As of 21 September 2026, free GPU time still comes mainly from four places: Google Colab's free tier, Kaggle Notebooks, Hugging Face ZeroGPU for short inference demos, and small monthly credits from serverless vendors such as Modal. Every one of them gives you an older or shared GPU under a hard quota. When the quota runs out, the cheapest paid step is an hourly rental of a T4, RTX 3090 or RTX 4090, and the live table further down shows what that costs today.
Everything here was read from the vendors' own pages on 21 September 2026 unless a row says otherwise. Free tiers change without notice. Treat the date as part of each fact.
Free GPU options at a glance
| Option | What you get | The catch | Status | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Colab, free tier | A hosted notebook with "very limited access to GPUs". Sessions run "at most 12 hours". Google does not name the GPU. Users report a T4. | No published quota. Idle runtimes time out. SSH, remote desktops and web UIs are not allowed without a paid balance. | Open | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Kaggle Notebooks | T4 and P100 class GPUs are what Kaggle has offered. "12 hours execution time for CPU and GPU notebook sessions". A weekly GPU quota that Kaggle sets and shows in your account settings (commonly reported as around 30 hours). | Kaggle's docs give no quota number, and the quota floats. The accelerator menu changes. | Open, check the menu and quota in your account | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Hugging Face ZeroGPU | A shared RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell. The default size is half a GPU with 48 GB. A free account gets 5 minutes of GPU time a day. | Gradio Spaces only. 60 second default GPU function. No torch.compile. It serves demos. It does not train models. | Open | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Lightning AI, free plan | "1 free active Studio (4 hour restarts)" and persistent storage with a 50 GB limit. | "Free Studios become paid after 4 hours". We could not confirm the monthly free credit amount. | Open, details unconfirmed | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Paperspace Gradient, Free plan | A "Free GPU (M4000)" machine for notebooks in private workspaces, with 5 GB of storage. | Auto-shutdown after 6 hours at most. We did not test whether free capacity is obtainable. | Documented, page last verified 13 Jul 2026 | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Modal, Starter plan | "$30 / month free compute" on a serverless platform. | It is code-first serverless, not a notebook. Usage past the credit is billed. | Open | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab | Existing users: GPU sessions of "up to 4 hours at a time with a limit of 4 hours in a 24-hour period". | "No longer open to new customers." | Closed to new users | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Colab Pro for Education | A free year of Colab Pro for US students and faculty, launched 18 July 2025. | "No longer available for new signups at this time." | Closed to new users | 21 Sep 2026 |
| GitHub Student Developer Pack | "$100 in Azure credit" for students aged 18 and over. Camber's student plan with "5 GPU hours". | No DigitalOcean offer appeared on the pack page as retrieved. | Changed | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Hyperscaler free trials | Google Cloud: $300 over 90 days. AWS: up to $200 over 6 months. Azure: $200 for up to 30 days. | Google's trial cannot add GPUs. AWS's free plan covers "select services only". | Open, mostly not for GPUs | 21 Sep 2026 |
Three rows need a note on how sure we are.
Colab. Google's FAQ says "The types of GPUs and TPUs that are available in Colab vary over time" and "Colab does not publish these limits". The T4, and every weekly hour figure you see quoted elsewhere, comes from users and not from Google. The 12 hour session cap is Google's own wording, qualified by "depending on availability and your usage patterns". Google also warns free users not to rely on background execution: "execution will be interrupted when user interaction ceases, and the VM will be deleted soon after that."
Kaggle. The session limits are from Kaggle's notebook documentation, read on 21 September 2026: 12 hours for CPU and GPU sessions and 9 hours for TPU sessions. The size of the weekly GPU quota is not in Kaggle's docs. It is shown in your account settings and it floats, so the figure of around 30 hours is what users commonly report, not a Kaggle statement. The same documentation says Colab Pro and Pro+ subscribers who link their account get 15 and 30 extra GPU hours per week on Kaggle respectively, without spending Colab compute units, and that Kaggle may change or end this.
Lightning AI. The pricing page is a client-rendered app. The free plan strings quoted above were read from the page's JavaScript on 21 September 2026. Third-party sites disagree with each other about the monthly credit, so we do not quote one.
