March 10, 2020 Tugdual Saunier

Since our move to General Availability last summer, we have been working hard improving SymfonyCloud based on users' feedback and usage.

One behavior we observed is that even though we were offering a 30 days free trial, most users finished their tests under much less time. In parallel, we wrote and published Symfony: The Fast Track, in which you get a deployable state at the end of each chapter which makes it a perfect introduction to Symfony development but also to Symfony-based application deployment using SymfonyCloud. Again, a duration shorter than 30 days is enough in most cases.

We also realized that it was not 100% clear that trials were limited to one trial per account. Some of our customers were deleting their free trial project a couple of hours after deploying a Symfony Demo application and so could not try SymfonyCloud with their own projects without paying or going trough support and request a new free trial.

For those reasons and because we want to support the use case of being able to spawn up new production-like environments for Symfony applications in a matter of minutes, we changed our trial policy around SymfonyCon 2019.

After a stabilization phase, we can now fully announce it: SymfonyCloud trials are now 7 days long and not limited to a single trial anymore. Once a trial is over, upgraded or canceled, you can create a new trial project. Trials continue to apply to development projects only.

We also took the decision to make the move from a trial project to a billed one a double opt-in decision: without actual confirmation, a trial project is suspended once the project trial period is over (and canceled a couple of days later). Billing is confirmed only when you explicitly run project:billing:accept or when you move to a production plan.

We hope this change will help you try SymfonyCloud on many projects as it allows a much smoother experience and provides a quick way to deploy short-lived environments for proof of concepts, demos and just test new Symfony features.