Trial Projects

Purpose and Limitations

When you start using CoCalc, you are either invited as a collaborator on an existing project, owned by someone else, or you are given access to a free trial project. The purpose of this project is to let you experience the platform and understand if it suits your needs well. We surely hope it does! If not - do let us know where we fall short, we may be able to fix it!

Your trial project has access to the full software collection available on CoCalc and the same user interface. It should give you a very good sense of what is possible. However, there are some limitations that we had to put in place to avoid abuse of the service and to keep the cost of hardware under control. In particular:

  • You do not have direct Internet access. You can upload files to CoCalc from your computer, but not from other sites. You cannot git clone repositories from GitHub and you cannot install packages even as a regular user via pip.

  • Your hardware resources are quite limited. They are enough to run a basic Jupyter notebook, but doing any serious computation or using several notebooks at once will likely run out of memory.

  • Idle timeout is small and overall session duration is limited.

Once you evaluated enough, please pick a subscription to lift away these limits and get access to the full power of CoCalc!

Can I Continue Using Trial Projects Only?

Yes, you can - trial projects do not expire at the moment. If you only need to do some occasional quick computation, perhaps a trial project is all you need. But if CoCalc proves to be useful in your day to day life, you will do yourself a favour by becoming a subscriber and letting CoCalc fully shine for you.

But Why Isn’t CoCalc Just Free?

Trial projects are completely free and they already offer features not available in free tiers of our competitors, for example, Linux Terminal. Full access with substantial resources has to be paid for a number of reasons:

  • CoCalc is a combination of sophisticated software (that is continuously developed, maintained, and supported by a dedicated team) and powerful computational hardware (that costs money to run).

  • We do not show third-party ads (we do try to spotlight our own functionality where appropriate).

  • We do not sell your data to other companies, nor do we use it for any other purposes except to allow you to use the platform, resolve issues, and improve its functionality. You can read more details about our commitments in our Privacy Policy.

  • We do not try to lock you into our platform - we facilitate using standard tools and formats. We just strive to make this usage better on CoCalc than anywhere else!