The debate is settled. After years of A/B testing, industry studies, and real-world case studies, one thing has become increasingly clear: requiring a credit card for free trials is costing SaaS companies more customers than it’s protecting.
At LeadSync, we recently made the decision to remove our credit card requirement entirely. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly. It came after months of analyzing industry benchmarks, studying what the most successful product-led growth companies are doing, and recognizing a fundamental shift in how B2B buyers evaluate software.
This article breaks down the research, the real numbers, and the strategic thinking behind this increasingly popular approach to SaaS growth.
For years, SaaS founders have wrestled with a seemingly simple question: should you require a credit card to start a free trial? The conventional wisdom suggested that requiring payment details upfront would filter out tire-kickers and attract only serious buyers.
The data tells a different story.
According to First Page Sage’s 2025 SaaS benchmarks (aggregated from 86 SaaS companies between Q1 2022 and Q3 2025), the difference between opt-in trials (no credit card required) and opt-out trials (credit card required) is stark:
Visitor to Free Trial Conversion Rates:
That’s a 240% difference in trial signups. But here’s where it gets interesting.
Free Trial to Paid Conversion Rates:
At first glance, opt-out trials appear to win on conversion rate. But this is what Lincoln Murphy at Sixteen Ventures calls “a vanity metric” when viewed in isolation. The real question is: how many paying customers are you actually acquiring?
Let’s run the numbers on a hypothetical 10,000 website visitors.
Opt-Out Trial (Credit Card Required):
Opt-In Trial (No Credit Card Required):
Despite the lower trial-to-paid conversion rate, the no-credit-card approach delivers 27% more paying customers from the same traffic volume. The Totango SaaS Metrics Report found similar results, noting that the end-to-end conversion rate doubles for companies that don’t ask for credit card information upfront.
But the advantages don’t stop there.
When Firstsales.io dropped their credit card requirement, they immediately saw a 71% increase in users wanting to try their software. According to Udit, the Founder and CEO, users who were previously abandoning on the payment screen suddenly became active trial users.
This points to a crucial insight that goes beyond conversion math: credit card friction doesn’t just filter out unqualified leads—it filters out qualified buyers who simply aren’t ready to commit payment details to software they’ve never used.
Consider the modern B2B buying journey. Forrester research indicates that B2B buyers complete nearly 83% of their purchasing journey before ever speaking to sales. They want to evaluate software on their own terms, in their own time, without the psychological pressure of knowing their card is on file.
The credit card requirement creates several hidden costs:
1. Trust Deficit at First Impression
Your first interaction with a potential customer is asking for their payment information before they’ve seen any value. For a new or lesser-known SaaS product, this immediately raises skepticism. Why do you need my card if the trial is truly free?
2. Increased Support Burden
Opt-out trials generate significant support overhead from users wanting to cancel before being charged. This creates negative interactions during what should be an onboarding-focused period.
3. Negative Reviews and Chargebacks
Users who forget to cancel and get charged often leave negative reviews or initiate chargebacks. These hidden costs rarely appear in conversion rate calculations but significantly impact brand perception and payment processing costs.
4. Missed Email Capture Opportunities
Every user who bounces at the credit card screen is a lost email address. Even if they don’t convert to paid immediately, you’ve lost the opportunity to nurture them through email marketing—a channel with significant long-term value.
The most successful SaaS companies of the past decade share a common trait: they make it remarkably easy to start using their products without financial commitment.
Slack went from zero to a $7 billion valuation in five years by making their product accessible to anyone. Their free tier is generous enough that individual users can adopt it without any purchasing decision, then spread it organically across their organizations.
The genius of Slack’s approach is that they don’t require credit cards for their free trial of paid plans either. Users can request a trial of Pro or Business+ plans without payment information, and the trial automatically reverts to the free plan if they choose not to upgrade.
Calendly’s product-led growth strategy extends beyond just offering a freemium plan. Every time someone receives a Calendly link, they experience the product’s value before ever visiting the website. There’s no credit card wall between that first positive impression and signing up to create their own scheduling link.
