In this paper, we study the optimal software free trial offering strategy for cybersecurity software. Cybersecurity software market is characterized by its high customer uncertainty / low customer learning rate, and its low network effects. We focus on the free trial strategy that is common in the cybersecurity software industry but receives little attention from academic investigation so far: free trial offering with annoyance mechanism. We investigate the conditions under which such a strategy is optimal for the cybersecurity software vendor, in comparison with other strategies such as no free trial offering, and free trial offering without nagware. We incorporate the impact of customer uncertainty and customer learning that resolves this uncertainty in our analysis and show how they critically impact this free trial offering strategy. Our analysis indicates that it could be optimal for a cybersecurity software vendor to offer a free trial version with full functionality indefinitely, coupled with a strategically designed level of annoyance mechanism. We further find that annoyance mechanism complements the free trial offering, and total social welfare could be higher in the presence of such strategy.

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