The presentation it references for support of the "1% is the limit" myth is here: http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/ "Myth" is strong language for me, but I believe it is justified in this case. If you play "Hey I got a BA degree for a reason, let's play secondary researcher", it is based off of a misstatement of a repetition of a claim that doesn't even appear in the primary research. All the primary research says is "Three particular firms we have convenient access to say they have about 1% visitor -> purchase conversions. That's probably typical, then." (Even the primary source skips over the fact that one of the three actually reported 1.14%, which is a 14% difference that falls straight to the bottom line, and the other two reported to exactly one significant digit.)

You'll note that visitor -> purchase is very different than trial -> purchase, but don't beat yourself up, different folks routinely quote both numbers at 1%. It should be self evidently obvious that both groups cannot possibly be equally right, but as it turns out they're probably both just equally wrong.

In addition to being incorrectly repeated from a misreported summary of anecdotal data, the claim is empirically false. I can't tell you other people's numbers, but I can tell you mine: 2.45% trial to purchase conversion. Feel free to do much better than that -- it is certainly possible. (Important possible apples-to-oranges alert: my freemium app is not sold on a subscription basis.)

This post is not meant as a personal attack: I have heard this statistic, and its older brother ("1% of shareware downloads convert") for years. Vaporizing it in the harsh light of actual evidence is one of my numerous personal crusades, because it leads to poor decisions that actually cost people money, like "Well, conversion is a fixed number so I totally can't add 5% to my bottom line by working on buttons or something absolutely stupid with a shopping cart redesign."