What the hardware is
The GPUs behind free tiers are old. The T4 launched in 2018 with 16 GB of memory. The Quadro M4000 on Paperspace's free plan launched in 2015 with 8 GB. For comparison, a rented RTX 4090 has 24 GB and 2.5 times the T4's dense FP16 throughput (165.2 against 65 TFLOPS, both dense figures from our spec table).
| Spec | T4 | Quadro M4000 | RTX 3090 | RTX 4090 | RTX PRO 6000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 16 GB | 8 GB | 24 GB | 24 GB | 96 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 320 GB/s | 192 GB/s | 936 GB/s | 1,008 GB/s | 1,792 GB/s |
| FP16 (dense) | 65 TFLOPS | Not published | 71 TFLOPS | 165.2 TFLOPS | 503.8 TFLOPS |
| FP16 (with sparsity) | Not published | Not published | 142 TFLOPS | 330.4 TFLOPS | 1,007.6 TFLOPS |
| Launch year | 2018 | 2015 | 2020 | 2022 | 2025 |
| Architecture | Turing | Maxwell | Ampere | Ada Lovelace | Blackwell |
ZeroGPU is the exception on age and the extreme case on quota. Hugging Face's documentation says it "dynamically allocates and releases NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs as needed". The default large size is half a GPU with 48 GB. The xlarge size is the full 96 GB GPU and burns quota twice as fast. A free account gets 5 minutes of GPU time per day and an unauthenticated visitor gets 2. The quota "resets exactly 24 hours after your first GPU usage". PRO costs $9 a month, raises the quota to 40 minutes, and lets you buy more "at the rate of $1 per 10 minutes of GPU time". That is a way to host a demo. It is not a way to fine-tune a model.
What closed by September 2026
Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab. AWS's documentation states: "Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is no longer open to new customers. Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal." AWS gives no closure date and says "we do not plan to introduce new features". The replacement it suggests is paid SageMaker Studio, which needs an AWS account.
Colab Pro for Education. Google launched a free year of Colab Pro for US students and faculty on 18 July 2025. The Colab FAQ now says these subscriptions "are no longer available for new signups at this time." Verified users keep the benefit until their year ends.
The DigitalOcean credit in the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Older guides cite a DigitalOcean credit. No DigitalOcean offer appeared on the pack page as retrieved on 21 September 2026. The compute offers we did find were Azure ("$100 in Azure credit"), Heroku, Codespaces, a Deepnote plan with no GPU, and Camber's student plan with "40 CPU hours, 5 GPU hours, 50 GB of storage".
Credits: who qualifies
Sign-up credits from the big three clouds
These are real money and mostly useless for GPUs. Google Cloud's free trial gives "a $300 Welcome credit to spend over 90 days", but during the trial you cannot "Add GPUs to your VM instances", and "GPUs and TPUs are not included in the Free Tier offer." AWS gives "$100 in credits immediately" and up to $100 more for exploring services, "up to $200 over 6 months", on a free plan "Limited to select services only". Azure gives a "$200 credit to explore Azure for up to 30 days" and asks for a phone number and a non-prepaid card. Azure's page does not say whether a new subscription gets any GPU quota, and we do not know.
Student programmes
Azure for Students gives "$100 credit to use on Azure services within 12 months" with "No credit card required", for full-time university students. Its page lists only burstable CPU machines as free services and does not state GPU eligibility. Modal's academic grant is the largest GPU-relevant offer we found: "Graduate students, labs, and researchers can get up to $10k free compute credits". You apply for it. It is not automatic.
Startup programmes
| Programme | Amount as published | Conditions as published |
|---|---|---|
| Google for Startups Cloud Program | "$2,000 to build your MVP". Seed to Series A: "$200,000 in cloud credits (or up to $350,000 for AI-first startups)" | Tier depends on funding stage |
| AWS Activate | Founders: "$1,000 USD in Activate Credits", with some participants qualifying for up to $5,000. Portfolio: "Up to $200,000 USD" | "Pre-series B, founded in the last 10 years, AWS Account on Paid Tier Plan" |
| Microsoft for Startups | "up to $150,000 in credits" across eligible Azure services | Tiers and eligibility are not shown on the landing page |
| NVIDIA Inception | "free cloud credits from NVIDIA and partners", no amount stated, plus "preferred pricing on select NVIDIA hardware and software" | Incorporated, less than 10 years old, at least one developer, a working website. No fees and no equity |
| Koyeb startup programme | "up to $30k in credits" | Apply through Koyeb |
| Modal | "Early-stage startups can get free compute credits", amount not stated | Apply through Modal |
All rows were read on 21 September 2026. Inception is not a cash-credit programme in itself. Its credits come through partners, and NVIDIA publishes no figure.
