The Current Credits Index: AI compute free credits, September 2026

Live version: the credits index. This page is a frozen snapshot, checked 2026-09-02; the index behind that link is the version that gets re-checked and re-dated. Snapshots are taken monthly, one dated URL per month, so this report is never edited in place once published. The previous edition is the August 2026 snapshot, linked from the archive navigation on this page.

Short versionCredits index

Rent	When	Example
Agent sandboxes	The largest card-free grants live here: Daytona $200 (CPU sandboxes only), E2B $100, Novita $100 (Sandbox scope, 90 days).	Daytona
GPU training	No provider publishes a free GPU-VM pot. The real offer is recurring serverless credit: Modal and Beam, $30 per month each.	Modal
API tinkering	Fireworks gives $1 that spends on inference. Anthropic now states a small unquantified allowance. OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, Cohere, and Cloudflare publish $0 paths with limits.	Fireworks AI
VPS self-hosting	Two $300 grants (Google Cloud, Oracle) and a $200 band (AWS, Azure, IBM, OVHcloud). The UpCloud $500 now needs the boost500 promo code.	Oracle Cloud

39 of 55 checked providers publish something real. 16 publish no free credit at all.Checked 2026-09-02

This is the Current Credits Index for September 2026: a dated, citeable snapshot of every AI compute free credit, free tier, and trial this site has verified against official pages, plus every circulated credit figure that those pages do not back. The living version is the credits index, where each entry is re-checked and re-dated on its own schedule. This report freezes the state of the landscape as checked on 2026-09-02 so it can be linked, quoted, and compared against the August edition and later snapshots.

Findings

I rechecked all 55 providers for this edition: 47 entries on 2026-09-02, and 8 entries whose full recheck ran on 2026-08-29 (Koyeb, Fly.io, Oracle, Railway, Render, Novita, Supabase, OpenRouter). Of the 55:

• 39 publish something real: 15 one-time signup credits, 9 monthly free tiers, 8 time-boxed trials, and 7 always-free tiers.
• 16 publish no free credit at all. Most of those entries exist because the opposite claim circulates: a specific dollar figure attached to a provider whose official pages state no such thing.
• The count moved by one since August: Anthropic’s pricing docs now state that new users receive “a small amount of free credits to test the API”, with no dollar figure. That moves Anthropic from the no-credit column to the smallest possible entry in the offers column. The circulated $5 for Anthropic remains absent from official pages.

The biggest verified grants are unchanged: the Google Cloud Welcome credit, $300 / 90 days, and the Oracle Cloud trial credit, US$300 over up to 30 days. Behind them sit Civo at $250 for 31 calendar days and a $200 band: AWS at up to $200 over a 6 month free plan, Azure at $200 for 30 days, IBM Cloud at USD 200 after a Pay-as-you-go upgrade, OVHcloud at US$200 for one month, and Daytona at $200, no card for CPU sandboxes. UpCloud’s $500 / EUR 500 promotional trial still exists but changed access mode this month: see the changes section below.

The card-free ranking loses a member this month. Daytona $200, E2B $100, and Novita AI $100 are still the three largest card-free grants, and all three are sandbox products. Netlify moves from the no-card group to not-stated: the “no credit card required” wording that backed it comes from the launch-era blog post about the pre-2025 Legacy Free plan, and the current official pages state nothing about cards either way. For sustained work, the only recurring dollar credits in the set remain Modal and Beam, each at $30 per month of serverless compute.

The structural finding from August still holds, and got stronger: there is no free GPU-VM money anywhere in this set. Every path to a GPU either requires your own deposit (RunPod, Vast.ai, TensorDock), excludes GPUs from the free grant (Daytona, AWS free plan, Oracle Always Free), zeroes or restricts the GPU quota during the trial (Azure, Google Cloud), or scopes the credit to serverless endpoints (Modal, Beam, Crusoe). UpCloud, which in August stated nothing either way about GPU on its promotional credits, now excludes them explicitly: the boost500 banner reads “GPU servers are excluded from the promotion”.

What changed since the August snapshot

Every change below is logged with its source in the changelog; this is the month’s summary.

