Time is not free. If it's too expensive that I won't use it for my own projects, I'm not going to even bother with a free trial. Same if you don't tell me your price up front, I'm not going to bother with the free trial. Tools that will get recommended at my workplace are more likely to be the ones that I use for my own side projects, since I already know them and they will allow me to move fast. And the tools I use at home are more likely to be the free/cheap ones than the expensive ones.

Of course specifics and circumstances matters. If a tool is critical for the business then we will review everything in depth and pick the best, regardless of trial/free plan/etc. And of course, sometimes the critical task is simply to ship ASAP...

Different anecdata here. Trial periods suck.

My experience is that I rarely have enough time to determine if I really like the service or if it's still just a shiny new tool to play with. I need more than 14-30 days to actually put in the work to understand a reasonably complex tool (say a CRM system) well enough to make a commercial recommendation.

Obviously this issue doesn't apply to all SaaS companies but it's probably common enough to be worthy of consideration.

Terrible title on their post then.

I, personally, rarely use a trial period for anything I’m testing for the long term. It’s not worth integrating it into my day to day if I may have to pay more then I want.

BUT, I do think it’s important to offer a free level for a lot of simple services to get people hooked. Costco does it, and it works for a lot of software.

both examples given specifically have free plans, not just trial periods. A trial period is useful for specific evaluation, but not for having experience with a tool and recommending it on that basis.