SAP BTP Trial Account: What You Get and How to Get Started in 2026

SAP BTP trial is a free, time-limited evaluation account that gives you 90 days of hands-on access to SAP Business Technology Platform without a commercial contract. You get a pre-configured subaccount with Cloud Foundry, a set of enabled services, and SAP Business Application Studio so you can build, deploy, and test applications immediately. No credit card is required. After 90 days, the trial is shut down and everything in it is deleted.

The trial is the fastest way to evaluate BTP. This guide covers what you get, how to create a trial account, what the limitations are, what happens at expiry, and how the trial compares to the free tier model. For background on the platform itself, read What is SAP BTP? first.

What is the SAP BTP Trial Account?

The SAP BTP trial account is a pre-provisioned sandbox environment designed for evaluation, learning, and proof-of-concept work. When you register, SAP creates a global trial account with a single subaccount in one of its trial regions. That subaccount comes with:

• A Cloud Foundry environment with an org and a dev space, pre-enabled and ready for deployments.
• A set of entitlements for commonly used services at trial-tier quotas, including SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Business Application Studio, the Destination and Connectivity services, XSUAA, and others.
• A pre-configured trust configuration with SAP Cloud Identity Services so you can log in immediately.
• Access to the BTP cockpit, Service Marketplace, and all standard administration UIs.

The trial is intended for individual developers exploring the platform. It is explicitly non-commercial: you cannot run production workloads, serve paying customers, or operate revenue-generating applications on it.

How to Create a BTP Trial Account

Creating a trial account takes about 10 minutes plus a short wait for provisioning.

Step 1: Get an SAP Universal ID

If you do not already have one, register for an SAP Universal ID at https://account.sap.com. This is your single identity across all SAP properties. You verify your email and set a password. It is free and permanent.

Step 2: Register for the Trial

1. Go to the SAP BTP trial sign-up page (search for "SAP BTP trial" to find the current URL, as SAP occasionally updates its landing pages).
2. Sign in with your SAP Universal ID.
3. Accept the terms of use for the trial.
4. Choose a trial region (typically a small set of regions is available, such as US East or EU). Pick the one closest to you for the best latency.
5. Submit the registration.

Step 3: Wait for Provisioning

SAP provisions the trial account within a few minutes. You receive an email when it is ready, containing a direct link to your BTP cockpit.

Step 4: Open the Cockpit and Start Building

Click the link in the email or navigate to https://cockpit.<trial-region>.hana.ondemand.com. Sign in with your SAP Universal ID. You will see your trial global account with its pre-configured subaccount.

From here, you can immediately:

# Target your trial Cloud Foundry environment
cf api https://api.cf.<trial-region>.hana.ondemand.com
cf login

# List available services in the marketplace
cf marketplace

# Create a HANA Cloud instance (trial plan)
cf create-service hanatrial hanatrial my-hana-trial

# Deploy your first app
cf push

The trial subaccount also has a subscription to SAP Business Application Studio. In the cockpit, go to Service Marketplace, find BAS, and click Go to Application to open the cloud IDE.

What's Included in the Trial

The trial subaccount comes with a curated set of services at trial-level quotas. While the exact list evolves, these are consistently available:

Runtime and IDE

• Cloud Foundry runtime — Memory and compute quota for deploying applications. Enough for several small apps or one medium app.
• SAP Business Application Studio — Full access to the cloud IDE with all dev space types (SAPUI5, CAP, Fiori, mobile, full-stack).

Data

• SAP HANA Cloud (trial plan) — A HANA database instance with trial-tier memory and storage. Note: the trial plan for HANA may use the older hanatrial service name.

Connectivity and Security

• Destination Service — Define connections to remote HTTP systems.
• Connectivity Service — Connect to on-premise systems via the SAP Cloud Connector.
• XSUAA / SAP Cloud Identity Services — Authentication and authorization for your apps.

Development Tools

• SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) — Not a separately provisioned service, but fully supported through BAS dev spaces and the cds CLI.

The trial quotas are generous enough to build and deploy a complete reference application (a CAP service with HANA persistence, XSUAA auth, and a Fiori elements UI) for learning and demonstration purposes.

