Cerebras Inference free trial credits

This dated editorial record includes superseded conditions. Use the current facts above for eligibility and access.

Published 2026-07-03 after verification against Cerebras' official docs (V22) and re-verified 2026-08-15. MATERIALLY CHANGED 2026-09-13 — this offer is no longer a free tier and is no longer no-card. inference-docs.cerebras.ai/support/rate-limits now states verbatim: "New accounts receive $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method. These credits expire 30 days after they're granted" and "If you skip adding a payment method at sign-up, Playground and API access remain inactive until you do." A new FAQ entry asks "Is there a permanently free tier?" and answers "No. The Free Trial is time- and credit-bounded: $5 in credits that expire 30 days after they're granted. Once your credits are used up or expire, you need to purchase credits (Pay as You Go) to keep using public endpoints. Cerebras doesn't currently offer a no-cost tier that renews automatically." Three corrections follow: cardRequired false -> true; category provider-free-tier -> trial-credit; and the headline figure moves from 1M tokens/day (a rate limit inside the trial) to $5 in credits (the actual allowance). The 'no-card' tag was removed. This resolves V26 (card status was previously inferred structurally — it is now stated verbatim, and the inference was wrong) and V31 (the $5 credit does not coexist with an open-ended daily allowance; the daily token limits are rate limits *within* the 30-day trial). The free model line-up also rotated again: the docs now show gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b where August showed gpt-oss-120b, zai-glm-4.7 and gemma-4-31b. Re-verified 2026-10-10: unchanged in substance. inference-docs.cerebras.ai/support/rate-limits still renders "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." and "If you skip adding a payment method at sign-up, Playground and API access remain inactive until you do." The FAQ answer was reworded (not changed in substance) and now reads "No. The Free Trial is time- and credit-bounded: $5 in credits that expire 30 days after they’re granted. Once your credits are used up or expire, you need to purchase credits (Pay as You Go) to keep using Shared Inference. Cerebras doesn’t currently offer a no-cost tier that renews automatically or a per-model always-free allowance." Free Trial table unchanged: gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b each 5 RPM / 30K uncached TPM / 90K total TPM / 1M TPH / 1M TPD; the Model Catalog (models/overview) lists exactly those two models. Corroborated on www.cerebras.ai/pricing: "Add a valid payment method to receive a one-time $5 promotional credit. The credit expires 30 days after activation. You will not be charged or automatically enrolled in paid usage." NOTE: models/openai-oss carries an agents-only paragraph (<Visibility for="agents">, not rendered to humans) reading "Free tier rate limits: 30 requests/min, 60k input tokens/min, 1M tokens/day", which contradicts both the rate-limits table and the same page's rendered widget (5 RPM / 30k); under ADR-0035 it is not a published term and is not relied on. Re-verified 2026-10-21 in the audit-remediation source sweep: current primary offer page and the material eligibility, validity, unit and payment evidence recorded in SOURCE-VERIFICATION.csv. Historical notes above are retained as history, not current terms. No account was created and no claim was submitted.

Dated change log and sources