[horsawlarway]

Even outside of pricing issues - demo only or "contact sales to get started" type marketing pages are an immediate (IMMEDIATE) turn off.

I'll usually just close the tab.

If I have to talk to sales to understand your product and pricing - your product/pricing are bad.

And I'm saying that from lived work experience - the products we integrate with that don't provide open signups are sitting in the first, second, and fourth spots for outages and downtimes across the 80 some products we integrate with (and those 3 are the only ones not open to signup).

[notfromhere]

Eh, kinda depends. Some software tools are complex, and a trial won't really show you the functionality. Free trial users aren't exactly going to spend time configuring a complex piece of technology, so you'll just get a lot of useless signups instead of actual users.

[FL410]

So what. Let them in to play around, they’ll see why they need to talk to a sales engineer (a TECHNICAL person, not the guy who sets appointments with the technical person).

If you’re selling a SaaS product and you can’t let me go in and play with it without talking to sales about my budget, timeline, and favorite color first, I’m not buying your product. Full stop.