Skene
PLG term

Trial-to-paid conversion rate

Trial-to-paid conversion rate measures how effectively your free trial turns signups into paying customers. In a PLG model, it captures how well your onboarding, product experience, and pricing work together to get users from “trying” to “buying.” A healthy trial-to-paid rate signals that your trial design, activation milestones, and upgrade prompts are aligned with real value.

Funnels
Also called: Trial conversion rate, Free-to-paid conversion
About this term

This page is part of the Skene PLG glossary. Use it as a reference when writing specs, dashboards, or playbooks that rely on this concept.

Canonical glossary index: /resources/glossary

What is trial-to-paid conversion rate?

Trial-to-paid conversion rate is the percentage of users or accounts that start a free trial and end up on a paid plan within a defined period (often by trial end plus a short grace window).

It is a core PLG funnel metric because it connects the top of your trial funnel to actual revenue.

What drives trial-to-paid conversion?

Clear value discovery during the trial, ideally by hitting a well-chosen activation milestone early.

Fair, understandable pricing and upgrade paths that make it easy to say “yes” once value is proven.

Timely prompts and success outreach that help users over the last mile from trial to decision.

How to measure and improve trial conversion

Track trial cohorts and calculate conversion as paying accounts ÷ trial-starting accounts for each cohort.

Segment conversion by acquisition source, use case, and product surface; then run targeted experiments on messaging, onboarding flows, and pricing to improve weak segments.

How Skene supports better trial conversion

Skene helps you define and instrument activation milestones that sit at the heart of a successful trial, so you can see which users are actually getting value.

By connecting journeys to analytics, Skene lets you correlate specific onboarding changes with improvements in trial-to-paid conversion over time.

Implementation notes

  • Choose a trial length that gives typical users enough time to reach activation, not just enough time to explore menus.
  • Design your trial journey around one or two clear outcomes; avoid overwhelming users with every feature during a short window.