We offer a free trial that requires a credit card, and our churn is entirely front-loaded on day six

A user signs up on a Monday, forgets to cancel their sandbox project, and gets hit with a $49 charge on Sunday morning. They immediately dispute the charge with their bank instead of emailing support, costing us a processing fee and a potential advocate.

Nothing about our conversion funnel makes that cliff feel manageable. The fourteen-day trial label sets an expectation of breathing room, but the friction of entering payment info upfront turns the trial into a ticking clock rather than an exploration.

Card-required trials exist because they filter out low-intent signups and improve conversion rates to paid tiers, and that metric drives our growth charts. But optimizing for upfront conversion while ignoring day-one hostility creates a toxic cycle of chargebacks and angry churn.

What I would do differently: let users build and test fully in the free tier with strict functional limits, then prompt for payment only when they hit a hard wall that requires production scale. Harder to build separate feature gates, much healthier for long-term retention.

If you use free trials to drive software adoption, how do you handle the tension between conversion metrics and user goodwill?