The Free Trial Is Free Again

Starting today, ReplyWisely is free for 7 days with no credit card. Sign in with X and you're in. Nothing is charged, and nothing will be charged unless you decide to subscribe.

If you've been reading this blog, you know this is the third time I've moved this line. I killed the free trial in April. I brought it back in May with a card requirement — $0 today, first charge on day 7. That version ran for two months. This post is what it taught me.

The card wall was in the wrong place

The argument for card-required was a good one, and I still think it's right for a lot of products: asking for a card filters for serious users, and the people who self-select through that filter convert and stay at much higher rates. The trials I got were high quality.

The problem is that ReplyWisely's value is not visible until you've used it. It isn't a tool you can evaluate from a screenshot. The whole pitch is “reply to the posts that will actually be seen” — and that claim only becomes real the moment you open X, see a green triangle on a post you would have scrolled past, reply to it, and watch the view count come back higher than your usual. That takes about ten minutes of ordinary browsing.

So the card wall was sitting before the ten minutes that make the case. I was asking people to take on the mental cost of a payment decision to find out whether there was anything worth paying for. That's the wrong order of operations for this specific product.

What actually changed

One thing: the trial now starts when you sign in, not when you check out. There is no checkout step to get started at all.

• Install the extension and open x.com.
• Click the banner and continue with X.
• That's it. Your 7 days start immediately — no card, no form, no email verification loop.

On day 7, access ends. If you want to keep going it's $29/mo, you enter a card then, and you're charged then. If you do nothing, nothing happens — there is no card on file to charge. That's the part I want to be unambiguous about, because “free trial” has been so thoroughly abused by products that quietly bill you on day 8.

The guarantee stays

Removing the card doesn't mean removing the risk reversal — it stacks on top of it. Every paid charge is still backed by the 30-day money-back guarantee: if you're not happy for any reason within 30 days of your first charge, you request a refund from your dashboard and I send back every cent.

So the full shape of the offer is now: 7 days free with no card, then 30 days of money-back on your first charge. You have 37 days to decide, and you only ever risk money for the last 30 of them.

If you're already a customer

Nothing changes for you. Existing subscriptions bill exactly as they did, at the price you signed up at. If you're currently in a card-on-file trial from the old model, that trial runs to its end date and converts as scheduled — I'm not moving anyone's goalposts mid-trial.

On changing your mind in public

Three pricing posts in four months looks like thrashing, and I understand why it reads that way. But the alternative — picking a model on day one and defending it because I already wrote it down — is worse. The card-required trial was a real experiment with a real result: good conversion on the people who started, far too few people starting. That's useful information, and the correct response to it is to move the wall, not to keep arguing for it.

I'll tell you how this one goes too.