14 day trial should be enough and it’s also industry standard.
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Even Adobe is only 14 days. And that is for the entire Creative Cloud Suite! 
Unfortunately, since Wappler projects are not tied to accounts like competing products, there is too many ways to beat the system.
Longer trial periods would have to have a limited feature set. Which obviously is not ideal either.
Fact is there is always people that will try and beat the system with trials. 7 days is enough of a deterrent to cut at least some of that down.
The number of trial days (7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 365) is arbitrary. The only downside to a longer trial period is that it creates a lag between the time a user first starts using a product and the first payment date. This lag is the ONLY reason to not offer a long trial period. Arguably, the longer the trial period, the greater the chance of acquiring and retaining a customer. This is why nowadays, every mattress company offers 365 day trial periods. The more a customer uses your product, the more dependent they become on it, and the less likely they are to switch to a competing product.
In this case, with a 7-day trial period, Wappler is losing a lot of customers who on principle, refuse to pay for the product before they’ve had the chance to fully evaluate it. Extending the trial period to 14 days would help. Extending it to 30 days would be even better. Extending it to 365 days would be better yet, but as I mentioned, this would create a one-year cash flow gap, thus it’s unrealistic. Also, the marginal rate of return decreases with each extension of the trial period. Thus, 14 days would be a lot better than 7 days, 30 days would be better than 14 days, but not as much of an improvement as going from 7 to 14, etc…
Your statement that “14 day trial should be enough” begs the question, enough for what? It’s certainly better than 7 days, but almost certainly not optimal in terms of maximizing revenue.
Not sure what you mean about “beating the system”. The only “system” here is the use of the software product. Once the trial expires, you can no longer use it. Thus, you get to keep whatever code you created, but you have no way of improving or updating the code in the future. As I mentioned, this is an unrealistic proposition for a commercial entity that’s using the code to generate revenue. If your website is making you money, of course you’re going to pay the yearly subscription in order to continue adding features and updates to maintain or increase that revenue.
I meant enough to trial all important features. Since I started with Wappler a few years ago I’ve seen the number of features double so it makes sense to increase the trialing period.
Regarding the financials I am assuming the team is doing what is best to keep everything heathy.
industry standard is more 30 days and a lot of SaaS follow a freemium model so except the boomers, most people expect not to be rush to trial anything. Thinking that users will do what you want because you decided it’s how it should be is not the way things work. Hire a decent marketing and product team and make choices based on users feedback (and not the guys here since beta) + make decisions on data not feelings. My 2 cents. This topic is very closed from the documentation / courses topic : old story and no real improvements… I would love someone here to explain me how having a longer trial will change your financials… most important KPI here are user acquisition cost and Churn / LTV… Having a longer trial period will not have any cost impact as your software does not consume any server ressources but for sure will help to convert…
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Agree on improving the documentation when new updates release. I believe most of people coming here because Wappler are promoting as ‘Visual Web App Creator’, which more make sense more non-coders user here are looking for more detailed & updated documentation.
I saw recent update are coming with use case documentation, however some people still can’t get the idea if it apply to different use case.
I saw very good suggestion here if you are open the documentation suggestion update to community also, I belive many wappler ambassador here would love to help Wappler team keep update the documentation.
Or maybe wappler can add something like tooltip that contain short explanation and link to the references. Saw it on some feature here, but not all.
I think @brad maybe referring to the fact that you could potentially keep registering free trials and importing the project. I guess two things would stop that, on a free trial don’t allow a user to import projects (not sure how you would stop that though since you could just overwrite the project files of a new project). Having a shorter trial helps stop that as it becomes a pain to keep doing that every 7 days instead of every month.
I think increasing the trial would be a great idea, however I do understand the concerns as this isnt a SAAS product like Bubble, Adalo, Softr etc technically people could get by using free trials. However I do also think that those users probably wouldn’t ever pay for Wappler in the first place so I do think that there would be more users onboarded with a longer trial personally.
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Can I throw another possible solution into the mix?
How about the trial has some kind of limitation which doesn’t prevent trying it out and confirming it will do what you want but it won’t allow you to produce a finished product? A bit like a watermark that might be placed on output from a graphics or presentation program.
I don’t know how easy or secure this would be but it might be worth considering. Then the trial could be increased to something like 30 days. You couldn’t let it run longer otherwise you could work on a large project using the trial and only actually pay for it when you’re ready to launch it. Unless you could prevent working with a project made with the trial version from being brought into the licensed version and published.
Worth thinking about?
As George explained a few days ago:
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Agree 100%
I would be happy to pay for a year if it brought down my monthly charge, just food for thought.
did not know that