Give your customers free trials of Microsoft products
Appropriate roles: Global admin | User management admin | Sales agent
A good way to introduce customers to new Microsoft products is to offer one-month free trials.
You can sign up for the trials in the catalog just as you sign up for many other online services.
All partners can participate.
Available trial offers
You can find all of your outstanding trial offers on the Customer page. This page lists all subscriptions, including free trials and paid subscriptions. (This feature isn't available in China.)
Each customer is entitled to one free trial for each available offer. For example, they can get one free trial for Microsoft 365 Business Standard and one free trial for Office 365 E3. However, if the customer already owns the offer, they can't use a free trial for that offer.
Available products
Free trials are available for the most comprehensive and popular license-based offers. New trial offers can be introduced on a monthly basis.
For legacy offers, partners can find trials in the monthly price list on the Pricing and offers page in Partner Center. Trial offers have TRIAL listed in the price list Secondary License Type column.
In New commerce, trials can be found by filtering for Trial in the Tags column.
There are no free trials for government offers, education offers, or add-on offers.
Licenses for free trial offers
All free trials provide 25 licenses.
- You can add more licenses to the subscription after the trial is converted to a paid subscription.
- Trial licenses should be assigned to users in the same way that paid services license are assigned.
- You can't change the number of licenses during the trial.
- You can't add or remove licenses during the free trial.
Sign customers up for trials
To get a trial for your customer in Partner Center, use the following steps:
From Customers on Partner Center, go to your Customer list, and then select a customer.
Select New Subscription to open up the catalog.
Search for the trial you want to offer. Under Products, Trials will have both Trial and License listed below the Product Name. You can also search by the Product:Sku from the price list. During trials you won't be billed. In legacy, trials last 30 days. In new commerce, trials last for a period of one month (ISO 8601 P1M).
You can convert a free trial to a paid subscription at any time during the trial.
Converting trials to paid subscriptions
In new commerce, trials will automatically renew to paid subscriptions.
For legacy offers, a free trial isn't automatically converted to a paid subscription. You must convert a free trial into a paid subscription yourself. You can do so in Partner Center or by using the Partner Center APIs. If a free trial isn't converted into a paid subscription within 30 days, it expires. Free trials can't be extended.
Note
Customer free trials for the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program can't be converted to another program tenant (such as EA, Open, or MOSP).
Convert legacy trials using Partner Center
To convert trials to paid subscriptions in Partner Center, use the following steps:
Go to the customer's subscription page, and select the free trial.
Select Convert trial to paid subscription.
Enter the desired license quantity and billing frequency, and select Apply.
Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date.
The subscription auto-renews 12 months from the conversion date.
Convert legacy trials using APIs
You might need to alter your APIs to accommodate the conversion of a free trial to a paid subscription. For more information, see the following developer documentation:
Trials without conversions
- Not all trials can be converted to paid subscriptions.
- Partners can use a trial that can't be converted until the expiration date.
- Partners can purchase compatible offers that support the same services as the trial offer. Those offers should be purchased before the trial expires to ensure that the newly purchased offers' services align with the trial's services.
| Trial | Compatible Small Business offers | Compatible Enterprise offers |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Teams Commercial Cloud (User Initiated) Trial | - Microsoft 365 Business Basic - Microsoft 365 Business Standard - Microsoft 365 Business Premium |
- F3 (formerly F1) - Office 365 for Enterprise (E1, E3, and E5) - Microsoft 365 F1/F3 - Microsoft 365 Enterprise (E3) |
Note
The preceding offers have similar service plans with similar functionality, however there might be some differences between the offers.
Expiring offers
You won't be notified of expiring offers. You can track upcoming expiration dates using the Customer view at Partner Center or by querying the API. It's a good idea to monitor these dates frequently so you can take the appropriate follow-up actions with customers as they approach a decision point.
After a trial expires, a customer who attempts to sign in to that trial will see an expiration message. Their data in accordance with data retention standards. After you purchase a new subscription with the same service plans, your customer's data can be accessed again from the newly activated subscription.
Converting new commerce trials to paid subscriptions
For new commerce license-based offers, your free trial auto-renews into the equivalent paid subscription after a period of 1 month (P1M).
Important
To convert a free trial into a paid subscription, auto-renew must be turned on.
