free trial, POC or paid pilot: which evaluation to offer a security buyer

Offer a free trial when the buyer’s doubt is whether the product does what you say and they can test that alone. Offer a POC when the doubt is whether it works in their environment, and the deal is big enough to pay for your engineers’ time. Offer a paid pilot when the product needs real users in production to prove itself, or when the buyer asks for a large evaluation without saying what happens if it succeeds. The three formats answer three different questions, and the wrong one wastes weeks on both sides.

what each format proves, and who carries the cost

Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2026 press release says more than 60% of business buyers use a trial to evaluate solutions, and 78% of buyers making purchases of $10 million or more run one first. Forrester describes the forms as ranging from paid bespoke sandboxes to usage-based trial periods.

GitLab’s public sales handbook draws the lines. A trial is the product access mechanism. A POV (proof of value, which most security vendors call a POC) is the managed business and technical motion around that access, tied to a technical or commercial decision. The same handbook describes a pilot as validation in a representative slice of the customer’s real environment, with a limited set of users, a formal readout and a rollout recommendation.

	free trial	POC	paid pilot
what it proves	the product does what the datasheet says	it works in their environment, against criteria they signed	it works in daily use, and they will pay for it
who runs it	the buyer, alone or with light help	your presales or a partner’s engineers, with named evaluators	a joint team: buyer’s project owner, your or the partner’s engineers
who pays	you, in licences and support	you, in engineer weeks; they, in staff time	the buyer, in a fee and staff time
where it runs	a demo tenant or a test machine	a test segment of their environment	production, for a limited group
how it ends	the period expires	a readout against the criteria	a rollout decision against exit criteria

The cost row is the one people skip. A trial is cheap for you per buyer and expensive in aggregate, because every trial account that matters needs someone to follow up. A paid pilot moves part of the cost to the buyer, and with it part of the decision.

match the format to the deal

Three things decide the format: the product, the deal size and the buyer’s maturity. Public buyers add their own rules, covered further down.

Product type. A product a buyer can deploy in an afternoon and judge in a week, like a scanner pointed at a test range, fits a trial. A product that touches identity, privileged access or endpoint policy across thousands of machines needs integration work and a test plan, so it fits a POC. A product whose value only shows in daily use fits a pilot, because a lab cannot show behaviour change.

Deal size. A POC costs you senior engineering weeks, which a small deal cannot carry. A simple rule to start from: below the size where one engineer week pays for itself, offer a trial with a written playbook, and above it a scoped POC. Very large or multi-year deals justify a pilot, because the buyer’s risk of a wrong choice outweighs a fee negotiation.

Buyer maturity. A team that has bought and run similar tools knows what to test. A trial works for them. A team buying its first tool in the category does not know what good looks like. It needs a POC with criteria you help them write, as described in how to run a security POC that ends in a decision.

Which evaluation fits the request

size and risk of the purchase →

high stakes, little environmentShort guided trial, references and an architecture review.

high stakes, their environmentPaid pilot with exit criteria, or a scoped POC that leads into one.

low stakes, little environmentFree self-serve trial with a playbook and a review call.

low stakes, their environmentTime-boxed POC with one to three criteria. Where free POCs become unpaid consulting.

how much the proof depends on their environment →

what changes when the buyer pays

A fee changes who is in the room. A free POC can be approved by an engineer; a paid pilot needs a budget holder, a purchase order and usually procurement. That is the point. You find out in week one whether money exists and who controls it. With a free POC you find that out after a green readout.

It also changes the paper. A paid pilot is a contract, so it brings forward the steps that normally follow a technical win: vendor onboarding, legal review of terms, the security review of your company, and a processing agreement if personal data reaches your systems. GDPR Article 28 requires processing by a processor to be governed by a contract or other legal act. It feels slow for a pilot. It is the same work the full purchase needs, done once, while the buyer is still motivated.

free POC

approved by an engineer, ends in a readout

• No budget holder needed to start
• Procurement, legal and security review start after the technical win
• Your cost grows with every extension
• Silence after the readout costs the buyer nothing

paid pilot

approved by a budget holder, ends in a rollout decision

• A purchase order shows the money exists
• Vendor onboarding, contract terms and processing agreement are done up front
• Extensions are a change to a contract
• The fee and its credit window give both sides a date

Two terms make a pilot fee easier to approve: a credit against the full purchase if the buyer proceeds within an agreed window, and a fee small enough to fit their approval rules for small purchases. Procurement will treat the pilot as a purchase and negotiate it like one, so prepare for procurement as you would for the main deal.