Trial Account Limitations

Understanding the trial's boundaries helps you plan around them:

• 90-day time limit. This is the defining constraint. The countdown starts at provisioning, not at first use. Set a calendar reminder well before the expiry date.
• Non-commercial use only. You cannot run production workloads. SAP's terms are clear on this.
• No production SLAs. Trial services run on shared infrastructure with no uptime guarantees. Instances may be restarted or relocated by SAP.
• Limited regions. The trial is available in a subset of BTP regions, not all of them.
• Limited quota. Each service has trial-specific quotas that are smaller than even the free tier plans in a commercial account. For example, the trial HANA instance has less memory than a free tier HANA instance.
• Single subaccount. The trial gives you one global account with one subaccount. You cannot create additional subaccounts or directories.
• No paid services. You cannot add paid service plans to a trial account. If you need a service or quota not available in the trial, you must create a commercial account.
• Data deletion at expiry. When the trial ends, all data is permanently deleted. There is no grace period and no recovery.

Trial vs Free Tier vs Paid

This three-way comparison answers one of the most searched questions about BTP access options:

The decision flow is straightforward:

1. Need to evaluate BTP quickly without any commitment? Use the trial.
2. Need ongoing access for learning and prototyping with no time pressure? Create a Pay-As-You-Go account and use free tier plans.
3. Need to run production workloads? Use a commercial account (BTPEA, CPEA, or subscription).

When the Trial Expires

This is the part that catches people off guard. Here is exactly what happens:

1. Warning emails. SAP sends email notifications as the trial approaches its expiry date, typically starting a few weeks before. Do not ignore these.
2. Account shutdown. On the 91st day, the trial account is deactivated. You can no longer log in to the cockpit or access the Cloud Foundry environment.
3. Data deletion. All deployed applications, service instances, databases, and configuration are permanently deleted. This is irreversible.
4. No automatic migration. Nothing from the trial is carried over to a new account. If you want to keep your work, you must export or redeploy it before expiry.

How to Transition Before Expiry

If you want to continue working without losing momentum:

1. Export your code. If you built apps in BAS, push your source code to a Git repository before the trial ends. Your code lives outside BTP, so it survives.
2. Create a Pay-As-You-Go account and assign free tier entitlements. This gives you a no-time-limit environment.
3. Redeploy your applications to the new account. Since you have the code in Git, this is a matter of creating service instances and running cf push again.
4. Recreate destinations and configuration. Destination definitions and service keys do not transfer; you recreate them in the new subaccount.

If you are caught by surprise and the trial has already expired, your data is gone. Create a PAYG account, set up free tier plans, and rebuild. With your code in version control, the rebuild is typically fast.

Can You Get Another Trial?

SAP limits trial accounts per SAP Universal ID. In practice, once your trial expires, you transition to a free tier or commercial account rather than creating a new trial. The free tier model in a PAYG account is the recommended path for continued no-cost access.

Learning SAP BTP with AI Assistants

The 90-day trial is a fixed window, and you want to make every day count. AI coding assistants dramatically accelerate BTP learning by answering questions, explaining errors, generating boilerplate, and guiding you through unfamiliar workflows. The problem is that general-purpose assistants often hallucinate SAP specifics: they invent service names, suggest deprecated APIs, and miss the entitlement and role collection steps that BTP requires.

SAP Skills (a community-maintained, open-source collection of context plugins for AI assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, not affiliated with or endorsed by SAP) fixes this. Each skill is a curated reference for a specific SAP technology, loaded directly into your assistant's context so it gives accurate, current guidance.

Install the core BTP skill to give your assistant accurate trial context:

npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-btp-cloud-platform

Add complementary skills based on what you plan to build during the trial:

# CAP development (build services with CDS and Node.js/Java)
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-cap-capire

# SAPUI5 and Fiori development
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sapui5
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-fiori-tools

# Business Application Studio workflows
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-btp-business-application-studio

# HANA Cloud and database administration
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-hana-cli

# BTP best practices for architecture and governance
npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills --skill sap-btp-best-practices

With these skills loaded, your assistant can scaffold a CAP data model, generate an MTA deployment descriptor, explain a Cloud Foundry staging error, draft a destination configuration with the correct authentication type, and walk you through role collection assignment, all with guidance that matches current BTP. This is the difference between spending your trial days debugging hallucinated code and spending them actually building.

Getting Started Checklist

1. Register for an SAP Universal ID if you do not have one.
2. Sign up for the BTP trial and choose your region.
3. Wait for the provisioning email and open the cockpit.
4. Open SAP Business Application Studio and create a dev space.
5. Install the SAP Skills for BTP and CAP to accelerate your assistant.
6. Build and deploy your first CAP application to Cloud Foundry.
7. Before the trial expires, push your code to Git and create a Pay-As-You-Go account with free tier plans to continue without interruption.

The trial is a launching pad, not a destination. Use the 90 days to learn the platform, build a reference app, and decide whether to transition to the free tier model for ongoing work. With the right tools and a clear plan, 90 days is more than enough to go from zero to a deployed BTP application.