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Free Cerebras Inference credits: $5 trial, 30-day expiry

Cerebras serves open models at extreme speed on wafer-scale hardware. Its free access is a $5 trial credit that expires after 30 days and requires a verified payment method — not an ongoing free tier.

The short answer

Corrected September 2026. We previously listed the Cerebras Inference offer as a no-card free tier worth up to 1M tokens/day per model. Cerebras’ docs now state that new accounts receive “$5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method”, that those credits “expire 30 days after they’re granted”, and that there is “no” permanently free tier. The 1M tokens/day figure is still published, but it is a rate limit inside that trial rather than a recurring allowance. Both the card requirement and the free-tier framing have been corrected across this site.

Cerebras remains a strong option if you want the fastest available inference on open models and do not mind a card — you simply get a trial credit rather than an ongoing allowance. For ongoing allowances instead, see free AI API tiers, where each offer shows whether its provider says a card is needed.

Frequently asked questions

Does Cerebras have a free tier?
No — not any more. Cerebras’ own docs now answer this directly: “Is there a permanently free tier? No. The Free Trial is time- and credit-bounded: $5 in credits that expire 30 days after they’re granted.” Once the credits are used up or expire, Cerebras says you need to purchase credits (Pay as You Go) to keep using Shared Inference. We listed this as a free tier until September 2026; that listing was correct then and is not correct now.
How do I get the $5 in Cerebras credits?
Create an account at cloud.cerebras.ai and add a verified payment method. Cerebras states: “New accounts receive $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method. These credits expire 30 days after they’re granted and can be used across all public models.” Its pricing page adds: “You will not be charged or automatically enrolled in paid usage.”
Do I need a credit card for Cerebras?
Yes. This changed in September 2026. Cerebras states that “If you skip adding a payment method at sign-up, Playground and API access remain inactive until you do.” We previously listed Cerebras as no-card, inferred from the absence of a payment step in the signup flow; that inference is now contradicted by Cerebras’ own wording and has been corrected.
What are the Cerebras trial rate limits?
Inside the 30-day trial, per model: 5 requests/minute, 30,000 uncached tokens/minute, 90,000 total tokens/minute, 1,000,000 tokens/hour and 1,000,000 tokens/day, per Cerebras’ official rate-limit docs. The documented models at verification are gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b; every model on the public Model Catalog is available on the trial.