same time. The free plan recruits individuals and small teams; the trial lets a growing team test the paid collaboration features before someone approves the spend. In this category, freemium vs free trial is a false choice.
AI leans free plan, not trial. About two in three AI products offer a free plan, but fewer than one in three offer a trial. Our read is cost: every free AI user burns inference, so a capped allowance does the job of a trial without a countdown. Notion shows the shape from the other side. AI arrives as a trial inside the Free plan, and heavier agent usage is priced separately at $10 per 1,000 monthly credits.
CRM, HR, and Field Service lean trial. Free plans are rare here (roughly one product in four or five), while trials are common, most of all in CRM at 80%. These products are usually bought by a manager for a team, need the buyer’s data loaded before they show value, and are sold to people who expect to pay. A time-boxed trial matches how the purchase actually happens. HubSpot is the well-known exception in CRM, and its 2-user cap explains how: one or two people get real value without a team rollout, and the team rollout is where the paid tiers start.
Three questions that decide it for your product
Who adopts first? If one person can sign up, get value alone, and pull colleagues in later, a free plan compounds, because every free user is also a distribution channel. If the first user is a manager evaluating for a team, a free plan mostly attracts people who will never buy. Trials fit committee purchases.
How long until value shows up? A trial is a countdown. If your product needs an integration, a data import, or a few weeks of history before it proves anything, a short clock runs out before the value arrives. Either lengthen the trial, put setup help inside it, or use a free plan with a limit that bites only after the value is obvious.
What does a free user cost to serve? For a doc editor, close to nothing. For an AI product, a data-heavy analytics tool, or anything with real infrastructure per account, an unlimited free tier is a recurring expense with no end date. That is where capped free plans and trials win.
Answer those three and the model decision in your SaaS pricing strategy gets simpler, because the acquisition motion constrains the pricing model more than most founders expect. Our SaaS pricing models breakdown covers the other half of that decision, and the free pricing model recommender walks through a similar set of questions.
The gate is the real decision
Freemium is not one decision. It is a choice about what runs out, and live pages use four gates:
- Seats. HubSpot’s free plan stops at 2 users. Easy to understand, and the upgrade prompt arrives exactly when a team forms.
- Scale. Linear allows unlimited members but caps the free plan at 2 teams and 250 issues. The gate tracks how much work runs through the product, not how many people touch it.
- Features. Notion’s Free plan has basic forms and sites; Plus adds custom forms, custom sites, and unlimited file uploads. The gate is capability.
- Time. A trial is a gate too, just a blunt one. It closes on schedule whether or not the user reached value.
Our view: scale gates are underused. A seat gate taxes the exact behavior you want, which is inviting colleagues, while a scale gate lets the product spread first and charges once it is load-bearing. Linear’s free plan is one of the cleanest examples of choosing spread over early seat revenue.
How many tiers sit above the gate is a separate question, and four is more common than three, as we found in how many pricing tiers SaaS pages actually use.
When a competitor switches models
A change to a free plan or a trial is one of the most informative pricing moves a competitor can make, because it changes who can get in the door. ChartMogul is the recent example. Between two early-September crawls, its pricing page dropped the self-serve free plan, moved the trial behind a conversation with sales, and removed monthly billing. We broke down what that signals in our ChartMogul pricing teardown.
Read the direction, not just the event:
- A free plan disappears, or a trial moves behind a demo: the vendor is moving toward larger accounts and wants to qualify buyers before they touch the product.
- A free plan appears in a trial-led category: someone is going after the individual user the incumbents ignore. In CRM, HR, or Field Service, where free plans are rare, that is a wedge worth taking seriously.
- A trial gets longer or drops the credit card requirement: top-of-funnel volume is soft and the vendor is buying more of it.
Watch discounts in the same pass. In our directory, annual billing is where most published discounts live, which we covered in the SaaS discount strategy teardown.
The one move worth making this week
Pull the pricing pages of your five closest competitors and write down three things for each: free plan or not, trial or not, and, if there is a free plan, what the gate is (seats, scale, or features). Then compare the set against your category row above. If you are the only product without a free plan, or the only one gating on seats where everyone else gates on scale, that is either a deliberate positioning choice or an accident. Find out which before your next pricing change. If you would rather not do it by hand, the pricing page analyzer returns the tier structure, value metric, and limits for each page in about 30 seconds.
Outmano is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that tracks competitor pricing pages alongside SEO, content, roadmap, and reviews, and writes the analysis the day a free plan disappears or a trial changes. Every number in this post comes from our directory’s live fetches.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between freemium and a free trial?
Freemium is a free plan with no end date, limited by seats, usage, or features. A free trial gives temporary access to a paid tier for a fixed number of days. Freemium optimizes for adoption and word of mouth, a trial for converting buyers who already intend to pay, and many SaaS products now run both.
Which converts better, freemium vs free trial?
A trial usually converts a higher share of signups, because people who start a trial already intend to evaluate a purchase, while a free plan converts a smaller share of a much larger pool. Compare the two on paid customers per month and acquisition cost, not on conversion percentage, since the denominators are different. Our directory tracks what pricing pages publish, not conversion, so be wary of anyone quoting one universal rate.
Should a B2B SaaS startup offer a free plan?
Only if one person can get value alone and bring colleagues in later, and a free user costs close to nothing to serve. If your buyer is a manager evaluating for a team, a trial with setup help usually produces more revenue for less support load. In categories where free plans are rare, such as CRM and HR in our directory, a free plan can also be a deliberate wedge against incumbents.
Do free trials need a credit card?
No, and many live pages advertise that they do not; Notion’s latest capture lists its trial with no credit card required. Requiring a card filters out casual signups and tends to lift trial-to-paid conversion, but it shrinks the top of the funnel. Choose based on whether your bottleneck is lead volume or sales capacity.
Can you switch from freemium to a free trial later?
Yes, but removing a free plan is visible to competitors and existing users, and it changes who can enter your funnel. Grandfather current free accounts or give them a clear migration path, and expect the market to read the move as a shift toward larger customers. Adding a free plan later is operationally easier but much harder to reverse.
