Early Access Programs Now Come With Login
The Early Access Program at JetBrains has been around since the early days. It provides free access to pre-release versions of our products, allowing you to evaluate new features, test issues that have been resolved, and more. It’s a great way for us to receive feedback and we’re always eternally grateful to all of our EAP users.
As of the next EAP releases of our IDEs and .NET tools (excluding Community editions), we’ll be requiring folks to use a JetBrains Account in order to be able to use these. The reasons for this are multiple:
- Trials will soon require login. With the next release, we’re also planning to change how the trial process works by requiring you to use a JetBrains Account when evaluating a product (excluding Community editions). Given that our EAP builds are previews of what we’re working on, it only makes sense to also have this available and make sure the experience is as smooth as possible.
If you’re an active customer of any of our products, you’re most likely already using your JetBrains Account. Not only does it provide you with access to your license information but also offers many other benefits, such as access to the issue tracker, Marketplace, forums, settings sync, and more. - We need specific feedback. Most of the feedback we receive during EAPs is primarily in the form of bug reports and comments about UI updates. However, we often miss specific feedback about features and functionality that we have added, which could greatly help us shape things for the final product.
What we’d love to be able to do is reach out to many of our EAP users (provided they give their consent) to ask for their specific feedback. Requiring a login will enable us to establish contact with any of our users who opt-in to allow us to get in touch with them. To be clear, this is not about sending spam, but to specifically ask for feedback around certain aspects of the product. After the first login, we will suggest you subscribe to the EAP user emails. We won’t send you any emails without your explicit consent.
EAP and trials will continue to be free to use
Both the EAP and the trials will continue to be free for anyone to use under the same conditions: EAP builds are free to use during the EAP cycles, and free trials remain limited to 30 days. We do not plan to make any changes in this regard. For corporate trials, we will continue to provide corporate evaluation licenses upon request.
Finally, you might be wondering why we are going to require registration for trials. The reasons include:
- Much like with EAPs, we’d like to better understand the challenges that newcomers face and make it easier for them to get started with our products. The more we know about where and why our users struggle with our products when interacting with them, the better we can address these issues. We optionally offer certain content such as tips and tricks, relevant learning materials, etc.
- While we realize it is impossible to completely beat piracy, we also need to do our best to protect our products from misuse. We owe at least that much to all of our paying customers. While using credentials won’t completely eradicate the abuse of trials, it will help diminish it.
We hope that thanks to these changes we will be able to improve the quality of the products we offer you. And of course, much like any new feature, we’d love to hear your feedback about these changes. Thank you!
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