Shadeform free credits: None

Shadeform offers no GPU trial credit. What is free is the platform itself: per the official pricing page, “Using Shadeform is free. You pay the same as going direct to the clouds in our network.” The GPU hours are not free at all, and the quickstart requires topping up your wallet before you can launch an instance. No free amount means no expiry to report, and the pages checked do not state card requirements in quotable terms. Checked on 2026-09-02.

The correction: “$300 Shadeform credits” is not official

Roundups circulate a “$300 Shadeform credits” offer. As of 2026-08-21 that figure is not on Shadeform’s official pricing page or docs. Until Shadeform’s own pages state a credit, treat the $300 as stale. Unverifiable-hundreds claims are a pattern in this category: the circulated Crusoe $300 is also absent from official pages.

“Free” here means no markup, not free compute

Shadeform’s model, in its own words, is that the platform costs nothing on top: you pay the same instance prices as going direct to the underlying clouds. That is genuinely useful for comparing providers from one wallet, but it is a pricing property, not a grant. The prices page lists the per-provider rates you would actually pay.

The wallet gate

Per the official quickstart, you must add funds to your wallet before launching instances. So the minimum cost of trying Shadeform is whatever you choose to top up, in your own money. The same top-up-first pattern shows up at TensorDock, where the circulated “start with $5” is likewise a deposit.

What to use instead

If what you need is GPU hours before any wallet top-up, two tracked entries provide them. Thunder Compute gives $20 of real credit to signups with a US student email address, verified automatically, usable on A6000 and L40 instances only; at its listed $0.35 per hour that is about 57 A6000 hours. Paperspace skips the balance entirely: its free plan includes a free M4000 GPU for notebooks in private workspaces, an ongoing plan feature with no dollar credit attached. Neither replaces Shadeform’s cross-cloud console, but both put a GPU in front of you at $0, which no amount of markup-free routing does.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not topped up or launched through Shadeform, so this page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Shadeform if you want one account across many GPU clouds and were going to pay anyway. Skip it if you are looking for free credit, and check the credits index for the grants that do exist.