Free trials compared: what is actually free, and the catch

"Free trial" is a bucket that needs a health warning: in this market the word covers everything from genuine no-card evaluations to prepaid minimums wearing the word. The rows above are filtered on the word "trial" in documented specs - and that filter catches honest offers and misclassifications alike. This page sorts them, because a trial is the cheapest due diligence this market sells - when it is real. Entry prices across the bucket start at $0.05, which is exactly why a fake trial is expensive: it converts the cheapest test in the market into a subscription.

What a real trial looks like

The honest end of the bucket [1][3]:

• SimpleMining - 30 days on one GPU rig, no card, no commitment. A real product at real scale for the length of a mining month.
• fil-one - 30 days with 1 TB storage and 2 TB egress, no credit card, with documented write-lock and egress-disable behavior at the caps - honest about what changes on the paid tier.
• 4everland / Jackal Pin - real trials, tiny caps (GB-scale). Good for API verification, useless for performance extrapolation.

The misleading end:

• "Trial" rows that are prepaid minimums - Together AI has no free trial; it has a $5 minimum on non-refundable prepaid credits [4]. The row matches the word, the product does not. That distinction is exactly what this page exists to make.
• Hardware return windows - a 14-day return policy is a return policy, not a trial; the bandwidth hub covers the deeper-network case where the app trial and the hardware live in different buckets.

Live from our database - caveats and sources in each linked review.

Trials per vertical: what to test in each

The trial bucket spans four verticals, and the honest test differs per one [1][2]:

• Mining OS / rig software (SimpleMining-style) - test uptime, the OS integration, and the payout loop end to end. The hashrate markets hub supplies the pool-side verification steps.
• Storage (fil-one, 4everland) - test the API edges that break production: multipart upload, list pagination, and a full round-trip retrieval at your object size. The storage hub prices the paid tiers those trials front.
• GPU clouds - test cold-start time and preemption behavior at the trial tier, because the paid tier's interruption behavior is what the compute hub prices into every cheap rate.
• Bandwidth hardware - the return window is the trial; test the software on a real line before the return window closes, not after.

What a trial can and cannot tell you

7 rows match the trial filter, of which 43% need no identity at signup - the overlap of those two sets is where honest testing is possible without leaving a data trail. A trial tests the platform, never the economics:

• It can: verify the API, the payout loop, the retrieval speed, support responsiveness - the operational surface.
• It cannot: predict profitability, because 30 days sit inside hashprice noise [2]. Price the economics in the mining calculator regardless of trial outcome; the trial answers "does this operator work," the calculator answers "does this contract pay."

The two questions get confused constantly because trial marketing borrows profitability language. A trial that "shows profits" is showing a spot-price moment - the hashprice feed is the honest version of that same number.

The no-card rule, and the retention flow

Card-on-file is the trial trap's mechanism: it converts your trial into a subscription the day you forget to cancel. The honest trials in this population are all no-card [1][3] - and that is not a coincidence. Card-free trials are the pattern of operators whose product survives scrutiny; card-gated "free" tiers are the pattern of operators whose product needs to convert. The distinction appears all over the scam watch archive: the subscription-trap pattern is the single most common consumer complaint in infrastructure trials.

The retention flow: read it before, not during

Every card-gated trial has a retention flow - the cancellation path engineered to be walked less often than the signup path [2]. The mechanics repeat:

• The cancel link exists but is buried - three levels deep in account settings, or behind a chat request.
• The reminder never comes - email trials convert silently; calendar the end date yourself, set two reminders.
• The "pause" offer - on cancellation, retention offers a pause instead of a cancel. A pause still holds your card. Refuse it.

If a card is required, treat the trial as a paid product with a refund window - price it, calendar the cancellation, and read the retention flow before you start. Our archive holds 1 operators; the trial-converts-to-billing pattern shows up across more of them than any other consumer-facing complaint. The beginners hub turns the same logic into a first-payout method; the no-kyc hub covers what a card on file does to your identity surface. Between the three pages, the rule is consistent: 100% of the live rows here carry facts we verified ourselves - apply the same standard to your own trial before you scale.