What you can do with an NS1 Connect free developer account

We get it: if you’re migrating any part of your critical network infrastructure, you’re going to want to test out any solution before you buy. That’s why we offer free accounts to developers, network administrators, DevOps teams, and anyone else who wants to peek under the covers of what NS1 has to offer.

We’re so confident that you’ll see the value of our best-in-class API, innovative traffic steering functionality, resilient infrastructure, and top tier performance that you’ll soon be asking for more.

Looking for more detail on what’s included in the NS1 Connect free developer account? Here are the answers to some of the most common questions we hear:

Is it really free?

Yes, the NS1 Connect free developer account does not incur any costs as long as you stay within the set number of queries and records. Since NS1 does incur back-end costs to serve these accounts, we set limits on what’s available.

With the free account, we give you five million queries per month and 500 records to play with. That’s typically more than a small enterprise or start-up would use. For larger businesses which are thinking about an enterprise-level purchase, that should be enough to try a representative sample of traffic and see how it works in a live production environment.

As long as you stay within those query and record limits, NS1 doesn’t place time limits on your account. You can use it as long as you like.

Does it require a credit card? What information do I need to provide?

The NS1 Connect free developer account creation process does not require you to enter credit card information.

We only require you to input some basic information to get started with a free developer account - your name, email, business name, and physical address (used for compliance purposes only).

What’s included?

We provide all of the standard features of NS1 Connect in the free developer account so you can experience the full value of the solution right from the start. For example, you’ll get:

• Global coverage with 26 Points of Presence (PoPs)

• A 100% uptime SLA

• Built-in protection against DDoS attacks

• Automation support with the full API and our Terraform integration

• Full support for DNSSEC

• Rapid response and propagation times that our customers depend on

The NS1 Connect free developer account also gives you the opportunity to try some of NS1’s advanced features.

We provide a single Filter Chain in the free developer account, which you can use to set up automated failover, steer traffic based on geography, route traffic around service outages, and many other use cases. We reserve our more sophisticated Real User Monitoring (RUM)-based filters for paid accounts, but the basic traffic steering functionality will give you a sense of how it all comes together.

We also give you the ability to plug in a single performance monitor as part of the free developer account. This gives you the power to steer DNS traffic around unavailable or deprecated resources. The monitor can be an NS1-provided monitor or a monitor you provide yourself.

How fast can I be up and running?

You can be up and running with NS1 Connect in a few minutes. Configuring your queries, records, traffic steering, and monitors usually takes a little while longer - probably an hour or so.