VWO Starter is being discontinued, a practical guide for free users

VWO access by account type (December 2025)

How Starter discontinuation affects you depends on when you signed up and whether you are on a legacy free subscription today.

What actually changes for your account

VWO has not published a single global shutdown date for every Starter user. What is clear: the free tier is a dead end, not a product line VWO is investing in. If you are on Starter, plan as if your window is months — not years.

Paid customers are unaffected by the Starter wind-down. The pain is concentrated on teams that used VWO as a zero-cost way to validate testing workflows, run early A/B tests, or prove ROI before asking for budget.

• Existing free users: email notification that Starter will end; plan may still show as active in billing
• New users: onboarding framed as "explore for free" but capped at a 30-day trial
• No published self-serve path to stay free after Starter — budget for Growth or move platforms

• Jan 2025

  Everstone takes majority stake

  Singapore-based private equity firm Everstone Capital acquires a majority stake in Wingify (VWO's parent). Free tiers and self-serve entry points become less aligned with upmarket revenue targets.

• Late 2025

  Starter discontinuation emails

  VWO notifies existing free Starter users that the plan will not continue indefinitely. The in-app checkout still shows Starter for some legacy accounts during the transition.

• Jan 2026

  VWO merges with AB Tasty

  Both brands continue, but packaging and sales motion shift further toward enterprise contracts under Everstone ownership.

• 2026

  No permanent free tier for new accounts

  New sign-ups land on time-limited trials. Teams that relied on Starter need a paid VWO plan or an alternative with an ongoing free tier.

Save this before Starter access ends

Do not wait until experiments stop serving. VWO holds your test definitions, goal configs, and historical results — much of that does not transfer automatically to another vendor.

• List every live and paused experiment with URL targets, traffic allocation, and primary metric
• Screenshot or export variant HTML/CSS if you edited in the visual editor — you will rebuild elsewhere
• Download result summaries you may need for stakeholder reports or budget conversations
• Document SmartCode placement and any anti-flicker snippets so you can remove them cleanly
• Note integration hooks (GA4 custom dimensions, GTM tags, data layer events)

Treat export as a one-afternoon task. The expensive mistake is discovering an active homepage test stopped collecting data mid-quarter because nobody migrated in time.

Stay on VWO vs switch — honest math

Upgrading to VWO Growth keeps your workflow intact but moves you into paid territory fast. At 100K MTU, Testing alone runs about $665/month on annual billing ($7,980/year) — and that is before Insights, Personalize, or Rollouts modules.

• Stay if you already depend on VWO Insights (heatmaps, recordings) and want one vendor
• Stay if procurement is underway and Growth pricing is approved for the next 12 months
• Switch if you only used Starter for basic A/B tests and never touched the broader suite
• Switch if $665+/month for testing alone exceeds what your programme has proven in lift

For a deeper paid-tier breakdown, see our VWO pricing guide. For a feature-level comparison, see RunPivot vs VWO.

Why trials are not a replacement for Starter

A 30-day trial answers "can we log in?" — not "can we build a testing habit?" Most teams need six to eight weeks to ship a first test, wait for significance, iterate, and present results. A month-long window pressures you toward upgrade before you have evidence the programme works.

Starter also trained teams to treat experimentation as always-on infrastructure. Trials reframe testing as a evaluation project with a deadline — which is exactly how PE-backed SaaS prefers you to think about it.