I don't necessarily need a free tier, but I find short trial periods to be unhelpful for something that needs a considerable time investments to truly try. Often I'll end up getting pulled away after starting a trial on something to do some critical bug fixing and other stuff, and then the 14 days are up without my having much of an idea if the product solves my problem.

I much prefer when the trial counts down some other finite resource that I have some control over, rather than wall time. For desktop software, number of days of actual use are a good option, for SaaS that's often difficult to measure sensibly. (Was the app open in a background tab somewhere? Oops, time's up.) So I'm much more likely to give a trial period with a fixed number of events/tickets/jobs/whatever a go.