title: Your free trial and the founding offer category: Billing & Pricing tags: free trial, founding offer, first three months free, billing priority: Normal
Your free trial and the founding offer
Certification Center is self-serve: you sign up, get an isolated cloud workspace immediately, and start governing access. As a founding offer, your first 3 months are free. This article explains how the trial works and what happens when it ends.
What the founding offer is
New customers get their first 3 months free — the full product, not a limited trial. There is no feature gate during the offer: access certifications, license-waste monitoring, the directory connectors, Separation of Duties, audit reporting, and policy-driven governance are all available from day one.
| During the founding offer | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Features | Everything included | Everything included |
| Workspace | Your own isolated cloud workspace | Same workspace, unchanged |
| Price | Free for the first 3 months | $20 per governed identity per year |
| Data | Yours, retained across the transition | Yours, retained |
How to start
- Sign up at certification-center.com (see our pricing page for the current terms)
- Your isolated cloud workspace is provisioned right away — no install, no professional-services project
- Connect your first directory and start a certification (see Creating an Access Review Campaign)
There is nothing to deploy and no server to stand up. Everything runs in your cloud workspace from the moment you sign up.
What "everything included" means during the trial
You are not evaluating a stripped-down edition. During the founding offer you can:
- Run real quarterly certification campaigns with manager routing and write-back
- Reconcile Microsoft 365 / Entra licenses and reclaim unused seats
- Connect Active Directory, Entra ID, Google Workspace, AWS (IAM), and SCIM 2.0 sources
- Enforce Separation of Duties rules and resolve conflicts
- Export attestation history for audit
This lets you prove value on your real environment before you pay anything.
When the 3 months end
At the end of the founding-offer period, your workspace continues on the standard plan at $20 per governed identity per year. Your data, connections, campaigns, and history carry over unchanged — nothing is reset and nothing is deleted at the transition.
You are billed on the identities you have brought under governance, not on the total size of your connected directories. See What counts as an identity for billing? for exactly what is counted.
Good practice during your free months
- Bring your real directory, not a sandbox. The value is clearest on your actual people and licenses.
- Run at least one full certification. A completed campaign with write-back shows the whole loop end to end.
- Try license reconciliation early. Recoverable-seat findings often pay for the product several times over — a compelling data point before you decide.
- Clean up duplicates. Because billing is per person, consolidating duplicate accounts lowers your eventual cost.
Frequently asked
Do I need a credit card to start? The founding offer gives you the full product for the first 3 months; billing begins only when that period ends.
What happens to my data if I do not continue? Your data is yours. Contact support before the period ends if you want it exported.
Is the founding offer the same as everything-included pricing? Yes — same full feature set, just free for the first 3 months. See Pricing: one plan, everything included.
Still have billing questions?
Email support@certification-center.com and we will walk you through your identity count and what your bill will look like after the founding offer.