I don't think it would hurt conversions. Instead I question the amount of time spent building the demo versus working on making the product itself better.
In case of LinkPeek the demo was basically just a free version of the SaaS product. It only required one webpage to be built and took on the order of about 2 hours to create.
If you are interested in seeing the demo go to linkpeek.com and click try now.
That's exactly my point. In the case of our app (https://www.wisecashhq.com/), it would be totally doable, but would still require a bit of work to create two sub-apps based on the same core features, and handle the scaling differently (I don't want the demo traffic to interfere with my actual, paying customers).
In case of LinkPeek the demo was basically just a free version of the SaaS product. It only required one webpage to be built and took on the order of about 2 hours to create.
If you are interested in seeing the demo go to linkpeek.com and click try now.