Creative Fabrica · 2025

Free Trial Modal — Timeline Test

How adding a "how the trial works" timeline to the payment modal lifted trial conversions by 3.51% across 73K+ users.

The product

Creative Fabrica is a subscription marketplace for design assets — fonts, graphics, templates, and AI tools for creators. Users sign up for a free trial to get unlimited access, which then converts to a paid subscription.

The problem

Creative Fabrica's free trial modal had a clean, functional layout — but a significant amount of whitespace below the form was doing nothing. Users were seeing a checkout screen with no reassurance about what they were signing up for, no clarity on when they'd be charged, and no sense of the experience ahead of them. We hypothesized that this dead space was a missed opportunity to reduce anxiety and increase activation.

The approach

Before designing, we looked at how other subscription products handle trial anxiety at checkout. Products like Canva and Miro use timeline-style explanations to show users exactly what happens after they sign up — and it works. We hypothesized the same pattern could work for Creative Fabrica.

Instead of guessing which execution would be most effective, we designed three variations — each testing a different level of detail and visual complexity — and ran them simultaneously against the control with a 33/33/33 split.

What we tested

Horizontal timeline communicating how the trial works — Today, Day 2 reminder, Day 7 charge. Winner with +3.51% lift.

Why Variation 2 won

Variation 2 stripped away everything except what the user needed at that moment — a clear, scannable answer to 'what am I signing up for?' No feature lists, no distractions. Just the three steps of the trial, presented horizontally so the eye moves through them in seconds.

Variation 3 showed the strongest raw lift (+6.32%) but had only 131 users in its sample — far too small to draw conclusions. Variation 1 showed minimal directional lift (+1.11%) with no significance.

One tradeoff worth noting: Variation 2 also showed a +12.9% increase in subscription cancellations — a signal we flagged for monitoring post-launch. The test confirmed that reducing uncertainty at checkout improves conversion, but the full retention impact requires longer observation.