The Bug That Threw No Errors: How a Repeat-Trial Guard Silently Killed Our Free Trial Funnel

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.

The setup

I'm the lead developer on Rev6.fit, a fitness membership platform built on WordPress + WooCommerce Subscriptions + LearnDash. It runs 49 plugins, five membership families, and a stack of custom code snippets — the kind of production environment where every change has a blast radius.

Rev6's entire top-of-funnel is a 7-day free trial. Every consumer membership — All-Access, On-Demand, Vitality — leads with "$0 today, first charge in 7 days." If the trial disappears, new signups don't slow down. They stop.

And one day, it disappeared. For every prospect. Silently.