Lightning AI Free Plan
Up to 30 free credits (about 80 GPU hours) and 1 free Studio
What you get from Lightning AI Free Plan for free
Overview
Lightning AI is a cloud platform for building, training and serving AI models, with browser-based Studios, single and multi-GPU compute, and hosted model APIs. The Free plan costs $0 and is aimed at students, researchers and hobbyists.
Free Tier Quotas & Limits
- Up to 30 free credits: 5 credits on registration, plus 25 more after adding a card. Unused credits expire after 12 months.
- Up to 30 credits is roughly 80 GPU hours on interruptible machines.
- Free GPU hours to start vary by accelerator: T4 75, L4 31, A100 40GB 10, A100 80GB 5, L40S 5, RTX PRO 6000 2.
- 1 free active Studio — CPU Studios run free 24/7 but restart every 4 hours; 32-core CPU Studios are available.
- Single GPUs including L40S, A100, H100 and H200, with up to 2 concurrent GPUs; 80% off on interruptible (spot) instances.
- Persistent storage with a 50 GB limit.
- Model APIs: 15 requests/minute and 120,000 tokens/minute.
- Connect any local IDE or SSH, unlimited background execution, and SDK automation.
How to Get Started
- Create an account at lightning.ai/sign-up with email, Google, or GitHub.
- Verify your phone number to unlock the initial free credits.
- Open a Studio, pick a GPU, and start from a template or your own repository. Note that the free Studio restarts every 4 hours while your files persist.
Before you claim
- Startups verification: Confirm your company details (age, funding, or website) to claim.
- Payment card: Not needed.
- Account: Sign up with the provider.
Key limits
- 5 free credits on registration; up to 30 free credits total
- Credits expire after 12 months
- ~80 GPU hours on interruptible machines at the 30-credit level
- 1 free Studio
Eligibility
No credit card is needed to use the free tier. A phone number is required at signup to prevent platform abuse.
History
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Full history with screenshots · How we verified this offer · Sitewide changelog
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Understand it
A few minutes of play-along, no sign-up.
- Why does AI need a GPU? · GPUs: thousands of cores and fast memory for matrix multiplies · 5 min
- Why does a 7B model need 16 GB of RAM? · Model memory: parameters × bytes, plus the KV cache · 5 min
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