Perhaps make all the past notifications you generated fully visible with no login required. Nothing sensitive about the past? Show the dates you'd have sent the content and what it would have looked like. Would be good for SEO too I think.
Having a free option sounds like a bad idea. Given that your users are by definition people interested in investing money, they should be perfectly suited to pay. Really what they're paying for is time, since they could find all of this info on their own, but their time is worth more than $20 to do so.
Edit: But I do like the idea of a free trial for a week or a month.
You could randomly select one company to feature from a list of N upcoming IPOs. E.g. `${sampleCo} begins trading this week, along with N-1 others...` You could leave the N-1 other tickers blurred out, or you could literally write 'along with seven other companies. Subscribe today to receive all IPO updates'. Something to that effect.
After all, customers will pay you for convenience, not proprietary data. As other commenters noted, this data is all freely available on NYSE, et al.
Your value prop == 'aggregated list of all upcoming IPOs in your inbox'. Not 'some' IPOs. You can demonstrate that the product works well by providing one free sample.
Maybe a free version could be something that only announces that days IPOs or last week or something? That would demonstrate all the content without providing nearly as much value as it’s not enough time to participate.
But an X week trial is probably a good option as well to give people an idea without having to keep up a free and non-free version.
Agree about a free trial. I'd consider something like $5/month for email updates, and then upsell into more advanced features that automate a process for me. If this thing could actually help me buy (e.g. hook it up to my Robinhood account and insert an order opening day) then I'd be willing to spend more.
