| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Provider | Lightning AI |
| Category | gpu |
| Offer status | available |
| Deal type | spend_unlock |
| What the spend to unlock gives you | The other 25 of Lightning's 30 free credits, released when you add a payment method. No charge is made for them — the card is a gate, not a purchase — but it is a payment instrument on file, which is a decision an agent cannot take by itself. Only with these does the advertised “up to 80 free GPU hours to start” become reachable. Free hours are quoted per GPU type and are NOT additive: T4 75 h, L4 31 h, A100 40GB 10 h, L40S 5 h, A100 80GB 5 h, H200 3 h — the headline 80 is the T4-weighted best case. |
| Access barrier | credit-card |
| How you get a credential | payment-card (stated on the row) |
| Agent-usable | True |
| Evidence | documented |
| Confidence | verified |
| Last verified | 2026-08-26 |
| Source | https://lightning.ai/pricing |
| Caveats | Split out from the card-free portion (afr-0053a) on 2026-08-26 because a single row could not tell the truth in its structured fields: the combined row carried access: phone-verification while 25 of its 30 credits required a card, so an agent filtering access != credit-card received the row with an 80-GPU-hour headline attached. That filter was not the consumer's error — our own field told them. Classed spend_unlock rather than free on the afr-0047 precedent: a threshold is met and a limit moves. It is not a discount, since nothing gets cheaper. 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; read it through a text-extraction rendering route. |
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 2026-08-26 01:40 UTC. Machine-readable: ai-deals.json.