Issuing free trials to your customers

From /dashboard/reseller/trials you can issue a free trial to any of your customers. You pay the wholesale price upfront out of your reseller wallet; the customer pays nothing during the trial and is billed at retail only if it converts.

Issue a trial

1. Open Reseller → Trials (/dashboard/reseller/trials). The Issue a trial card shows how many trials you have left this month.
2. Customer — pick from the dropdown. Only eligible customers appear: customers under your brand who have never used a trial.
3. Plan, then Region — the region list fills in once you pick a plan.
4. Trial length (days) — anywhere from 1 up to your tier’s maximum (the tier default is 7 days; the form caps you at your tier’s trialLengthDays).
5. Hostname — a subdomain or a bring-your-own FQDN for the trial server.
6. Click Issue trial. The server provisions exactly like a paid order.

Issuing a trial debits your reseller wallet for the wholesale price upfront (a CHARGE_TRIAL entry on your ledger) — you eat the cost, that’s the deal. If your wallet can’t cover the wholesale price, the form refuses and tells you to top up first. The server shows a trial badge in the customer’s dashboard, and the customer gets a trial-started email from your sender.

What happens when the trial ends

Daily at 11:00 UTC, the cascade processor walks every server whose trial has expired. It runs after the 10:00 UTC wallet-renewal pass, so a same-day customer top-up counts. For each expired trial:

• Customer wallet covers retail → converted. We debit the customer at the renewal retail price, clear the trial flags, set the next renewal to today + 30 days, and email them a conversion receipt. The server keeps running.
• Customer wallet is empty → past due. The server goes PAST_DUE and the standard dunning ladder takes over: the server is suspended on the first dunning pass, the customer gets one reminder email per day, and the server is terminated after the 7-day grace window (the platform-wide policy). The customer also gets a trial-expired email with a top-up link.

Monthly allowance

Your tier sets a monthlyTrialAllowance (default 5; −1 means unlimited). The issue-trial form shows your remaining count for the current calendar month and refuses to issue beyond it. The counter resets on the 1st of each month.

One trial per customer, ever

Each customer can receive exactly one trial across their account lifetime — the form only lists customers whose lifetime trial stamp is unused. There is no self-serve way to reset it; if a legitimate edge case needs a second trial, contact platform support.

Good to know

• Trials are billed monthly-cycle wholesale even for short trials — annual pricing never applies.
• A wholesale override of 0 on the plan makes trials free for you to issue (no debit at all) — pair it with a long trial length for a "free for the first 30 days" promotion.
• The Live trials card on the same page shows every in-flight trial with its days remaining, so you can nudge customers before the cascade runs.