Salad free credits: None

Salad offers no free GPU credit and no GPU trial. The pricing page puts it in its FAQ: “Is there a free trial? No. SaladCloud and the Transcription API are pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment, so you can start with a small, low-cost test before scaling.” There is no amount, so there is no expiry, and the pages checked do not state a card requirement for signup. Checked against the official pricing and get-started pages on 2026-09-18.

The transcription trial is gone, and the wording changed with it

Until at least 2026-09-02 this entry recorded one free item at Salad: a 5-audio-hour transcription free trial, applied automatically when you created an organization. It is not on either official page this entry cites as of 2026-09-18, and the FAQ that replaced the old wording now answers for both products at once rather than for the container product alone. Where the pricing page used to state “Salad Container Engine does not have a free trial”, it now says no for “SaladCloud and the Transcription API” together.

Two things follow. The transcription allowance should not be planned around until it reappears on an official page, and the conflation this section used to warn about is now moot: roundups folding that trial into “Salad free GPU credits” were describing two products, and one of them no longer publishes a free window either.

Salad’s actual pitch is price, not credit

The official marketing floor is GPU rates from $0.02 per hour, with “No contracts. No minimums.” on the pricing page. That is the honest framing: Salad competes on being cheap from the first dollar rather than giving you a free window. The hardware is consumer GPUs contributed by a distributed network, which is how those rates exist.

If you need actually-free GPU time

Two entries in this catalog offer something real: Paperspace includes a free M4000 GPU for notebooks in private workspaces, and Thunder Compute gives US students $20 usable on A6000 or L40 instances. Also beware the deposit-as-gift pattern at Vast.ai, where the circulated “$5 free” is money you pay in.

What to use instead

Salad’s pitch is containers on GPUs with no free window, so the nearest alternatives with one are the serverless platforms. Modal, where you deploy Python functions that can attach GPUs, includes $30 of compute per month on its $0 Starter plan, though a payment method must be on file to use it. Beam published the same $30 per month until 2026-09-09, when it came off every official page, so the comparison now has one member rather than two. You give up Salad’s keep-it-resident container model for workloads that scale to zero, and get a monthly window that is actually free.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not deployed containers on Salad, so this page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Salad if per-hour price on consumer GPUs is what you are optimizing and you never expected free credit. Skip it if you need a free tier to evaluate first. The full list of tracked grants is on the credits index.