A bug saved the company

It's sad that the more generous, user-friendly trial policy led to worse sales. ;-(

it is the unfortunate truth of the world. It's why I just roll my eyes when I see comments like "nagging reminders mean I'll never buy your product!" Those were probably never going to be customers anyway, they're just finding ways to justify it to themselves.

I'm actually not so sure. Even if 100% of the signups to the new version came from users trying for the first time, the previous version being essentially free could have got the app a lot of publicity in tutorials, recommendations or even just showing more highly rated or higher in the download charts.

All of that could increase discoverability of the version with only 15 minutes free trial, so it would be essentially trading sales for advertising.

That said, 2 weeks evaluation on a tool you might use only once effectively means it's just free. Those who might have a need say once a month might just uninstall and reinstall it, and feel completely justified because they didn't get their 15 days, only one day.

I still have not gotten around to buying WinRaR. On other hand if it stopped working I would probably install something else.

QED

I agree with you that if the app was indeed "essentially free", it could have seen all the benefits you suggest.

But it wasn't "essentially free". For myself, whenever I encounter a tool I might want to use and it has a limited time trial, I typically skip it unless I'm already fairly certain that I'll keep paying for it after the trial period. I think loss aversion comes in here as well: I'm worried about "wasting" the trial. It's like consumables in a video game: yeah maybe this tool would be useful now, but what if I encounter something later where it would be more useful?

> I'm actually not so sure. Even if 100% of the signups to the new version came from users trying for the first time, the previous version being essentially free could have got the app a lot of publicity in tutorials, recommendations or even just showing more highly rated or higher in the download charts.

You've just described enshittification 101.

Because of this, I put off signing up for services that automatically have a premium period at the start, followed by the free tier after one fortnight/month/year (as opposed to a time-limited trial you can manually activate). What if I need those premium features at some point in the future and want to actually trial it?

30 year non-paying customer of WinRAR here. I really don't think anything would have changed if I spent some money on it 30 years ago. In fact, way back then, I was correctly afraid of someone sniffing or leaking my credit card info. Today, I'm afraid to buy it because everything is getting AI baked into it. I'm switching back to PKZIP if that happens.