Can you try conversion tools for free first?

What is genuinely free

Microsoft Clarity is the outlier and deserves its reputation: session recordings, heatmaps and rage and dead click detection, at no cost with no session cap. For a store that has never had any visibility at all, there is no honest argument against trying it first.

Beyond that, most established tools offer a limited free plan or a time-boxed trial, Hotjar, Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange and PostHog among them. The limits are usually sessions per month or retention days rather than features, though testing is the common exclusion.

Free scans and audits are a different category: point one at your storefront and it reads your pages the way a first-time shopper meets them, with no install. Useful for a candidate list, and structurally unable to tell you what any of it costs, because it has not seen one of your shoppers.

What free plans hold back

Testing, almost everywhere. Running a test costs the vendor real infrastructure in the path of every page load, so it sits behind the paywall. This matters because testing is the step that turns a finding into a fact.

Retention is the second, and it catches people out. A short retention window sounds fine until an investigation takes longer than the window and the sessions you wanted have expired. Check it before you rely on a free plan for anything with a long cycle.

Then seats, integrations and anything that writes. Free plans are usually read-only by design: they show you the problem and stop short of the part that changes your store, because that part is the product.

The cost that is not on the pricing page

The reason so many free recording installs are abandoned is not that the tool was bad. It is that watching recordings is unbounded work with no completion criterion: there is always another session, and no point at which you have finished.

Put a number on it during the trial. The hours you spent in week one, at a modest internal rate, recur every week, and they belong in the comparison beside the licence fee. Few people do this arithmetic, which is why “free” wins evaluations it should lose.

The fair corollary runs the other way: if you have someone who enjoys watching sessions and is good at it, a free tool plus that person is a strong setup, and you may not need to buy anything.

How to stop an evaluation from drifting

Set an end date before you install. Two weeks is enough for any tool in this category to show you what it is, and open-ended evaluations do not conclude; they just stop being mentioned.

Evaluate against one question rather than a feature list. A feature comparison favours the tool with the most surface area, which is usually not the tool that answers your question fastest.

And insist on an estimated finding by the end. “We found some dead clicks” is where most trials finish, and it is not a result. “The size guide on mobile product pages takes a real share of taps and does nothing, and on our own numbers that path is worth this much a month” is a result, and it makes the buying decision clear in either direction.

What Liftable offers free

The store scan, for anyone: paste your store address, add an email, and it reads your storefront as a shopper would, on desktop and mobile. It runs 35 of the 39 planned checks and shows each finding on your own pages with its evidence. It prints no dollar figure, because a crawl has seen no shopper and no order. No install, no login, no card.

There is no free plan beyond the scan. Anything involving your own shoppers needs Shopify connected and the pixel on, and that comes with the Founding Brand Programme: 14 days free, then $750–$1,500 a month depending on sessions, including implementation support. Self-serve plans at $125, $400 and $999 a month are coming later.

A two-week evaluation that concludes

1. 01

   Write the question down first

   One sentence, before you install anything: “why does our mobile cart lose people between add to cart and checkout”. A tool is easy to judge against a question and impossible to judge against curiosity.

2. 02

   Install the free plan of one broad tool

   Microsoft Clarity is the obvious first choice: free, uncapped, and it will not run out mid-evaluation. Give it a week to collect before you look, because a day of data will mislead you about volume.

3. 03

   Run a free scan or audit in parallel

   Anything that gives you an outside read on the storefront without an install costs nothing and takes minutes. Treat it as a list of candidates, not a measurement: a scan sees your pages, not your shoppers.

4. 04

   Try to answer your question, and time yourself

   This is the real test. Note how long it took and how confident you are at the end. The hours are the number you are really comparing, and they are invisible unless you write them down as you go.

5. 05

   Estimate what the best finding is worth

   Take the most promising thing you found and work out what it costs each month against your own traffic and order value. If a tool cannot help you do this, it has given you a to-do list rather than a ranking.

6. 06

   Decide what the paid version has to be worth

   You now have a real estimate for the problem and a real number for the hours. A tool that saves the hours and finds the problem has a price you can justify; one that does neither is free and still too expensive.

Sources

1. On the free plans named above. Vendor free plans and trial limits change regularly and vary by region. The tools named here offered a free plan or trial when this guide was written; confirm current limits with each vendor rather than relying on this page. Microsoft Clarity’s uncapped free offer has been stable enough to plan around.
2. Liftable: what is built today. Liftable’s own account of what the product does, checked against the code on 2 October 2026 and shown on /how-it-works and /compare. Every figure this page gives about Liftable comes from it. No test has run on a merchant’s store and there are no published merchant results yet.

Questions