Why we don't have a free trial (and what we ship instead)

Fast answer

Free trials select for tourists, not operators. CommonWealth Ops ships the 30-day money-back guarantee instead: you pay the first month, and if within 30 days the weekly read has not surfaced an opportunity you did not already know about, the first month is refunded and your account is frozen. Skin in the game on both sides.

What is wrong with free trials

Every ecommerce intelligence platform with a public price page offers some variant of "7 days free" or "14 days free" or "first month at 50 percent off". The standard playbook. It feels customer-friendly. The structural problem is that it selects badly.

A free trial brings in:

• Curious people who will never pay.
• Competitors auditing your feature set.
• Operators who are not yet committed enough to actually run the product through a real workflow.
• Tire-kickers chasing every new launch announcement.

A free trial does NOT preferentially bring in:

• Operators who are serious enough about the value claim to risk EUR 49.
• Operators who will actually act on the weekly read.
• Operators who will renew at month 2 because the product changed their P&L.

The structural asymmetry is: tourists love free trials; operators do not need them. A free trial expands the top of the funnel with the wrong people and drains support time on questions that never convert.

What we ship instead

The 30-day money-back guarantee, full mechanics at /blog/30-day-guarantee-mechanics.

The structural difference: the operator pays EUR 49 upfront. If within 30 days the weekly read has surfaced no opportunity they did not already know about, they submit the claim form at /guarantee, we issue a Stripe refund within 5 business days, and the account is frozen. No interview, no negotiation, no escalation to customer success.

The two structural advantages over a free trial:

1. The operator's commitment is measurable

A free-trial signup tells us nothing. A paid signup tells us the operator believed enough in the value claim to part with EUR 49 in advance. That belief is the highest-correlation signal we have for whether they will stay past month 2. We optimise for it at signup; a free trial would erase it.

2. The guarantee period is long enough to test the real value

A 7-day trial does not give the weekly read enough time to surface anything: by the time the operator has read the first weekly digest, the trial is half over. The 30-day guarantee gives the operator FOUR weekly reads to find a useful pattern. That is a real test, not a tour.

What the guarantee actually costs us

The economics: the guarantee refunds EUR 49 plus Stripe's 2.9 percent processing fee. So a claimed guarantee costs CW Ops about EUR 50.50 in cash plus a small amount of operator time to process the refund. Roughly EUR 70 in fully-loaded cost.

If we ship a product that has nothing useful to say to a typical operator in their first 30 days, the EUR 70 per claim is the price of finding out, fast. The faster we find out, the faster we fix it. The slow alternative — a free-trial product that everyone drops at day 8 — gives no signal because there is no cost on the customer side.

The maths only works because the EUR 49 first month is low enough to bound the refund cost, and the 20 percent revenue share is non-refundable — it is owed on profit the operator already earned, and only ever exists in a profitable month. Both structural choices are explained in the pricing math post.

When this might change

If a meaningful share of the paying customer base ever writes in asking for a free trial — say more than 5 percent of new signups — the trade-off shifts and we re-examine. So far that signal has not arrived. The signups we get specifically say "I appreciated that you didn't make me jump through a trial hoop".

For now, no free trial. The 30-day guarantee is the equivalent — better calibrated for both sides.

Try it under the guarantee →