This approach helped Calendly build a user base of over 10 million monthly users while remaining a lean organization with fewer than 250 employees.
HubSpot didn’t start as a product-led company. They made a deliberate strategic shift after observing the success of PLG competitors. A crucial element of their transformation was making their free CRM tier accessible without credit card requirements.
Their free plan gives users access to a fully functional CRM including contact management, site activity tracking, and deal tracking—with no credit card details required. This allowed users to build workflows and dependencies on the platform before any purchasing decision was necessary.
Notion’s explosive growth came from a generous free tier that lets individual users access unlimited personal pages, real-time collaboration with up to 10 guests, and core features like databases and kanban boards—all without entering payment information.
Users build dependency on the product through daily use, and natural upgrade triggers occur when teams grow beyond the free tier’s limitations. The product sells itself because users have already experienced its value.
Dr. Robert Cialdini’s principle of reciprocity helps explain why no-credit-card trials often outperform their payment-required counterparts in the long run. When a business asks for little to nothing yet delivers genuine value, it creates what psychologists call an asymmetric relationship.
The user receives value first. They feel the product has earned their trust. When it comes time to pay, they’re reciprocating for value already received rather than gambling on a promise.
This stands in stark contrast to opt-out trials, where the psychological frame is fundamentally different. Users are constantly aware that the clock is ticking toward a charge. Rather than exploring the product with curiosity, they’re mentally cataloguing whether to cancel. The relationship starts from a position of skepticism rather than generosity.
To be fair, opt-out trials aren’t universally wrong. There are specific scenarios where requiring payment information upfront may be the right strategic choice:
Established Brands with Proven Products
Companies like Amazon Prime require credit cards for trials because they have massive brand recognition and proven product value. The trust barrier has already been cleared through brand awareness.
High-Touch Enterprise Sales
If your product requires significant setup, integration, or training, the friction of a credit card might appropriately filter for serious evaluators who are willing to invest time in a proper evaluation.
Products with High Marginal Costs
If each trial user costs you significant money (compute resources, API calls, etc.), you may need the credit card requirement to prevent abuse. However, consider whether usage limits might solve this problem without the conversion penalty.
Late-Stage Optimization
For mature SaaS products with high market awareness and optimized onboarding, the higher trial-to-paid conversion rate of opt-out trials might ultimately deliver better results. But this is typically an optimization for companies already achieving strong product-market fit.
The shift toward no-credit-card trials isn’t just a conversion optimization tactic—it reflects a fundamental change in how successful SaaS companies go to market.
Product-led growth (PLG) companies, where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, and expansion, have consistently outperformed traditional sales-led models. According to OpenView Partners, PLG businesses trade at almost 2x higher revenue multiples than their sales-led counterparts.
The core philosophy of PLG is simple: let users experience value before asking them to pay. Credit card requirements are antithetical to this philosophy. They insert a purchasing decision before the user has experienced anything.
As OpenView notes in their research, during the 2020 disruptions, PLG companies didn’t just survive—they thrived. People needed tools that worked immediately, without lengthy sales processes or evaluation committees. Zoom, Notion, Slack, and similar products exploded because they could deliver value within minutes of first interaction.
Removing the credit card requirement isn’t a magic bullet. It shifts where conversion work happens—from the signup form to the product experience and onboarding flow.
Optimize Time-to-Value
Your most critical metric becomes how quickly users reach their “aha moment.” Calendly achieves this in about 30 seconds—users can create their first scheduling link almost immediately after signup. Map your product’s core value proposition and ruthlessly eliminate friction between signup and that first success.
Invest in Onboarding
With more trial users and lower inherent commitment, your onboarding experience becomes your primary conversion tool. Interactive walkthroughs, checklists, and personalized onboarding sequences help users discover value faster.
Implement Behavior-Based Outreach
Use product analytics to identify users who’ve reached activation milestones and trigger conversion communications at precisely the right moment. A user who’s just experienced significant value is far more receptive to a payment request than one who signed up yesterday and hasn’t logged in since.
