Sorry about that! Free trials have a timeout :(

Can you submit a support request and we'll see what we can do?

Also, spinning up a cluster should be incredibly cheap if you just want to mess around for a little bit - we do billing by the minute :)

Full disclosure: I work on Google on Kubernetes

Yeah, sorry if that came off as snarky; I appreciate the suggestion.

I guess I can understand the cost-cutting mentality that drives Google, AWS, etc. to limit these kinds of offers to "new customers" only. Just remember to consider what kind of incentives you're creating. By effectively punishing developers for being early adopters/experimenters, you're making them wary of signing up early for whatever new and interesting stuff you announce in the future.

Any suggestions for incentive systems that would be motivational for you? We want to help!

Full Disclosure: I work at Google on da Cloudz

There should be several types of free trials

1. Current type for new customers. Here's $500. Do whatever you want

2. For old customers who haven't ever used a free trial, give credit without limits (same as new customers)

3. For old customers who have used a free trial give credit only for services they haven't used

It's an interesting problem - the issue is that our trials are both money & time based ($300 for 60 days). So technically you've "used" your trial even if you do nothing for 2 months.

We do appreciate the feedback and are looking hard at the right next way to solve this. If it wasn't for bitcoin miners and/or bot nets, this would all be a lot easier :(

Full disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

Ah, interesting -- I thought it was for a year. Then I don't feel like I'm missing out quite so much, because I would have a hard time spending that much credit in 2 months anyway :)

And #3 can give the positive effect of converting existing paying customers on one product into paying customers on new products.

Got a fairly quick response from Google Cloud Billing Support:

"Unfortunately, the system is developed by design to only apply the free trial credit to new email address creating a new billing account and we can't apply it for already existing emails." Bummer.

Or they assume your wallet is already open.

Then they are wrong.

I actually find this a common issue with a presumed sales pipeline I encounter.

They think:

1. He finds us. 2. He's interested and signs up for a trial 3. We hopefully convert before the trial is over

What actually tends to happen

1. I find something that looks interesting 2. I sign up 3. Real work intervenes 4. Several months later I have some time to look again but my trial has expired.

To be fair most companies respond to a quick email but they could be proactive and do the following:

1. If no activity is detected after the first day pause the trial 2. Some time later send an email saying "We've paused your trial. Please choose either: 1. to reactivate it, 2. be reminded in another x weeks or 3. never hear from us again.

(this would be more readable if Markdown was less idiotic)

The problem isn't that Markdown is idiotic; the problem is that Hacker News doesn't use Markdown at all.

GitHub and Reddit have conditioned us to think that any halfway decent discussion system must use it :-P