If partners don't want a trial subscription to convert to a paid subscription by default, they can turn off auto-renew so the trial will expire at the end of the trial period.
There are two ways to convert a trial to a new paid subscription: Immediate conversion and Scheduled conversion.
Immediate conversion
- When doing an immediate conversion, you can convert a free trial to a paid subscription at any time before the end of the P1M trial period.
- When doing an immediate conversion, all 25 seats (at minimum) must be converted to the new paid subscription.
- Partners can add more than 25 seats during conversion, but reducing the number of seats isn't allowed.
- Changes go into effect immediately.
Scheduled conversion
- When doing a scheduled conversion:
- You can modify billing term and frequency.
- You can choose the number of seats that you want to convert.
- Changes go into effect automatically, as soon as the trial period ends.
Note
At the end of the P1M trial period, 25 seats are automatically converted to the new paid subscription, with a one-year commitment and monthly billing.
- Trial subscriptions, when automatically converted to full commercial subscriptions, have the standard seven-day cancellation period.
- Within the first seven days, partners can cancel the licenses and be refunded the full amount minus the prorated amount for the days the subscriptions were used. For more information about NCE cancellation, see Cancel a subscription.
- Within the first seven days, partners can decrease the number of licenses and be refunded the full amount minus the prorated amount for the days the subscriptions were used. For more information, see Increase or decrease licenses in new commerce license-based subscriptions.
- If more than seven days elapse after conversion, partners can't cancel licenses or decrease the number of licenses until the next cancellation window at renewal.
Partners can also convert trials to existing paid subscriptions. In this scenario, the existing subscription must be a subscription that is eligible for the trial conversion. If so, the trial seats will be added to the existing subscription and the end date will remain the same for the existing paid subscription.
Note
To convert a free trial to an existing paid subscription, the end date of the existing subscription must occur on the same day or after the end date of the free trial.
When partners convert a trial to a new paid subscription, they can choose to convert to the same paid SKU or upgrade to a higher SKU.
If you want to convert your trial to a paid subscription before the end of the trial period, you can do so using Partner Center APIs or in Partner Center itself using the following steps.
Convert new commerce trials using Partner Center
To immediately convert new commerce trials to paid subscriptions using Partner Center, use the following steps:
Go to the customer's subscription page, and select the free trial.
Select Convert trial to paid subscription.
Choose the paid equivalent and then select Submit.
Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date, and the subscription auto-renews 12 months from the conversion date.
To schedule trial conversions to take place automatically at the end of the trial period, use the following steps:
In Partner Center, go to the customer's subscription page and select the free trial.
Ensure that Auto-renew is enabled.
Select Manage renewal.
Make the updates you want for the conversion and then select Submit.
Billing for the paid subscription begins on the conversion date. The subscription auto-renews 12 months after the conversion date.
Note
Customer free trials for the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program can't be converted to another program tenant (such as EA, Open, or MOSP).
Trial conversions must be managed by partners. There isn't any subscription-based alerting in Partner Center to let partners know when a trial is expiring.
Note
On conversion to a new subscription, subscription duration defaults to one-year, and the billing cycle defaults to a monthly plan.
Billing
Annual billing and free trials are the same in both the public cloud and sovereign clouds (for example, Azure Government, Azure Germany, and Azure China 21Vianet). The only difference is the trial SKUs available at the time of launch.
Billing for free trials
- The subscription start date is based on the conversion date.
- Free trials can be used for both monthly and annually billed subscriptions.
- Default conversion settings are a term of one year and a monthly billing cycle.
- You can select the billing frequency when you convert the trial to a paid subscription.
- If a free trial is converted to a paid offer with annual billing, the subscription renewal date is 12 months after the conversion date.
- If a free trial is converted to a paid offer with monthly billing, the subscription renewal date will be 12 months from the billing date following the conversion date.
Legacy invoices
You won't see free trials listed in your invoice or license-based reconciliation file.
A free trial appears on your invoice and license-based reconciliation file only after you convert it to a paid subscription.
The converted subscription appears in the same way as any new subscription.
New commerce invoices
You won't see free trials listed in your invoice, but you can find them in your reconciliation file by checking the ProductQualifiers attribute in the reconciliation file.
Incentives
Free trials don't affect incentives.
Support
For support for free trials, submit a service request through Partner Center.
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