Cloud credits & GPUs¶
Supplemental reference · Browse supplements · Current report
Modal is a conditional instructor experiment, not the classroom baseline. Its documented $30/workspace/month credit requires a payment method and the Starter workspace has three seats. CPU, GPU and memory share the allowance. No card, credit redemption, grant or workload has been tested here.
With $0 cash, do not depend on paid conversion. Use Kaggle/free Colab for preliminary GPU benchmarks, then replay on awarded ACCESS CPU + GPU resources. Confirm eligible grant funding before any paid use.
Provider documentation reviewed October 16, 2026. Pricing and credits can change; follow the dated sources.
9 resources
Modal
DS: a small pinned training/inference run. MLIS: public-corpus OCR, embeddings or retrieval experiments.
Access: $30/workspace/month; three Starter seats
Limits and sources
Payment method required; GPU, CPU and memory share credits. Set explicit usage and net-spend limits. Shared Endpoints tokens cost extra. Academic grant is an application, not funding in hand.
Modal Starter pricing and Shared Endpoints boundary · Modal billing: payment method required · Modal budgets and out-of-pocket spend limits · Modal academic credit grants
Beam
DS/MLIS component hosting if funded; open-source runtime may warrant later engineering assessment.
Access: $20/month Developer includes $20 credits; one seat
Limits and sources
June free-$30 comparison is stale against current direct plan table. Prepaid deployments need credits; warm/idle settings can bill. BYOC is not free compute.
Beam current plan table · Beam runtime and prepaid credit billing · Beam earlier free Developer comparison (historical)
Cerebrium
DS model serving; MLIS public-corpus embeddings or transcription.
Access: Free Hobby subscription; no recurring compute credit verified
Limits and sources
Free plan fee and included storage do not make execution free. Trials are discretionary/time-limited and may transition to paid billing.
Cerebrium Hobby subscription versus metered compute · Cerebrium trial terms
Paperspace Gradient
Small DS training and public/synthetic MLIS corpus notebooks.
Access: Free CPU / M4000 GPU subject to availability; 5 GB
Limits and sources
Six-hour free-session maximum, one-hour idle stop, one free notebook at once; free notebooks are public. Check old GPU/runtime fit and actual signup/payment requirements.
DigitalOcean Paperspace: free machine and storage eligibility · Paperspace notebook free-session duration · Paperspace free machines: visibility and inactivity
Lightning AI
DS/MLIS notebook preparation and small tests within actual credit balance.
Access: One free CPU Studio; GPU credit amount and expiry vary
Limits and sources
Four-hour CPU restart boundary; first 10 GB storage free. Do not promise a fixed monthly GPU grant or count paid academic discounts as free compute.
Lightning AI · billing and storage scope · Lightning AI student documentation and free CPU workflow
Saturn Cloud
Potential DS and MLIS notebook alternative, pending an authorized account check.
Access: Landing page advertises 150 compute hours/month, no card
Limits and sources
150 compute hours is not verified as 150 GPU-hours. Current pricing emphasizes paid hosted resources; reconcile device allowance, storage, inactivity and new-account access.
Saturn Cloud free-compute landing claim · Saturn Cloud current hosted pricing
Runpod
Funded DS/MLIS jobs with explicit checkpoint and external export.
Access: Prepaid compute; no recurring free allocation verified
Limits and sources
Pod launch needs credit; stopped storage still bills and can be deleted when funds run out. Not a zero-cash fallback or preservation repository.
Replicate
DS model-behavior comparison; MLIS controlled metadata/transcription demonstrations.
Access: Select-model demonstrations, then billing
Limits and sources
No stable free monthly grant verified. Private deployments can bill setup and idle time. A model API does not replace arbitrary CUDA training.
Hugging Face Inference Providers
DS inference evaluation and MLIS embeddings/metadata tasks when funded.
Access: No included monthly API credits for Free users
Limits and sources
Separate from ZeroGPU/Spaces. Current API pricing overrides older free-credit snippets; no historical change date established.
Hugging Face Inference Providers: current free-account credits