What happens when the free trial ends
A free trial is a two-week app between you and a decision the vendor has already made on your behalf. The trial's length is on the pricing page; what happens at minute zero of day 15 usually is not. The four possible endings are very different products, and picking a trial without knowing its ending is how people discover a $119 charge on a statement they don't remember approving.
Ending one: the auto-charge
The trial that exists to capture a card number. You entered payment details at signup; at expiry, the first paid month bills automatically, and the "cancellation" you need to perform is a settings journey that starts after the charge, not before it. This design is legal and everywhere, and its tell is visible at signup: if the trial asks for a card, the trial is a purchase with a delay.
The defence is calendar arithmetic, not vigilance. Set the reminder three days before expiry — not on the day — because cancellation flows frequently include a save offer, a confirmation screen, or a survey that eats the remaining hours. Our renewal checklist (the SaaS renewal checklist) treats any card-on-file trial as a scheduled renewal in disguise.
Ending two: the silent downgrade
The trial that expires into a limited mode — the account keeps breathing, but features switch off. This is the friendliest design and also the most dangerous at scale, because a degraded workspace can run for weeks before anyone notices. The exports you thought were running, the automation that quietly stopped firing, the second seat that lost edit rights — nothing announces the change.
The tell at signup: no card required, no hard cutoff mentioned. The defence: on expiry day, open the product and use the specific feature you signed up for. Degradation is only silent if nobody tests the wound.
Ending three: the lockout
The trial that ends with your data behind a paywall. The workspace survives as a museum: viewable, not operable, exportable only by upgrading. This ending converts your trial investment — the hours you spent configuring pipelines, boards, and templates — into switching cost. The vendor knows the configuration work is the real product; the trial was where you built it.
The defence is export discipline before expiry: leave the trial the way you would leave a job, with everything you made copied out. Our migration pieces (spreadsheet to CRM, Mailchimp to Kit) all start from the same rule — export before you need to, not after you must.
Ending four: the genuine tier below
The best trials don't end; they land on a free plan. Kit's model — a 10,000-subscriber free tier, no card, with paid features excluded rather than revoked — is the honest version: the trial is a tour of a house you are allowed to keep living in, unfurnished. Podia's 14-day trial likewise requires no card, which means ending two, one, and three are structurally impossible: there is nothing to charge and nothing to hold hostage. We documented both in Kit pricing explained and Podia pricing explained.
Note the asymmetry this creates in the market. Vendors confident in their paid conversion (or fighting for the top of the funnel) can afford cardless trials and real free tiers. Vendors whose economics require capturing the charge use the card. The trial's terms are a signal about the vendor's confidence, and it reads before you ever open the product.
Three questions to ask before starting any trial
- Does it want a card? If yes, treat it as a purchase with a refund window and calendar the exit at signup.
- What does the account become on day 15? If the page doesn't say — and it usually doesn't — the answer is one of the four endings above, chosen by the vendor. Ask support; the answer's candour is itself data.
- Can you get everything out? Confirm export exists while the account is fully powered. The last day of a trial is the worst day to discover its boundaries.
And when the trial is over and you're deciding between paying and leaving, that decision belongs to when an upgrade actually pays off — not to the vendor's default answer, which is always "pay".
What we cannot verify
The card/no-card status and expiry behaviours we cite were read from vendor pricing and signup pages on October 23, 2026 (Teachable's 7-day carded trial with a 30-day money-back window; Podia's 14-day cardless trial; Kit's free tier with no trial card requirement). Trial terms change frequently and often differ by signup path and region; we have not personally run every trial to expiry. The four-endings taxonomy is our framework, not a vendor classification. See How We Test.