[UPDATED] BTP Free Trial to Free Tier – It’s a Good Time to Switch

November 2023 Update: Individual users exploring BTP should now use BTP Trial rather than free tier plans.  This article describes an older BTP account and free tier signup process which is now obsolete. The revised process is available exclusively for Customers, Partners, and other organizations – not Individuals. 

Read the original article:

Have you been working with SAP Business Technology Platform’s Free Trial?

If so, the 2021 TechEd free tier release of Integration Suite and HANA Service plans makes this an excellent time to consider serious use of free tier.  What’s more, with the announcement of our support for Individual BTP global accounts, it is now quite easy to get an environment associated with your own name — more reason that now might be the time to switch for good.

You might be wondering how to start.

In this post, I am collecting links to resources that you’ll want to review and a pointer to what I hope is a handy walk-through to get you going with minimal effort.  It’ll start with that video.

Walk-Through the Sign Up Process

As Juergen Mueller announced, our BTP Global Account enrollment process has been upgraded to allow you to easily create an account for your own learning and experimentation. These Individual  accounts come with support for the full list of free tier service plans, just as with the traditional SAP BTP commercial accounts.

We have prepared a nine-minute video that will walk you through the full signup process. The workflow will require that you supply a credit card, but the account itself and the free tier services come with no charges passed along to you.

(click to watch the video)

(update: video is obsolete and is no longer available)

This walk-through video demonstrates the configuration of a couple of useful service Entitlements in your new account.  You likely have previously been exploring additional services in your Free Trial account.  This would be a good time to review the service instances your are currently using in Trial and to set up entitlements for the same services in your new Sub-account.

If you follow the steps in this walk-through, you will end up with a sub-account in your new Individual global account ready to migrate your development components.

Migrate Your Free Trial source code projects into Free Tier

The most direct way to move any applications you’ve been working on in Free Trial to your new sub-account will be to use the project export/import functions available in most SAP IDEs.

For example, you can export an application project from a Trial instance of Business Application Studio and import it into BAS in your new account.  Naturally, any environment settings or supporting services will need to match in the environments, but you may find that your project’s MTA deployment specification can configure (or at least document) what will be required in the the application’s new home.

The bottom line is that even though this migration requires manual steps, you will likely find that SAP tools will support a relatively painless migration.

Questions? Community Support for Free Tier

Free tier services are community supported. That’s really to say that if you need to be able to submit support tickets with standard Service Level Agreements for any service, you would want to subscribe to a corresponding paid plan. Still, you are by no stretch on your own here.  You should pose questions that you encounter to corresponding Community topic pages. The Community topic page for general Business Technology Platform information is located here.

Our product teams frequently interact on these pages, so any issue or question you raise is likely to be responded to promptly.  And — if you haven’t already — click the page’s Follow button to keep closer tabs on the topic.

Last Thought – Dive In!

Once you have reviewed the walk-through video, I believe you will see that the sign-up process is straightforward.  The environment is a superset of what you had in BTP Trial and you now will have options to move to larger and more capable configurations via paid plans easily if your needs dictate.

Explore and enjoy.  We’ll talk to you on the Community pages.