AI DevSpace trial vs persistent edition: pick the right edition

When I opened AI DevSpace from the AI Agent practice center today, the first screen did not ask me to build anything. It asked me to choose an edition, and that choice matters more than any prompt I was about to type.

Trial edition: for a quick, disposable test

The trial edition starts in seconds and is free to try with full features. It does not consume any quota. The trade-off is explicit: data is not retained, and the environment resets automatically when the trial period ends. That makes it the right place for a first look, a short experiment, or checking whether an idea works at all. Anything I want to keep should be copied out before I close it, because I cannot rely on it being there later.

Persistent edition: for work I want to continue

The persistent edition is billed by core-hours, starts a little slower, and saves data automatically when it shuts down. The page I saw offered an initial grant of 8000 core-hours, with usage deducted by actual time used. That is the edition for a project I will return to, a demo I will iterate on, or code and configuration I do not want to rebuild from scratch.

My simple rule

1. If the task is disposable, use the trial edition and accept the reset.
2. If the result must survive the session, use the persistent edition and watch the core-hour usage.
3. Never start a long task in the trial edition and hope the data will still be there.

Choosing the edition first saved me from the most common beginner mistake: doing real work in a temporary environment. It is a small decision, but it decides whether the next hour of work is kept or thrown away.