SAP BTP for Beginners: Your First Steps with Trial or Free Tier

Your first steps on SAP BTP are simple: pick trial or free tier, register, let SAP create your first subaccount, look around the cockpit and create one service instance from a free plan. This post walks through each step with the labels you will actually see on screen. It is Part 2 of 3 in the series “SAP BTP for beginners”.

TL;DR: Use the trial (90 days, personal, non-productive) to learn on your own. Use free tier plans in a Pay-As-You-Go or CPEA account when a team wants to test something that may go to production. When you register for the trial, SAP creates a subaccount and a space for you and assigns quotas automatically. In the cockpit, find your subaccount via the Account Explorer, check Entitlements, open Services > Service Marketplace, create an instance and find it under Services > Instances and Subscriptions. The SAP Discovery Center shows which services have free plans.

If the words subaccount, entitlement or service plan are new to you, read Part 1: what SAP BTP is and how the account works first. I am learning BTP in the BAIP & Product team at Spadoom, and this is the order that made sense to me.

Trial or free tier: decide first

SAP describes two free ways to try BTP. They look similar but serve different purposes.

Question	Trial account	Free tier service plans
Who is it for?	Anyone; access is open to everyone	Customers and partners with a Pay-As-You-Go or CPEA enterprise account
How long?	90 days	Per service, as SAP defines it
Production later?	No; not for production or team development	Yes; projects can move to production
Upgrade to paid?	No; for more services you switch to an enterprise account	Usually possible without creating a new instance
Support	Community	Community only, no SLA

My rule of thumb: alone and learning, take the trial. A team testing a real idea, take the free tier. SAP adds the free tier automatically to contracts with the consumption-based model, so your company may already have it.

Registering for the trial

SAP’s tutorial Get an Account on SAP BTP Trial is marked “Beginner” and takes about 15 minutes. The steps:

1. Log on at sap.com, or register if you have no SAP account yet.
2. Activate your account.
3. Log on to SAP BTP Trial at account.hanatrial.ondemand.com.
4. Open the SAP BTP cockpit.
5. Navigate to your subaccount.
6. Look at the service marketplace.

The tutorial is short on purpose. Follow it once exactly as written before you start experimenting.

What SAP creates for you

You do not start with an empty account. According to SAP’s getting started guide for the trial, a subaccount and a space are created for you when you register. In a trial account, quotas are also assigned to your subaccounts automatically.

The same guide says you can install the Cloud Foundry command line tool (cf CLI) later, but you do not have to: every necessary task also works in the cockpit. For a beginner, that is good news. One tool at a time.

A first tour of the cockpit

These are the places I would visit first, in this order. The labels come from SAP’s help pages (Navigate in the Cockpit, Navigate to Orgs and Spaces). The cockpit changes over time, so small differences are possible.

What you want to see	Where you find it	What it tells you
Your global account and subaccounts	Account Explorer (you land here after logging on), tab Directories & Subaccounts	Which workspaces exist and in which region
Your Cloud Foundry org and spaces	Subaccount Overview page; Cloud Foundry > Spaces	The org name, the spaces and the API endpoint
Which plans you may use	Entitlements in the subaccount	The service plans and quotas assigned to this subaccount
What you can create	Services > Service Marketplace	All resources you are entitled to consume, as tiles
What you have created	Services > Instances and Subscriptions	Your service instances and application subscriptions
Who has access	Security > Users	The users and their role collection assignments

A useful habit: look at the breadcrumbs at the top. They always show where you are, first the global account, then the subaccount.

Creating your first service instance

A service instance is your own copy of a service, created from one plan. SAP’s steps for free service plans are:

1. Make sure the subaccount is entitled to the free plan. In a trial account this is done for you; in an enterprise account a global account administrator assigns it under Entitlements.
2. In the subaccount, open Services > Service Marketplace.
3. Select the service. Its page describes the available plans. Choose More to read the scope and limits of the free plan.
4. Choose Create, select the free (or trial) plan and confirm.
5. Open Services > Instances and Subscriptions to see the new instance.

That is all it takes. If the service you want is missing from the marketplace, the reason is almost always the entitlement, not a bug. Part 1 explains why.

When you are done testing, delete instances you no longer need. It keeps the subaccount readable, and in an enterprise account it frees quota.

Finding free services in the Discovery Center

The SAP Discovery Center service catalog is where I look before I open the cockpit. As of October 2026, it offers a quick filter called “Always Free & Free Tier Services”.

• Free Tier means the service offers a free tier service plan.
• Always Free means the plan is already included in your overall BTP contract, at no additional charge.

Open a service and go to the Pricing tab. There you see every plan with its limits, and the free ones are labelled “Free”. Good to know: Always Free plans might not be available in all regions or for all providers.

The limits you should know

The trial is generous for learning, but it is not a small production system. From SAP’s trial documentation:

• 90 days in total. The period runs in intervals that are extended by up to 30 days when you sign in regularly.
• Use it or lose it. If you do not sign in for 30 days or more, the account is suspended. Suspended accounts are deleted.
• No production, no team development. The trial is for personal exploration and your own non-productive testing.
• Restricted resources. Trial services allow restricted use of platform resources.
• Kyma is special. On free tier, the Kyma free plan is available only once per global account, for up to 30 days.

After 90 days the trial account is deleted automatically. If you want to keep exploring, you register a new one, or move to an enterprise account with free tier plans.

When you move to a real account

A trial teaches you the cockpit. Running a real company account is a different job: naming conventions, trust to your identity provider, role collections and monthly cost reviews. That is not beginner material, and Michael Suter covers it in the SAP BTP cockpit explained. Read it as your next step once you work in an enterprise account.

For the business side of BTP, see What is SAP BTP?, and for what we build on it, the SAP BTP solution page.

What Part 3 covers

Part 3 looks at what you can do on BTP once you are in: SAP Integration Suite, SAP Build and AI services, and which one fits which job in a Sales Cloud V2 and S/4HANA landscape.

Frequently asked questions

Should I start with the SAP BTP trial or the free tier?

Take the trial if you want to explore alone and quickly, for up to 90 days, without production plans. Take free tier service plans in a Pay-As-You-Go or CPEA account if you want to test something your team may later run in production, because free plans there can usually be upgraded to paid plans.

What does SAP create automatically when I register for the trial?

When you register for a trial account, SAP creates a subaccount and a Cloud Foundry space for you. In a trial account, quotas are also assigned to your subaccounts automatically, so you can start creating service instances right away.

How long does an SAP BTP trial account last?

90 days in total. The period is divided into intervals that are extended automatically by up to 30 days when you sign in regularly. If you do not sign in for 30 days or more, the account is suspended, and suspended accounts are deleted.

Can I use the trial for a real project?

No. SAP states that a trial account is for personal exploration and non-productive testing. It must not be used for production or team development, and not in any productive or commercial manner.