shc license trial start

start the 30-day Enterprise trial (explicit opt-in)

Start the 30-day SHC Enterprise trial.

Until you start it, this estate behaves exactly like the free tier and every Enterprise feature refuses with a pointer here. During the 30 days every Enterprise feature works, watermarked in shc license status.

READ THIS BEFORE STARTING — the trial ends in TWO STEPS, and the second one is a freeze:

day 30 the trial lapses. Everything you built keeps running, but Enterprise GROWTH stops: no new cluster nodes, tenants, or seats beyond the free-tier limit.

day 44 after a 14-day grace period, this estate LOCKS. Every change is refused until a license is activated — new deployments and app installs, deployment updates, config changes, cluster/node/tenant/seat changes, and BACKUP CREATION and RESTORE.

What a lock never does: no container is ever stopped, every running workload keeps serving, you can still start/stop/restart what is deployed, and backups you have already taken stay downloadable (shc backup export) so your data is never held hostage. Reads, status, logs, metrics, certificate renewal and DNS keep working.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART, SO YOU HEAR IT NOW AND NOT ON DAY 44: an estate that never starts the trial is NEVER locked. Starting the trial and letting it lapse therefore leaves you worse off than never having started it. The trial is a paid tier lent to you for 30 days, not a second free tier. If you want the free tier and nothing else, do not start the trial — everything in it stays yours, unlocked, forever.

Activating a license at any point clears all of this immediately, offline, with no vendor contact (shc license activate).

NOTE FOR TERRAFORM / IaC USERS: setting accept_ee_trial = true (the license.accept_trial config row) starts this same 30-day clock at provision time, with no prompt and without printing this text. Leave it false to stay on the free tier.

shc license trial start [flags]

  -h, --help   help for start

      --config stringArray   extra YAML config file to layer on top of auto-discovered config; repeatable, later files win
  -d, --debug                enable debug mode (default: $SHC_DEBUG)
  -e, --environment string   environment name (default: $SHC_ENVIRONMENT)
      --exclude string       comma-separated dotted paths to drop
      --fields string        comma-separated columns/keys to show (and their order)
      --filter string        comma-separated dotted paths to keep (drops everything else)
  -o, --output string        output format: tty|text|json|yaml (default: $SHC_OUTPUT)
  -s, --stack string         stack name (default: $SHC_STACK)
  -t, --tenant string        tenant name (default: $SHC_TENANT)
  -v, --verbose              verbose output (default: $SHC_VERBOSE)

• shc license trial - manage the 30-day Enterprise trial