A lot of software, especially that within the cloud, is offered to developers on a 30 day trial basis. It is really such an antiquated model that harkens back to the days of demoware and freeware. After 30 days it stops working and you need to buy (or reset your clock or something).
Go do whatever you want… for 30 days… then start paying us.
It’s a tough model because with everything else on your plate do you really have the time to learn everything and anything on that topic?
Doubtful.
I’ve had trials for software up to 90 days and I still made the wrong decision to go with them.
Place on top of that the fact that you now have this time constraint to get from failure to success in? Well that doesn’t help much else now does it.
If it’s a developer tool, I get it, giving a developer 120 days to evaluate your software, probably not going to work. But a platform for them to learn and use and really get a breadth of what it is before they commit? Yeah, that needs to go beyond the standard 30 days that are out there right now.
Perhaps the other solution is to make it so cheap (I’m looking at you $.99 AppleStore Apps) that the developers will buy it, use it and not feel the pressure to achieve x by y while really learning about your systems.
Cheap enough to buy, feature functional enough that it could not be deployed to a Production environment, perhaps that’s the licensing model that would really open things up.
