Give five hundred strangers root

Your developer tool is best understood by using it. So the free trial is a terminal URL: a real Linux box with the tool installed, root included, no signup form before the first command.

Five hundred people take it this month. Some are curious, some are bots, a few are hostile. Each one is in a container cloned from the trial snapshot, on its own bridge, with its own root filesystem and process tree. One trial can't see another, and none can see the container where billing runs. The host drops outbound SMTP for all of them, so nobody's trial becomes a spam relay.

A nightly cron deletes trials older than seven days. Idle ones cost nothing meanwhile, so one flat-rate server carries them all.

Demos became videos because shells were dangerous. The trial is a real shell because the walls are real.

The trial is a real shell because the walls are real.