To see what one POC costs each side, and how much of your side a pilot fee would cover, put the hours from your last POC into this calculator.

When a partner sells the deal, the pilot goes on the partner’s paper: it invoices, earns margin on the fee and often runs the work. Agree who delivers which part before the offer goes out, using the same role split as in co-selling with a partner.

public sector buyers

A public authority that pays for a pilot is buying, and a purchase falls under procurement law as transposed into national law. In Poland the procurement act applies from PLN 170,000 since 1 January 2026, and purchases below that follow the authority’s internal rules; other countries set their own thresholds. Check the current figure before you offer a fee (general information as of October 2026, not legal advice).

A free POC for a public buyer carries a different risk. Article 41 of Directive 2014/24/EU covers a vendor that has advised the contracting authority or otherwise taken part in preparing a procedure. The authority must take appropriate measures to ensure that competition is not distorted, for example by sharing the relevant information with other bidders, and exclusion is a last resort. A long free POC that shapes the specification puts you in that position, and what you showed may reach your competitors. See why a vendor with the better product loses a Polish tender for how the specification decides the outcome.

A public buyer can pay for evaluation work on purpose through pre-commercial procurement, which the European Commission describes as public procurement of research and development services, from solution design to testing of first products. Article 14 of the directive limits when its rules apply to R&D services. The route fits new solutions. An existing product is usually evaluated through market consultations and the tender itself.

moving from one format to the next

The formats work best as steps, each with a defined way into the next.

Trial to POC. GitLab’s handbook warns against converting every self-guided trial into a POV, and lists the triggers that justify it: a named business outcome and decision date, a late-stage or strategic opportunity, a need for architecture, security, compliance or integration guidance, and several teams or decision makers who must coordinate. When a trial account shows one of them, offer a scoped POC with criteria. Trials that stay self-guided get a playbook and a support route.

POC to paid pilot. The signal is scope creep. When the buyer asks for more users, a production segment or a longer timeline than the POC plan, answer with a pilot proposal: the larger scope they want, a fee, a credit against the purchase and exit criteria. If they refuse every version of a fee, the no-decision check shows whether the deal is stuck on the status quo or on indecision.

Pilot to rollout. Write the rollout terms into the pilot contract: the price for the full scope, the credit window and what happens to pilot users if the buyer stops. Without them the end of the pilot becomes a second negotiation.

the traps in each format

Free POCs as unpaid consulting. GitLab’s handbook says a POV is not a substitute for discovery, architecture, implementation, training or paid consulting. It creeps in one request at a time: a design workshop, a custom rule set, a migration plan. Each is reasonable. Together they are an implementation project the buyer got for free and can hand to a cheaper integrator.

Trials nobody uses. Treat a trial account with no activity in its first days as a trial at risk. Watch the first login, the first data source connected and the first task completed, and call when they are missing. The cloud marketplaces leave the length to you: AWS Marketplace allows SaaS free trials of 7 to 90 days, and Microsoft Marketplace allows 1 to 180 days on plans it sells, converting to paid at the end unless the customer cancels. A longer period gives a busy team more time to forget about it.

Pilots without exit criteria. A pilot with users in production can run indefinitely: the users like it, nobody owns the decision, and you support it for free. Write two or three exit criteria, a decision date and the default when it passes, for example the licences expire.

the next evaluation request

Ask one question before you choose the format: “If this works, what would you need to see before you roll it out to everyone?” A feature list points to a trial. A test in their environment points to a POC. An answer about users, adoption or a budget cycle points to a paid pilot.