Why We Removed the Card Requirement From the Free Trial

Until a few days ago, starting a LAYER 0 trial meant entering a card. Standard practice — Stripe collects it, sets a 7-day trial on the subscription, nothing gets charged unless you stay past day 7. Plenty of software works this way. We didn't think twice about it.

Then I looked at the actual numbers, and they didn't agree with that decision.

What the Data Actually Said

Over 30 days: 136 visitors to the homepage. Roughly 4 signups. Most of that traffic came in cold, off a link on X — someone scrolling, curious, not mid-research with a card already in hand. Cold social traffic converts differently than someone who typed “prop firm discipline tool” into Google with intent to buy something today.

A card requirement is a filter. It's the right filter when the problem is too many low-intent signups clogging up support and skewing your metrics. It's the wrong filter when the actual problem is that almost nobody is trying the product at all. I had the second problem, and I was running the first problem's solution.

The Part I Got Wrong Twice

It gets less flattering. While fixing this, I found that the paywall screen inside the app — the one a brand-new signup would have hit first — said “Pro Required, Upgrade for $9.99/mo,” with zero mention of the 7-day trial the marketing site was promising everywhere else. The trial itself worked correctly on Stripe's end. Nobody would have known that from what the app actually showed them. Someone who read “free trial, cancel before day 7, pay nothing” and then landed on an unexplained $9.99/mo wall seconds later had every reason to assume the worst.

Not intentional. Still a real gap between what we said and what we showed. Worth naming directly rather than quietly patching and moving on.

What Changed

Signing up now grants full access immediately — every feature, for 7 days, no card, no Stripe screen at all. If it's not for you, you never had to hand anything over to find that out. If you want to keep going after day 7, that's when a payment method comes up, and only then.

This isn't a permanent policy carved in stone. If volume grows to the point where a card requirement starts making sense again — filtering for people who are serious rather than filtering out people who haven't decided yet — we'll revisit it. Right now, the honest answer to “what's actually holding this back” was friction at the door, not quality of who walks through it.

If you've been curious but not quite ready to hand over a card to find out — that reason is gone now.