Create Natural Upgrade Triggers
Design your free tier so that upgrade triggers occur naturally as users get more value from the product. Slack’s 2,000 message limit, Notion’s 10-guest collaboration cap, and similar mechanisms create organic moments where upgrading becomes the obvious next step.
Build Email Nurture Sequences
Every trial signup is an email address. Even users who don’t convert immediately can be nurtured over time with valuable content, product updates, and re-engagement campaigns. The long-term value of this email list often exceeds the short-term conversion benefit of credit card requirements.
For LeadSync, the decision aligned with our core philosophy about how B2B buyers should evaluate software. Our target users—marketing teams and agencies managing lead generation—are sophisticated buyers who know exactly what they need. They don’t need a credit card deadline to evaluate software properly.
By removing the friction, we’re betting that a better onboarding experience and genuine product value will convert more users than artificial urgency ever could. We’re prioritizing the end-to-end customer journey over a single-step conversion metric.
The initial data supports this approach. We’ve seen the expected increase in trial signups, and our product-qualified lead volume has increased substantially. More importantly, the users who do convert show higher engagement and lower early-stage churn—they’re converting because they genuinely want to use the product, not because they forgot to cancel.
The companies that have built the most valuable SaaS businesses of the past decade share a common trait: they trusted their products enough to give them away first.
This isn’t about being generous for generosity’s sake. It’s a strategic recognition that in an era of empowered buyers, unlimited software choices, and zero-commitment alternatives, the companies that win are the ones that prove value before asking for anything in return.
The credit card requirement was always a proxy for commitment. But real commitment comes from users who’ve experienced your product and decided they can’t live without it. No payment form can manufacture that.
If your product genuinely solves a problem, let people experience that solution. The paying customers will follow.
According to First Page Sage’s 2025 benchmarks, opt-in free trials (no credit card required) see an average 8.5% visitor-to-trial rate and 18.2% trial-to-paid conversion rate from organic traffic. Opt-out trials (credit card required) see 2.5% visitor-to-trial and 48.8% trial-to-paid rates. When you calculate end-to-end conversions, opt-in trials typically deliver more total paying customers despite the lower trial-to-paid percentage.
For most SaaS companies, especially those that are new or building market awareness, no-credit-card trials deliver better results. They generate significantly more trial signups (around 3-4x more) and, despite lower trial-to-paid rates, typically produce more total paying customers. Credit card requirements may make sense for established brands with strong recognition or high-touch enterprise products.
Opt-in free trials don’t require credit card information upfront. Users try the product and must actively decide to enter payment details and subscribe. Opt-out free trials require payment information at signup, and users are automatically charged when the trial ends unless they actively cancel. Opt-in trials prioritize user experience and trust; opt-out trials prioritize immediate revenue capture.
Product-led growth (PLG) companies like Slack, Calendly, Notion, and HubSpot typically offer generous free tiers or trials without credit card requirements. They focus on getting users to experience product value quickly (time-to-value), then create natural upgrade triggers when users hit usage limits or need advanced features. This approach builds trust and converts users who genuinely need the product.
Industry benchmarks vary by trial type. For opt-in trials (no credit card), 15-25% is considered good, with top performers exceeding 25%. For opt-out trials (credit card required), 40-50% is average, with strong performers reaching 55%+. However, these numbers should be evaluated in context of your overall visitor-to-paid conversion rate, not in isolation.
Focus on time-to-value by getting users to their “aha moment” as quickly as possible. Invest in interactive onboarding experiences, implement behavior-based email sequences, and create natural upgrade triggers through usage limits. Use product analytics to identify activated users and reach out at the optimal moment. Strong onboarding typically has more impact on conversion than credit card requirements.
Most SaaS companies offer 7-14 day trials, though some extend to 30 days. Shorter trials create urgency but may not give users enough time to fully evaluate complex products. Longer trials reduce urgency but allow users to build habits and dependencies. The right length depends on your product’s complexity and how long it takes users to experience core value. Testing different lengths is recommended.
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