Most platforms run a 14-day trial. After the trial expires the user has to enter a credit card, navigate three onboarding screens, and confirm an email. Friction is the point — it filters out people who would not pay.
We do the opposite. The first 24 hours are entirely anonymous: no signup, no card, just a curl. After 24 hours the resource expires unless you claim it. Claiming costs money from day one.
What we believe
A developer who runs curl -X POST https://api.instanode.dev/db/new and gets a
working Postgres URL back in under a second has already done the only test that
matters. The decision to pay isn't "is this product good enough to justify a
trial" — it's "is keeping this specific running thing worth $9/mo".
The numbers
Anonymous → claimed conversion is currently around 4% in beta. Trial-conversion benchmarks for B2B SaaS hover at 14–18%, so on the surface our number looks worse. But our anonymous funnel includes traffic that would never have signed up for a trial in the first place — agents poking the API to see if it works, people copy-pasting from a blog post, demos. The denominator is bigger.
What we watch instead is "claimed → kept past 7 days" — that's 89% so far. Once an agent or a human shipped something on instanode.dev, they tend to keep it.
What this enables
- Claude Code can provision a postgres in a tool call without asking the user
- A blog post that says "just curl this URL" actually works for the reader
- The platform documentation can demo every feature live, not in a sandbox
That third one is what unlocked the docs you're reading now. The code snippets here aren't mock requests — they hit production.