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.
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)
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.