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Why should I purchase a subscription?

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Harald Schilly edited this page Mar 19, 2019 · 20 revisions

Unfortunately, CoCalc receives no funding from charitable foundations; the site depends entirely on your financial support to continue operating. We will never charge you, except after you explicitly purchase a subscription or course package.

Purpose of CoCalc

The purpose of CoCalc is to make it easy to use SageMath (and other open-source software like R, Octave and LaTeX), collaboratively and to generate a stable revenue source to hire full-time developers to develop CoCalc and ultimately SageMath.

Subscription revenue currently just enough to pay for server infrastructure but not to cover employee costs. See http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf for more info about the challenges of funding SageMath development.

Reasons you should purchase a subscription

  1. Better support: Subscribers get higher priority on feature-requests and much more involved support responses.

  2. Members only hosting: The free servers are overloaded. They are cheap Google preemptible instances. A side effect of the cheapness is that the free servers are randomly restarted at least once every 24 hours.

  3. Use of internet resources from code running on CoCalc: For example, you could download data directly to your CoCalc projects, but you must have an internet-access upgrade applied to each project you want to download data to. You could install software in your CoCalc projects directly from the internet, but this too requires an internet access upgrade.

  4. More resources: You can purchase additional compute, memory, and storage resources. (See the pricing page for details.)

  5. Upgrades can be shared: You can share your upgrades with friends, co-workers and family.

  6. Fund improvement of CoCalc and SageMath: Improvements are made daily! For example, the development focus for Summer 2016 is making CoCalc more reliable and adding features for use in teaching. You can see contribution graphs at https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/graphs/contributors

  7. Support those who cannot afford to pay: When you get a paid subscription, or donate, you help fund the free-tier offering for those who can't afford a subscription. We all know of some countries (and plenty of individuals in every country) that are going through extremely difficult financial times.

Footnote about internet resources from free projects: At one time, there was a "white list" of sites (e.g. GitHub) that could be connected to from free projects. Unfortunately, the "white list" was removed after some abuse by a free user that caused Google to temporarily shut down CoCalc. The $14/month minimum fee has been enough to prevent abuse.

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This Wiki is for CoCalc.com.

A more structured documentation is the CoCalc User Manual.

For further questions, please contact us.

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