• Anthropic (entry): the pricing docs FAQ now states a small, unquantified free allowance for new users. Grant type moved from no-free-credit to signup-credit. The circulated $5 figure remains unofficial.
• UpCloud (entry): the $500 / EUR 500, 30-day boost500 promotion, which the signup flow advertised by default in late August, is no longer shown by default. The code still works when entered or passed in the signup URL, and the banner now explicitly excludes GPU servers. The default signup offer is the documented 7-day standard trial. The deploy250 code linked from the free-trial docs shows as inactive.
• Paperspace (entry): corrected. The pricing page caps free machines with a 12-hour auto-shutdown per session; this site previously reported session caps as not stated officially. Monthly hour caps remain unstated.
• Netlify (entry): corrected from no-card to card-not-stated, as described above.
• Oracle Cloud (entry): restated on 2026-08-29 in the docs’ current phrasing. Always Free Arm is capped at no more than 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory in total across A1 instances, provisioning above the cap gets all A1 instances disabled then deleted after 30 days unless you upgrade, and A1 runs only in the home region. Guides still circulating 4 OCPUs / 24 GB do not match the current docs.
• Koyeb (entry): tracked, not changed. Koyeb announced on 2026-02-17 that it is joining Mistral AI; as of the last check the pricing FAQ still lists the free web Service and free PostgreSQL, while the pricing page presents only paid plans. Signup still defaults to the $29 Pro plan with prorated billing until you downgrade.
• Salad (entry): no change, worth repeating because it keeps getting misread. Container Engine has no free trial; the automatic 5-audio-hour trial belongs to the separate Transcription API.

Method

What counts as a source

Official first-party pages only: pricing pages, documentation, legal terms, and official signup surfaces. Blog roundups, coupon aggregators, YC threads, and Reddit posts are treated as claims to verify, never as sources. Every entry in the credits index lists the official URLs it rests on, and the sources list on this page carries the official URLs behind this report’s headline claims. Where a provider’s official pages could not be reached or do not state a number, that is recorded as a finding, not papered over.

Fail-closed rules

The index is fail-closed. The rules, applied uniformly:

1. If an official page does not state a number, the published value is “Not stated officially”. That string is a legitimate cell value, not a gap. Anthropic’s new allowance is the live example this month: the existence is official, the amount is not, so the entry publishes existence and no number.
2. A minimum deposit is not a credit. “Start with as little as $10” (RunPod) and the $5 minimum on Vast.ai describe your money, not the provider’s.
3. A spend cap is not a credit. OpenAI’s usage-tier table includes a tier named Free with a $100 per month usage limit; that is a ceiling on permitted usage, not $100 of free money.
4. A $0 plan fee is not a credit. Cerebrium’s Hobby plan is “Free + compute / month”: the plan costs nothing, every compute second bills.
5. Application-gated programs are not signup offers. AWS Activate, Microsoft for Startups, Lambda’s research grants, Modal’s startup program, and the various startup programs are recorded as context, never as the default grant.
6. Nothing here is a usage report. Every entry’s hands-on field reads “Not tested yet” until that changes; this report fabricates no experience.

Check dates and depth

47 entries were rechecked on 2026-09-02 and 8 on 2026-08-29; each linked entry displays its own lastChecked date, and that per-entry date is the authoritative one if this snapshot and an entry ever disagree. One honesty note on depth: this month’s pass verified every entry’s headline facts, the amount, grant type, expiry, and card requirement, against the primary official sources. Secondary sources that only back supporting detail, such as referral terms or startup program pages, were not all re-opened this month; body text that depends on one keeps its own older check date inline.

What was excluded and why

Four providers were checked for the August edition and have no published entry: Baseten (credits exist, size unpublishable), Lightning AI (figure not on a crawlable official page), Google AI Studio / Gemini API (official pages redirected to sign-in), and Genesis Cloud (official pages unreachable). Their exclusions were not re-examined for this edition; the reasons recorded in the August snapshot stand until a future pass revisits them. A further four GPU clouds (Hyperstack, CUDO Compute, GMI Cloud, and Verda) publish no automatic signup grant and remain unpublished.

When a provider disagrees with itself

Where official pages state the same fact twice differently, both versions get printed and the dated documentation page wins over the marketing page. Rechecked and still true this month:

• Google Cloud describes the Welcome credit window as 90 days on the program pages while the legal terms say 3 months. The entry prints both.
• Civo’s terms grant the $250 for “31 calendar days” while marketing copy says “a full month”; separately, the docs FAQ gives 21 days to add a card while the signup page’s offer terms give 3 months. The entry prints both pairs.
• AWS advertises “up to $200 in credits”, which official pages themselves decompose into $100 at signup plus up to $100 earned by exploring key services. A new account that does nothing has $100, not $200.
• Paperspace states the 12-hour session limit on paperspace.com’s pricing page, while the DigitalOcean-hosted pricing docs do not repeat it. The entry cites the page that states it.