Crusoe Cloud free credits: $5 (serverless only)

Crusoe’s real offer is small and narrow: “$5 in free credits to explore Serverless Inference and Serverless Fine-Tuning”, per the banner in the official docs. It applies to those serverless products only, not to GPU VM instances. Expiry is not stated officially. Account creation requires a “valid, non-prepaid credit card”, per the docs, so mark this one as card required. The $300 new-customer credit that circulates in roundups is not on any official Crusoe page. Checked on 2026-09-02.

The correction: $300 is not on official pages

Posts and coupon lists circulate a $300 Crusoe credit for new customers. As of 2026-08-21 no official Crusoe page states that offer. The only credit on official pages is the $5 serverless credit above. If Crusoe brings a bigger offer back, it will be on their own pages first; until then, treat $300 claims as stale. The same gap between circulated and official numbers shows up at Lambda and Nebius.

What the $5 actually covers

Serverless Inference and Serverless Fine-Tuning, which bill per token, not per GPU-hour. That means there is no honest GPU-hour conversion for this credit, so I will not print one. What the $5 does not cover: Crusoe’s GPU VMs. For scale, the managed self-serve GPU rates are H100 at $5.50 and H200 at $6.00 per hour, and infrastructure on-demand rates include H200 at $4.29, H100 at $3.90, A100 SXM at $2.30, A100 PCIe at $2.00, and L40S at $1.50 per hour. Those numbers are context for what the credit is not for.

The card requirement

The account-creation docs require a valid, non-prepaid credit card. Official wording here really is “credit card”, and it excludes prepaid cards, which is stricter than the generic “payment method” wording other clouds use. Budget for that before counting the $5 as accessible.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not run inference against the $5 myself, so this page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Crusoe if you specifically want to try its serverless inference or fine-tuning endpoints and a non-prepaid card is no obstacle. Skip it if you want free GPU VM hours: this credit does not touch those. For a monthly serverless allowance instead of a one-time $5, see the Modal free tier, or the guide on choosing between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox. Every grant I track is on the credits index.