Provider credits
Modal's Starter plan includes "$30 / month free compute". Baseten says new accounts "come with credits" and gives no amount. Replicate says "You can run select models on Replicate for free, but after a bit you'll be asked to set up billing." Beam's and Cerebrium's pricing pages list $0 plans billed on usage and state no free credit amount. RunPod's referral programme pays a new user who loads at least $10 "a random weighted bonus between $5 and $500", or a fixed $5 in Europe, and requires Google sign-in. Our sister article on serverless GPU pricing lists what these platforms charge once the credit is gone.
Converting credits to GPU-hours
A credit is only worth the GPU time it buys. The conversion is one division:
GPU-hours = credit amount divided by the hourly price of the GPU you will use.
Two rules keep it accurate. First, take the hourly price from a live source on the day, such as the table below or the provider pages. Do not use a number typed into an article, including this one. Second, use the price at the vendor where the credit can be spent. A cloud credit buys GPU-hours at that cloud's rate, which is often well above the cheapest rate on the market. Cerebrium's pricing page, for example, says AWS and GCP cloud credits cannot be applied to its platform. Check the expiry as well: the Google Cloud trial credit lasts 90 days and the Azure one 30.
When free costs more than paid
Free tiers cost time. Sessions end at 12 hours on Colab and Kaggle. Colab may interrupt you when you stop interacting. Kaggle's quota is weekly, ZeroGPU's is minutes per day, and Studio Lab's is 4 hours in 24 for the users who still have it. Work that outgrows these limits turns into checkpoint juggling, account switching (which Colab's terms forbid) and waiting for a reset. Here is what the cheapest real GPUs cost right now.
And the same prices as a daily and a monthly bill if you left the GPU running all the time, which you would not.
Read the hourly column, then multiply by the hours your job needs. Do that sum with today's prices before you spend another evening on quota. For a job of a few hours on a consumer card, a short paid rental often beats a week of fitting the same job into quota windows on a 16 GB T4. A rented RTX 3090 or L4 gives you 24 GB and no weekly quota. If you are unsure how much memory your model needs, the LLM VRAM calculator and our guide to the best GPU for AI will narrow it down. The current cheapest T4 we track is no in-stock on-demand offer right now.
The decision rule
Students. Learn on Colab free and Kaggle. Use Kaggle when you need a quota you can see. Use Colab for quick notebooks. Do not plan on Colab Pro for Education or Studio Lab, because both are closed to new users. When a course project outgrows a 16 GB T4, rent a 24 GB card by the hour. Graduate students should apply for Modal's academic grant.
Hobbyists. Use ZeroGPU to host a demo and Kaggle to experiment. The moment you want SSH, a web UI such as a Stable Diffusion front end, or a run longer than 12 hours, stop fighting the free tiers. Colab's FAQ says free users "commonly experience runtime terminations" when they bypass the notebook UI. Rent an RTX 4090 or RTX 3090 for the hours you need and shut it down after.
Startups. Apply to every programme you qualify for on day one: Google for Startups, AWS Activate, Microsoft for Startups and NVIDIA Inception. Inception has no fees and takes no equity. Then run the conversion above with the live price at the cloud where the credit is spendable, and compare it with the cheapest rate for the same GPU across all providers. Credits expire. Build on them, but keep your stack portable so you can move to the cheapest paid GPU when they do.
Sources
Source pages were retrieved with automated research tools on the dates shown and each figure was traced back to its source before publishing. Rental prices on this page are not typed: they are read live from GPUperhour's own data.
All accessed 21 September 2026.
- Google Colab FAQ
- Google Colab signup page
- Google: Colab Pro for higher education launch, 18 July 2025
- Kaggle Notebooks documentation
- Hugging Face ZeroGPU documentation
- Hugging Face pricing
- Lightning AI pricing
- DigitalOcean: Paperspace pricing (page last verified 13 July 2026)
- DigitalOcean: Paperspace notebook features
- AWS: SageMaker Studio Lab availability change
- AWS: SageMaker Studio Lab overview
- GitHub Student Developer Pack
- Azure for Students
- Google Cloud free trial and Free Tier
- AWS Free Tier
- Azure free account
- Google for Startups Cloud Program
- AWS Activate credits
- Microsoft for Startups
- NVIDIA Inception
- Modal pricing
- Baseten pricing
- Replicate billing documentation
- Cerebrium pricing
- Beam pricing
- Koyeb pricing
- RunPod referral programme