Amazon Introduces Free Evaluations for 60+ Products

If customers are looking to try before they buy, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace may have an answer. Today, the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider unveiled free trials for more than 100 of some of the most popular products found within the cloud services marketplace.

The “Try it for Free” campaign provides up to a 31-day free trial for specific AWS-hosted services, including offerings from the likes of Riverbed Technology (RVBD), Barracuda Networks, Compuware, SafeNet and RealNetworks.

As AWS noted in a blog post today: “You’ll pay only for the AWS resources consumed by the application during the evaluation period (up to 31 days).”

With the large number of services available in the AWS Marketplace, it’s a small number of services that are being made available through the free trial program. To make it easy for customers and partners to discover which services are available through the program, AWS has highlighted the offerings with a yellow “Try it for Free” banner.

For customers that qualify for the AWS Free Usage Tier, the cloud applications they would like to test will run on a micro-instance. They can try it for no charge for the software or AWS resources as long as consumption stays within the threshold set out by the Free Usage Tier. Others can try the app for free but will have to pay for AWS resources they use.

Amazon is marketing the free trial program to other software vendors, so it’s likely more apps will come online under a month-long free evaluation period contract.

“If you are a software vendor, you can offer customers access to a full-featured version of your software for evaluation purposes right from the start. You can do this for any and all of the EC2 instance types. You don’t have to create a separate trial offering and you don’t have to worry about migration when customers want to purchase a full version,” Amazon noted.