Simon Watton

Don't worry, Invision Community is in very capable hands. While I co-founded the company 20 years ago, we've come a long way since then. Along the way, we've hired some extremely smart developers who do the bulk of coding now. I still work on features and help direct the product, but I spend less time in a code editor these days, and that's a great thing. 

I enjoy writing, and if one person gets a little value or inspiration from a blog article, then it's been worthwhile. 
Really soon. A soft release helps us narrow down critical issues before we roll it out to all customers.

This article is great for IPS' SEO. It's also super insightful. 
It's possible to write great content and also focus on dev simultaneously. As they say, come for the content, stay for the community.
Keep up the great articles, @Matt

Happy to report, it works. On one of my sites I rarely sell any VIP memberships. It can takes months to sell a single one. I turned on free trials this morning and got the first person signing up almost instantly. Within a few hours more the person moved over to a full paid membership. 

@The Old Man please share here or in PM your community URL and Im happy to help you suggest many ideas from my experience.
Long story short, your community should have
Valuable and/or entertaining/engaging content Above content should be locked for paid user after a free preview. Above content shouldn't be freely available with other sites and communities.

Nice to see these improvements to subscriptions! Thank you. 
On a personal note...
Funding an IPS Community is certainly challenging when you can't do it as a hobby anymore. I've had no regular income since 2017 following redundancy due to austerity cutbacks. It's hard to keep justifying the expense when you can't pay your mortgage or food. So I invested in Commerce for subscriptions when they were relaunched and Braintree was touted as the next 'big thing' in order to help save my main community site going after almost 2 decades, and unfortunately it was a huge financial mistake. I have just 2 subscribers, and one caused me no end of frustration in the process.
I've tried giving everyone access to the GIF feature for 6 weeks which is promoted as available with subscriptions, affordable prices and promotions but nobody wants to pay anything for the site they say they love. My community asked for t-shirts, so I launched two fabulous Spreadshirt stores, and got just 3 orders since October. My members have no interest in starting Clubs, a feature benefit promoted with paid subscriptions. The same with Blogs, but I can't get remove Blogs to save expense because some are essentially memorials to popular and much-loved members who have passed away.
So I'm hoping this free trials feature might encourage members a little, but honestly I'm getting close to the point where I don't want to visit my own community anymore aside from the AdminCP and instead of having the choice of bronze 1 month, silver 3 month and gold 12 month discounted packages, I now have just the $5 monthly bronze package available in case I have to pull the plug.

Like it or not, no one said they weren’t working on it or asked you to comment about beta versions. If being told you shouldn’t use them on live sites gets you this crabby, find a new hobby. 

Sorry did not realize I was crabby, 🙂