Guide

Why users sign up but don’t pay

People create an account and then never give you money. From the inside that feels like one problem: “they don’t want it.” It is usually one of three, and they ask for different experiments.

They never reached the thing worth paying for

If most signups never finish the action you call activation — first invoice, first project, first query that returns something useful — they are not rejecting the price. They never saw the product work. A discount does not fix that. Shorten the path to that action and measure signup → activation before you touch the paywall.

They reached it, and the free version was enough

Freemium fails quietly when the free plan already includes the job. People are not “bad leads.” They finished the job at $0. Look at activation → paid, not at traffic. The experiment is packaging: move the repeated job, the sharing, or the history behind the paid plan, and see whether people who already activate start paying.

They might pay, but not for this offer

Sometimes activation is healthy and the upgrade rate is still poor. That is willingness to pay or the shape of the price: a monthly subscription for a problem that shows up twice a year, a plan that asks for a card before trust exists, a price anchored against a spreadsheet that costs nothing. Do not “add features” here. Talk to people who activated and did not pay, and test one change to the offer.

How to stop guessing

Split the last 30 days into visitors, signups, activated users and paying customers. If the collapse is signup → activation, the paywall is the wrong argument. If activation is fine and payment is not, stop buying traffic. The free-to-paid rate is a summary of that second case. It still will not tell you which of the causes above you have — only that the argument is no longer “nobody signs up.”