A free trial is an optional, popular marketing tactic that lets users try paid features of your app for a limited period. After the trial, users are charged automatically and need to opt out if they don’t want to pay to continue using the paid features of your app.
Apps with stable, recurring fees that are billed monthly or yearly and use the Wix billing system can have free trials fully managed by Wix. This includes:
Self-managed trials (restricted): Until June 2024, all app developers were required to self- manage free trials. If you meet the criteria we recommend switching to the Wix-managed method by following the steps below. Apps that use external billing, usage-based pricing or offer single purchases still need to manage their own free trial.
The following sections explain how to set up a Wix-managed free trial, including how to:
Important: Free trials don't appear in your payouts dashboard until the trial ends and the user is successfully charged.
Note: Free trials are applied to users and existing plans only after submitting, approving, and publishing a new app version.
When a user begins a free trial plan, Wix considers them as paying customers, and triggers Paid Plan Purchased.
To detect if a user is on a free trial, call Get App Instance (REST | SDK). Check the returned instance
properties, and activate or deactivate your app's paid features accordingly.
isFree
: false
if a user is on a paid plan or free trial.billing
: Only appears if isFree
is false
. Contains a property freeTrialInfo
with status
and endDate
(to check how many days are left in the trial).freeTrialAvailable
: Indicates if a user is eligible for a free trial or not.When the free trial ends, and the user's credit card is charged, you won't receive a notification. However, if the user cancels before their credit card is charged, Paid Plan Auto Renewal Canceled is triggered.
Note for Blocks developers: Free trial fields aren't available in the decoded instance and the vendorProductId
will be updated once a user upgrades to a free trial plan. We recommend using the REST/SDK instance to receive information on free trials.
For users eligible for a free trial, prompt them to start the trial with a button. You can know if a user is eligible by checking the freeTrialAvailable
property returned from Get App Instance (REST | SDK).
Since a free trial is considered an upgrade, your button should use the following link, which must open in a new tab:
If your app offers only a premium plan with a free trial, choose one of these approaches until the user upgrades:
Note: If your app is built with Wix Blocks, see Provide Entry Points to Upgrade a Blocks App.
After you've activated a free trial as described in step 1:
isfree
should be true.Note: Wix-managed free trials are available to new users only. This means that if you tested your purchase flow, you won't be able to test the Wix-managed free trial flow afterward from the same Wix account for the same app. Create a new test app if necessary.
When your new app version is published with a Wix-managed free trial any users that are currently enrolled in the self-managed free trial will be offered the new free trial as well. Your app can prompt users to move to the new free trial and end their current one.
Important: As of June 01, 2024, this workaround solution is only relevant for apps that use external billing, usage-based pricing or offer single purchases.
When a free trial is activated in the App Dashboard, Wix displays a free trial’s availability in various places on the Wix App Market. However, it’s the app’s responsibility to:
You need to set up the following ‘availability’ states within your app: