Product-led growth
marketing.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a way of selling software where the product is the main sales tool. Instead of a demo, a sales call and a proposal, someone signs up, uses it, gets a result, and pays. Marketing's job shifts: less about convincing people the product is good, more about getting the right people into it and to a result fast.

It isn't free stuff for the sake of it. A free plan or trial is a cost: hosting, support, and people who never pay. It earns its keep only if enough of those people reach the point where the product proves itself. Capterra's advice to Australian buyers says the same from the other side: run a trial of typical tasks to confirm the software performs as expected. Buyers are testing you. PLG is designing for the test.

There are three common doors. Freemium: a free plan with limits, forever. Free trial: the full product for a set time, no card. Card up front, sometimes called an opt-out trial: the full product for a set time, and it turns into a paid plan unless the person cancels.

The headline conversion rates make card-required trials look like the obvious winner. The 2026 Conversion Report, a survey of 200 software products, found trials that require a credit card see 30% free-to-paid conversion, more than five times those that don't. But the same report counts signups too. Per 1,000 visitors, card-required trials got 35 signups and 10.5 paying customers; free trials got 45 and 3.6; freemium got 90 and 5. Once signup rates are counted, free trials did worse overall than freemium.

Lenny Rachitsky's earlier survey of more than 1,000 products found the same shape: for freemium self-serve products, 3% to 5% is a good conversion rate and 6% to 8% is great, while free trials convert higher, partly because people only start them when they're serious.

The defaults below are the report's medians. Put in your own traffic, price and rates if you have them, and how long it takes a new user to get one real result.

Time to value is how long it takes a new user to get one real result. It decides more than any benchmark. A design tool where someone makes a usable graphic in five minutes can afford a free plan: the product sells itself in the first session. A job management system for a Newcastle electrical contractor, which needs price lists, staff and customers loaded first, can't show its worth in a 14-day trial unless someone helps.

The most common trial length in the 2026 report is 14 days, used by 62% of products. That's a habit, not a law. Set the trial to the time a typical buyer needs to finish setup and use it for real, plus a few days. If that's a month, either offer a month or offer a guided start with sample data.

The biggest marketing lever in PLG often sits inside the product: templates, sample data, an import tool for the spreadsheet or the competitor they're leaving. Every step you remove between signup and the first result does more than a cheaper click.

Australian law has a lot to say about 'free'. The ACCC says an offer misleads when it's offered 'free' but on closer examination 'conditions apply', and that fine print must not conflict with the overall message. A 'free forever' plan that can't do the basic job, or a 'free trial' that needs a card and renews at full price without saying so clearly, is a risk today, not just from 2027.

Card-up-front trials carry the most weight. From 1 July 2027 the Unfair Trading Practices Act covers free trials that convert to paid, with disclosure before sign-up and an easy way to cancel. If you run one, say plainly on the sign-up screen that it becomes a paid plan, on what date, for how much, and how to cancel online. The SaaS rules page has a sign-up check.

PLG doesn't mean no people. The 2026 report found 80% of free trial products have human touchpoints when an enterprise user enters the trial. Larger buyers still want someone to ask about security, invoicing and setup. The trick is spotting which signups need a person, which the SaaS lead generation page covers.