SymfonyCloud Trials
March 10, 2020
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Published by
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.
Help the Symfony project!
As with any Open-Source project, contributing code or documentation is the most common way to help, but we also have a wide range of sponsoring opportunities.
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Yep, this was something that bit me, and it cost me money. I deleted my one trial project, and started a new one, assuming it would be treated as a trial, and I ended up getting charged unexpectedly. I deleted everything and haven't gone back again, because it felt like I was deceived.
I've already been taking advantage of this and it's been great! Spin up a new project to test something - deploy immediately, then opt-in later if I need to keep the project permanently. It also helps teaching a lot. Thanks!
Nice! I'm using SymfonyCloud for months and it has been the best decision I've made in 2019. You should have a try!
This will be great for trial projects, but SymfonyCloud is still pretty expensive. I can spin up a Symfony project on heroku for free that's functional forever (though it takes 30 seconds to spin up if it's been sleeping). It includes a PostGRES database for up to 10,000 rows, and Elastica.
For $9/month, I can get rid of the sleeping, and for another $9/month, get a larger database.
I love all the Symfony Bundles, but a lot of them break when a new version of Symfony comes out. Or their demo code doesn't work. I love it when bundle repos have a separate repo with a demo that uses the bundle, with simple instructions AND a live production production site you can visit and see the bundle in action before even downloading it. Even Ryan's excellent SymfonyCast tutorials have code that doesn't work out of the box. If it were live somewhere, I think it'd be more likely the code stayed current. And of course, Symfony Bundles should be demo'd on Symfony Cloud!
Sorry for the long message! Anyway, jazzed about the 7-day trials.