Mirantis Inc. is taking its shot at making OpenStack more accessible to application developers with the addition of a free tier to its hosted distribution that offers a painless way of trying out the capabilities of the buzzed-about cloud operating system. As the leading – and one of the best-funded – players in the ecosystem, the company is in a better position than most to foster the creation of services atop the platform.

As OpenStack Foundation head Jonathan Bryce told SiliconANGLE in a September interview, applications for the project are still few and far between despite widespread developer involvement under the hood. He attributed that to the lack of easily accessible options for consuming the technology and predicted that the situation will change by the end of the year, a forecast that has proven entirely accurate.

Just over a month after Bryce made his remarks, DreamHost launched a subscription-based OpenStack implementation offering virtual machines with full access to the project’s core interfaces starting at $19 a month. Now Mirantis is lowering the barrier to entry even further with the new Developer Edition of its hosted distribution, which provides a single tenant packing four virtual processors, four gigabytes of memory, 100 gigabytes of storage capacity and two IP addresses at no charge for the first 12 months.

That’s only sufficient to support the smallest OpenStack projects, but it’s still better than the other free hosting option available today. TryTack, as the community-run platform is known, requires developers to apply for access at the risk of rejection. Worse, data stored in the environment is periodically deleted to prevent overuse, which makes it unreliable for anything but simple experiments.

Mirantis offers a much more viable alternative for serious application development, especially since it allows users to add resources as needed starting with relatively small increments of two virtual processors, two gigabytes of memory and 50 gigabytes of storage at $19.99 per month. The company is also promising to lower the cost barrier for corporate users with a team offer rolling out alongside the Developer Edition, which positions it to secure enterprise accounts while they’re still small and cash in as deployments grow from pilot to production.