Make Money Online Without Spending Any - Free Trial Offers Positives and Pitfalls

When you are looking for ways to make money online without spending any, you are bound to be drawn to companies offering free or reduced fee introductory memberships. There are some companies where membership is free forever. Other companies offer free membership for a trial period; at the end of the trial, you decide whether you want to continue as a full member. At that stage you either cancel or stump up the fee.

The experience of the trial will often convince people that it is not feasible to make money online without spending anything at all, so they sign up for full membership, and that is exactly the result the company would hope to achieve.

This sort of deal is pretty standard across numerous industries; you will find concessionary low start offers being made by all kinds of businesses (for instance credit card companies and utility companies).

I have just read a long forum thread written by several people who have decided that free/low cost start-up concessions are scams and the company owners are crooks. There are a variety of "reasons" put forward by the contributors to the thread I was reading. These are the most common ones:

1. Forgot to cancel the membership.

2. Did not realise they would have to pay when the trial expired if they failed to cancel.

3. Used a pre-paid debit card with insufficient funds and incurred bank overdraft charges.

4. Didn't think the service/product was worth the full membership fee.

Do these sound like reasons to condemn the company as a scam run by crooks? Let's look at each one in turn:

Number 1. There is only one person to blame, and it isn't the company.

Number 2. Low cost or free trial start-up offers are not gifts. If a vehicle dealership offers you a free test-drive in a brand new sports car, you don't assume that you can drive it away and keep it forever without paying anything.

Number 3. Again, only one person to blame.

Number 4. The point of the "almost free" trial is to let people see what they will be getting without forking out a full month's membership. In any event, the fact that something might not live up to our expectations does not make it a scam.

On the plus side, these free or low cost trials can be great money savers, and they are an excellent way to sample products and services with little or no cost and no ongoing obligation.

The pitfall is that the consumer must remember to cancel within the required time-frame if he does not wish to continue with the company after the trial expires. If you take advantage of a concessionary offer you need to make sure you mark the cancellation date on your calendar, otherwise you will be liable to pay the fees demanded.

Scams? Of course they exist, and many are targeted at people seeking a way to make money online without incurring any expense. With common-sense and a little caution, dishonest deals should be pretty easy to avoid. Offering a low cost or free trial is a legitimate marketing technique. You should easily be able to spot a likely scam by reading the terms of the offer: if it does not tell you exactly how to terminate the deal at the expiry of the free trial, be suspicious, be very suspicious.