Anyone, anywhere — no .edu email, no credit card, no account, no region limits, no funding-cap rules. Only requirement is your own infrastructure: a server/container/DB to host it (you pay for compute/storage, not for Keycloak).
How to claim
1) Go to https://www.keycloak.org/downloads and pick the ZIP or TAR.GZ of the 26.x server (links straight to GitHub releases); 2) run it bare-metal, via Docker/Kubernetes, or with the official container image; 3) no signup, no license key, no billing. For clients, use the JS adapter 26.2.4 or client libraries 26.0.12.
Expiry
No expiry or renewal — perpetual Apache-2.0 license with ongoing releases. Watch out: Node.js client adapter is explicitly tagged DEPRECATED on the download page, and older releases are moved to 'Archived releases' (EOL, security unbacked).
Gotchas
Cost shifts to infrastructure (VM/container, Postgres/DB, load balancers for HA) — no egress fees from Keycloak itself but your cloud bill applies. No support/SLA. Enterprise-grade features/support are sold separately by Red Hat as a commercial offering, which keycloak.org no longer surfaces at all (no trial, no free credits, no free tier of the commercial product). Trial-vs-free: this is genuinely free, not a trial.
Absence of trial-credit / startup / education offers high confidence
Verified today against the official site: keycloak.org has no pricing page, no trial, no startup program, no education license, no student credits, and no free-tier of a commercial offering anywhere in its navigation (only Guides, Docs, Downloads, Community, Blog). The CNCF project page likewise lists no credits or sponsored tiers. So there is nothing to claim besides self-hosting the community edition; there is no paid 'commercial Keycloak' free trial discoverable from official channels.
Eligibility
N/A — documents that no eligibility criteria exist because no program exists.
How to claim
Nothing to claim. The only free path is self-hosting the Apache-2.0 community edition (see finding 1).
Expiry
Not applicable.
Gotchas
Absence verified from official keycloak.org + CNCF pages only; this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so a Red Hat commercial trial offered purely on redhat.com cannot be positively ruled out — but no such offer appears on any official Keycloak channel today.