Try Wintertrace live — in your own demo

There is now a way to test Wintertrace that does not involve reading about it or squinting at screenshots: you use it. You request a demo, confirm your email, and a few minutes later you get login details to your own real Wintertrace installation. It is yours for 48 hours, it is free, and then it is gone. No credit card, no sales call, no strings attached.

That is the whole pitch. Don’t take my word for what the software does — go and find out.

An unusual thing to offer

Is a free, personal, throwaway demo a normal thing for open-source software? Not really. Most open-source projects hand you a download and wish you luck. Standing up a fresh installation for every visitor, on real infrastructure, and then deleting it two days later is a fair amount of work for something nobody is paying for.

So why do it?

Honestly: because I enjoy it. Who builds open-source winter service software for fun in the first place? I do — that is more or less the whole premise of this project. The live demo is the same instinct pointed at you. I would like to show what Wintertrace can actually do, and trust is easier to build when you can put the thing in someone’s hands rather than describe it. Maybe you try it and decide it is not for you. Maybe you try it and it turns out to be close to what your operation needed.

What you actually get

Nothing about the demo is a cut-down preview. It is a full installation — every feature, every module — isolated and yours:

• Your login is the email you enter; the password arrives by email.
• The demo runs on its own subdomain, something like frosty-fox-2ba.demo.plowdispatch.com.
• It has its own web inbox. Every email the software sends lands there in your browser, so you can watch notifications and service proofs go out without anything reaching a real recipient.
• After 48 hours the whole thing — installation and data — is deleted automatically. It is built for trying things out, not for real records.

So you can walk a dummy round with the app running, generate a PDF service proof and hold it up to your most sceptical customer, poke at the customer portal, and see whether GPS tracking fits how you actually work. If you like what you find, the honest next step is to self-host it: the demo and the download are the same software.

The part I find genuinely cool

Here is the bit that made me want to build it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

You fill in a small form — name, email, a spam check. That form goes to an API. And from that single request, a full Wintertrace installation provisions itself: Coolify brings up its own Docker container, a subdomain is assigned, an SSL certificate is issued, the software installs, its own web inbox comes up alongside it, and a timer is set so that 48 hours later everything is torn down again cleanly.

Do you, as a winter service operator, need to know any of that? No. Do you need it at all? Honestly, not really — a plain download would do the job. But it is a properly satisfying piece of machinery, and building it was a way to find out how far the idea could go: one form in, a live self-contained installation out, gone again two days later without anyone lifting a finger.

And that, more than anything, is why this project looks the way it does. Not because a throwaway demo is strictly necessary, but because building it — and building Wintertrace itself — is something I genuinely like doing. Software made for fun tends to show it, and I would rather it showed that than the opposite.

Try it

If any of this lands, the invitation is simple: request a demo, confirm your email, and spend an afternoon with it. It costs nothing and expires on its own. If it turns out to fit, the download is right there and the source is on GitHub — the thing you tried is the thing you keep running.

No risk, in the most literal sense of the word: in 48 hours there is nothing left to clean up.