Trial Projects

When you start using CoCalc, you will see a banner similar to

“Trial Project – buy upgrades or expect poor performance, […] you can’t install software packages […]”

That’s because a license granting network access has not yet been applied to the project.

Warning

CoCalc costs us significant money to run. CoCalc receives no funding from charitable foundations and the site depends entirely on your financial support to continue operating. Without your financial support this service will not survive long-term!

Trial projects do not expire, but please be aware that without compensation for development and hosting, CoCalc itself will not be around indefinitely.

To remove the warning message from the top of your project, at least one collaborator must upgrade the project to run on members-only hosting and have network access.

Note

CoCalc will never charge you, except after you explicitly purchase a subscription or course package.

Ways to remove the banner

Buy a license

Starting with a $3/month subscription, you get a license to upgrade your projects, enable network access, and add other computing resources. The pricing page lists the current offerings.

Note

You have to explicitly apply your license or upgrades to your projects. Open up Project Settings and click Adjust your upgrade contributions… in the Project usage and quotas panel. For more information read the upgrade guide.

Student in a course

Ask your teacher/instructor to buy a course package and distribute the upgrades to the student projects (which should include yours). If it is just for a short project or a small course, they might as well want to get a “personal” subscription, which can also be used to upgrade your student project!

Alternatively, if you’re a student in a course, ask your instructor to enable the “Students pay” option in course settings, which makes available a special one-time fee to cover the entire course.

In both cases, we are available to talk to the teacher/instructor directly and explain CoCalc’s course functionality. For inquiries, contact us at help@sagemath.com.

For more details, read the Upgrading Student Projects section in the teaching guide.

Via a project collaborator

If one of your colleagues/friends has upgrades to share, add her/him to your the project as a collaborator. The can apply their upgrades to your project!

All users of the project benefit fully of the upgrade applied by one collaborator.

Disable banner (paying customers)

Alternatively, once you are a paying customer, you’ll find a new checkbox in Account Preferences that’s lets you hide the warning banner for yourself when using a free trial project:

[x] Hide free warnings: do not show a warning banner when using a free trial project (thanks for being a customer)

Can’t afford to purchase upgrades

You may continue using your project for free, despite the warning message. However, please keep in mind that (1) you can’t pull in external data from the internet to the project, (2) the project will get randomly restarted and runs on servers with lower hosting quality, and (3) CoCalc itself really needs your support in order to survive.

Reasons for purchasing a subscription

The Purpose of CoCalc is to make it easy to use SageMath (and other open-source software like Python, R, Octave, Julia, LaTeX, etc.), collaboratively and to generate a stable revenue source to hire full-time developers to develop CoCalc and ultimately SageMath.

Warning

Subscription revenue is currently enough to pay for server infrastructure but not enough to cover employee costs. This means the company behind CoCalc will eventually no longer be able to operate the service. See http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf for more info about the challenges of funding SageMath development.

Internet Access

The Internet Access upgrade allows outgoing internet connections and outbound email from a project. See Network access for details.

Member Hosting

Servers hosting trial projects have fewer compute resources and a higher project load than members-only servers. See Member Hosting for details.

Better support

Subscribers get higher priority on feature-requests and much more involved support responses.

More resources

You can purchase additional compute, memory, and storage resources. (see Project Upgrades)

Upgrades can be shared

You can share your upgrades with friends, co-workers and family.

Fund improvement of CoCalc

Improvements are made daily! You can follow CoCalc’s development at https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/

Support those who cannot afford to pay

When you get a paid subscription, or donate, you help fund the free-tier offering for those who can’t afford a subscription. We all know of some countries (and plenty of individuals in every country) that are going through extremely difficult financial times.

Funding SageMath development

A long-term goal is to generate enough revenue to fund development of SageMath. However, that goal is far away. Read about directly funding SageMath.