| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Provider | Lightning AI |
| Category | gpu |
| Offer status | available |
| Deal type | free |
| What is free | 5 of the 30 free credits, granted at registration with no payment method — the genuinely card-free portion of Lightning's free tier. Credits are spent against a published per-GPU rate, so what 5 buys depends which GPU you pick; see the per-type hours in afr-0053b, which are quoted for the full 30. Free plan also gives 1 active Studio (restarts every 4 hours), 32-core CPU Studios, up to 2 concurrent GPUs, persistent storage (200 GB limit), and model-API access at 15 requests/min and 120,000 tokens/min. |
| Access barrier | phone-verification |
| How you get a credential | phone-verify (stated on the row) |
| Agent-usable | True |
| Evidence | documented |
| Confidence | verified |
| Last verified | 2026-09-08 |
| Source | https://lightning.ai/pricing |
| Caveats | NO GPU-HOUR FIGURE IS STATED FOR 5 CREDITS and this row deliberately does not compute one. The advertised “up to 80 free GPU hours” is the T4-weighted best case for all 30 credits; dividing it by six would invent a number the provider never published, and would inherit the T4 assumption on top. Use the per-GPU table on afr-0053b to convert. Phone number required at signup (“To prevent abuse of the platform”), which is why access is phone-verification rather than none. Credits expire 12 months after issue. The grant is framed “to start” — a one-time starting allowance, NOT a renewing monthly credit; an earlier draft of this row carried “~15 credits/month” from secondary sources and the first-party page does not support the monthly framing. The 4-hour Studio restart penalises long unattended runs. lightning.ai is a client-rendered SPA returning a loading stub to a plain fetch; re-read 2026-10-08 with a local renderer on our own client (the earlier reads went through a third-party text-extraction route, now retired); that read changed only the storage figure (50 GB → 200 GB) and the rest held, but verified_at stays 2026-09-08 because this page's title carries the date and is frozen until the 2026-10-12 CTR read. GATE CONFIRMED FIRST-PARTY 2026-09-08, during an audit that found the same field unsourced on three other rows (afr-0004, afr-0013, afr-0016). This one holds: the pricing page's own FAQ says verbatim “Why do you need my phone number? To prevent abuse of the platform.” METHOD NOTE, because it cuts the other way from the other three: a plain fetch of lightning.ai/pricing returns a 17KB client-rendered SPA shell whose only visible text is CSS, with ZERO occurrences of “phone”, “credits”, “GPU” or “$”. Reading that as “no phone gate” would have been a false negative. The page has to be read through a text-extraction render route, which also re-confirms the 5-credits-on-registration structure and the ~80 GPU hours / 30 credits headline. |
No measured example — this row is evidence: documented: it states what the provider's own page advertised on the date shown, and this worker holds no credential to call it. The provider's documentation is the source: https://lightning.ai/pricing
Rendered 2026-10-09 02:47 UTC. Machine-readable: ai-deals.json.