Count paying customers per visitor, not trial-to-paid
Per 1 000 visitors, a card-required trial yields 10.5 paying customers, a standard trial 3.6, freemium 5. The conversion rate you should track is paid customers per visitor.
Per 1 000 website visitors, a credit-card-required trial produces 10.5 paying customers. A standard free trial produces 3.6. Freemium produces 5.
That is from ChartMogul's 2026 survey of 200 B2B software products. The card-required trial gets the fewest signups of the three (35 versus 45 and 90), yet it ends up with the most paying customers, because the people who get past the card field actually intend to buy. The same data shows conversions peak around day 7 no matter how long the trial runs, so a 30-day trial rarely buys you anything a 14-day one doesn't.
Why it matters: your trial-to-paid rate can look healthy while the funnel behind it is starved of qualified people. Judge every signup or pricing change on paying customers per visitor, not on the conversion rate of whoever happened to sign up.
Source: Free Trial Conversion Statistics 2026: SaaS Benchmarks by Industry
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