The Plaid Trial plan provides free access to Plaid's production APIs. You can connect real financial accounts, call production endpoints, and build projects — no business registration, security questionnaire, or sales process required.
Who can sign up
The Trial plan is available to developers who:
- Are located in the United States or Canada
- Do not already have an existing Plaid Production or Limited Production account
US and Canadian institutions are available on Trial plans, all other institutions are not currently available on this plan type. To get started, go to dashboard.plaid.com/signup.
Agreements
Applying for a Trial plan requires accepting Plaid's standard Master Services Agreement (MSA).
In the Agreements step of the application you'll check "I agree to the latest Plaid Master Services Agreement," along with attestations about keeping your accounts, data, and code secure. The application can't be submitted without these.
What's included
The Trial plan includes access to the following products:
- Auth — retrieve account and routing numbers
- Transactions (including Recurring Transactions and Transactions Refresh)
- Balance — retrieve real-time account balances
- Identity (including Identity Match) — retrieve account owner information
- Assets — generate asset reports
- Liabilities — retrieve loan and credit card data
- Investments (including Investments Refresh)
- Statements — retrieve bank statements
What's not included
The following products are not available on the Trial plan. To access these, you'll need to apply for a paid Production account:
- Identity Verification
- Signal Transaction Scores
- Transfer
- Consumer Report (by Plaid Check)
- Monitor
- Protect
- Income
- Investments Move
- Enrich
- Layer
- Payment Initiation
Item limits
Trial plan accounts can create up to 10 Items (connected financial accounts) in production. An Item represents one end-user connection to a financial institution.
Once you have connected 10 Items, you will need to upgrade to a paid Production account to connect more. See Trial plan limits for full details.
API calls against your existing connected Items are not capped — you can make unlimited API calls to the Items you've already connected.
Note: Calling /item/remove on the Trial plan does not free up slots against your 10-Item cap. If you've reached the limit, you'll need to upgrade to a paid Production plan to connect more. All access tokens created in Production will count against your Trial plan Item limit. This includes duplicate Items created when a user links the same account more than once. We recommend adding logic to prevent duplicate Items; see Preventing duplicate Items for more details.
OAuth coverage
The Trial plan includes immediate access to almost all OAuth institutions, including Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Citi, Navy Federal, PNC, U.S. Bank, American Express, and Merrill.
You don't need to complete the OAuth registration requirements in the Dashboard until you upgrade to a paid plan.
Getting approved
Most Trial plan applications are approved automatically after identity verification. If your application is flagged for manual review, Plaid's Customer Oversight team will follow up within 2–3 business days via email.
Getting help
Trial plan customers can ask Bill, Plaid's AI assistant. Support cases are available only on paid plans.
Upgrading to Production
If you need products not available on the Trial plan or are ready to scale, you can apply for a paid Production account. See How do I upgrade from the Trial plan to a paid Production plan? for step-by-step instructions.
Note: Upgrading from the Trial plan to Production is a one-way change. Once your Production account is approved, you cannot revert to the Trial plan.