TensorDock free credits: None

TensorDock gives you no free credit. The “Start with just $5” line on the official site is a deposit, your own money loaded into the account, not a promotional grant. There is no free amount and therefore no expiry, and the official page checked does not state card requirements in a way I can quote. Checked on 2026-08-21.

The correction: deposits are not gifts

Roundup posts circulate several TensorDock offers: a $1 credit via a LINKEDIN_1 code, $5 in testing credit, and $15 credit bundles. As of 2026-08-21 none of those appear on TensorDock’s official pages. What the official site says is that you can start with just $5, which is the minimum you pay in. This is the same deposit-mistaken-for-gift pattern as Vast.ai, where the circulated “$5 free” is also a minimum deposit.

What your deposit buys

Official rates as of the check date: H100 SXM from $2.25 per hour, A100 SXM4 from $1.80 per hour, and consumer GPUs from $0.12 per hour. At the consumer floor, a $5 deposit stretches to roughly 40 hours of the cheapest listed hardware, but that is your $5 at work, not TensorDock’s.

Where free GPU money actually exists

If you qualify, Thunder Compute’s student credit is a real $20 grant on A6000 or L40 instances. Elsewhere the honest picture is mostly corrections: Prime Intellect and Shadeform also have circulated credits that are not on their official pages.

What to use instead

If the point is running GPU work at $0 rather than hunting a grant, two entries outside the marketplace model deliver today. Paperspace includes a free M4000 GPU for notebooks in private workspaces on its free plan: hardware access with no balance to drain, though it is a notebook runtime, not a VM you administer. Modal includes $30 of compute per month on its $0 Starter plan, a recurring allowance rather than a one-time grant, with the catch that a payment method must be on file to use it. Both run real workloads before you deposit a cent, which no deposit-first marketplace can say.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not deposited on TensorDock, so this page reports only what the official page states.

Choose TensorDock if marketplace pricing from a small deposit suits you. Skip it if you are hunting free credit: there is none here. Every grant I track, including the real ones, is on the credits index.