Trial accounts
Every new ServersCamp account starts with EUR 25 of welcome credit, valid for 30 days. No payment method, no forms: sign up and deploy. The credit is real money inside the platform, and it covers your hourly charges automatically until it runs out.
Free credit is great for engineers evaluating a platform, but it also attracts automated abuse and disposable compute. We want the first group to have a great first week, and we want the second group to be structurally unprofitable. The trial is about size, not features: every product is available from day one, with sensible caps on how big a single allocation can get. While your account runs on welcome credit alone, the biggest plans and the fastest disks stay visible in the Cloud Panel but locked. You can see exactly what the platform offers. You just cannot allocate half a node with money we gave you for free.
What a trial account can do
Everything the platform does is available from day one:
| Area | Available on a trial account |
|---|---|
| VM plans | Everything up to 4 GB RAM, both Burst and Sustained profiles |
| Disks | Basic (R1-R3) and Database (W1-W3) classes, any disk up to 100 GB. The first 25 GB of an R1 root disk is free, as for everyone |
| Networking | Networks, routers, security groups, public and floating IPs, port forwarding, load balancers |
| Data protection | Snapshots and full off-site encrypted backups |
| Everything else | Web console (VNC), metrics, resize within the caps, API access |
For scale: a 2 vCPU / 4 GB Sustained VM with a 50 GB Basic disk and a public IP runs about EUR 14 a month. The welcome credit comfortably covers a real workload for its whole 30 days.
What is locked until you unlock
| Locked | Why |
|---|---|
| VM plans above 4 GB RAM | Large allocations on free credit are the classic abuse pattern |
| Storage tiers 4-5 (R4-R5, W4-W5) | Peak IOPS tiers are priced for production use, not trials |
| Solo (E) and Storage (S) disk classes | Hundreds of thousands of IOPS and bulk capacity are magnets for throwaway abuse |
| Any disk above 100 GB | Free credit should buy compute time, not a terabyte of storage |
Locked plans stay visible in the create wizard, greyed out with a lock mark. That is deliberate: what you see is the real catalog, and unlocking it takes a minute. The same caps apply through the API, so this is not a cosmetic UI filter.
How to unlock the full catalog
- Redeem a promo code. A code from the ServersCamp team removes the limits the moment it is applied, and adds its credit on top. Enter it in the Cloud Panel under Billing → Credits. Codes are handed out by real people: events, support conversations, early-access programs.
- Ask support. If you are evaluating something that genuinely needs bigger hardware (a database benchmark, a load test), open a ticket and say so. Unlocking a real evaluation costs us nothing.
- Add a payment method . Once card payments launch, attaching a card unlocks the catalog automatically: at that point you are a customer, not a trial.
Once lifted, the limits never come back on their own. Existing resources are untouched by any of this: limits only gate what you can create or resize, never what is already running.
The fine print
- The welcome credit is issued once per organization and expires 30 days after signup. Unused credit is not converted to anything.
- Charges always consume credit first, oldest-expiring first. You can watch every line of it under Billing → Credits in the Cloud Panel.
- Mining and similar burn-the-CPU-for-profit workloads are not allowed on promotional credit, and we reserve the right to revoke the credit of accounts doing it. On paid resources with the Sustained profile, run whatever you like: it is your hardware time.
If the trial caps are blocking a legitimate evaluation, that is exactly the case we want to hear about: [email protected].