Trial-to-paid conversion rate tells you how many of your free trials turn into revenue.

It matters because every trial you lose has already cost you money.

By the time someone starts a trial, you have paid to bring them in: ads, content, sales time and the cost of running the product for them. Trial-to-paid conversion is the step where that spending turns into revenue or into nothing.

It also multiplies everything above it. Double the rate and you double the customers you get from the same traffic, so one change here moves MRR, customer acquisition cost and payback period at the same time.

Divide the trials that paid by the trials that ended.

trial-to-paid conversion rate = trials that paid ÷ trials that ended × 100

Take one group of trials, usually every trial that started in the same month, and wait until all of them have ended. Then count how many of those same trials made a first successful payment.

Going from 15% to 20% on the same 400 trials means 80 customers instead of 60, or $3,920 of new MRR instead of $2,940. Nothing above the trial had to change.

A 2026 survey of 200 software products puts the median at 8%.

In February 2026, Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletter published a study of 200 B2B software products, run with ChartMogul and ProductLed. It counted free-to-paid conversion as the share of leads or free signups that became paying customers within six months.

The median across all products was 8%, with a wide spread: one in five free trial products converted below 2.5%, and roughly one in four above 25%. Free trials that required a credit card converted at 30%, more than 5 times the rate of trials that did not.

Source: Growth Unhinged, “A new look at free-to-paid conversion”, Kyle Poyar, 4 February 2026, read 13 October 2026.

Your own earlier months are the comparison that holds. A trial that asks for a card at signup and one that does not measure different things, so set your number against trials run the same way.

You raise it by fixing the moments where trials drop out.

• Ask for a payment method when the trial starts. A trial that starts with a card on file needs no extra step from the customer when it ends. The trade-offs are on the credit card for free trials page.
• Catch cards that cannot pay before the trial begins. An expired, blocked or empty card fails at the end of the trial, after you have served that user for weeks.
• Get each trial to its first result quickly. A trial that never reaches the main thing your product does has little reason to pay. Cut the setup steps in front of it.
• Say when the trial ends and what it will cost. A clear end date and price at signup mean fewer surprised customers when the charge arrives.
• Test the trial page itself. The headline, plan and trial length change who signs up and who pays. Run two versions side by side and keep the winner.

1Capture handles the payment side of this list on your own Stripe account. Its trial pages take a card at signup and authorize the full first payment, so a card that cannot cover the price is declined before the trial starts. The payment is collected in the last two hours of the trial, with up to 10 retries if it fails, and you can A/B test versions of the page. See how it works.

These mistakes make the rate look better or worse than it is.

• Mixing groups of trials. Dividing this month's new customers by this month's trial starts compares two different groups. With a 14-day trial, many of this month's payers started last month.
• Reading the rate too early. A group counted before its last trial has ended always looks worse than it will.
• Counting a saved card as a conversion. A trial converts on its first successful payment. A card on file that has not been charged is not revenue yet.
• Dropping trials cancelled on the first day. Every trial that started belongs in the bottom of the fraction, or the rate flatters you.