It takes time for the online registration at developers.redhat.com to "replicate" over to wherever the RHEL subscriptions are held. Granted, it could be that our installer is only validating with developers.redhat.com, not a real RHEL subscription.

The reason we ignored this issue with the launch of $0 RHEL subscription was because we knew it would take several minutes to download and then install RHEL, giving our backend systems many minutes to sort out the request for subscription and insuring the right entitlements were in place.

we should make sure we really clearly document this and put it on the relevant download pages, as this is a super-non-obvious gotcha for people and may explain some of the unpredictable behavior we have right now