Subscriptions with a free trial
A free trial is a legitimate way to try a service before you pay. Don’t forget to turn off auto-renew before the trial ends if you don’t want to continue. And if you do continue — the full price applies after the trial, so it may be worth setting up a price alert.
How the list is put together
Only services whose free trial we’ve checked on the provider’s page or in the sign-up window make the list, and only with the number of days we saw there. There are three possible answers about a free trial: “none”, “the provider doesn’t say” and “we didn’t find one”. So a service missing from the list doesn’t mean it has no trial — only that we didn’t find information about one. On the service’s own page, the free trial line says which of these answers applies.
If a service doesn’t offer a trial, the subscription starts with the first payment. Then the cheapest way to decide is a single month that you cancel after the first period.
Three rules to keep a free trial free
First: a free trial almost always turns into a paid subscription automatically. If you’re asked for a card when you sign up, that card is charged the day after the trial ends. So cancel before the period ends, and don’t rely on memory: every service has a button for a calendar reminder.
Second: cancel where you signed up. A trial you started on your phone through an app store is canceled in the app store — not in the app and not on the provider’s website. How to do it depending on where you bought is explained in the auto-renew guide.
Third: when you cancel a trial, access may end right away. If the account switches to the free version the moment you cancel, the remaining days are gone. If you want to use the whole period, plan the cancellation for the last day — but not the day after.
After the trial
When the trial ends, the regular price applies, and that’s exactly what you should know in advance: on the service pages we show the price after renewal. If the price is too high today but you liked the service, the price alert will let you know when the price drops to your limit — no sign-up and no constant checking.
What we don’t write
We don’t write tricks for getting a second free trial with another email address or another card — it breaks the providers’ terms. And we don’t include trials we’ve only seen in other countries: they may not apply in the US, and promising something that isn’t offered here would be worse than promising nothing.