Cerebras Free Trial
The rate-limits FAQ says there is no permanently free tier. New accounts receive $5 in free credits after a verified payment method is added. Credits expire 30 days after they are granted. There is no charge until you buy more credits. If you skip the payment method, Playground and API access stay inactive. When the credits are used up or expire, access stops until you purchase credits.
Free Trial table on the rate-limits page
Limits apply at the organization level and use a token bucket, so quota replenishes continuously rather than resetting on a clock. Cached tokens do not count toward uncached TPM. The default total TPM is 3× uncached TPM. The console Limits page can differ from this table.
| Model | RPM | Uncached TPM | Total TPM | TPH | TPD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-oss-120b | 5 | 30K | 90K | 1M | 1M |
| qwen-3.8-27b | 5 | 30K | 90K | 1M | 1M |
The qwen-3.8-27b footnote on that table: image limits of 2 per request and a 10 MiB total request payload. Every model in the Shared Inference catalog is available on the Free Trial, subject to the per-model Free Trial limits listed there. The page says additional families are Dedicated Inference only.
The gpt-oss-120b model card does not match that table
The GPT OSS model card says: context window 65k tokens on the free tier and 131k tokens paid; pricing $0.35 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; free-tier rate limits 30 requests/min, 60k input tokens/min, and 1M tokens/day. The rate-limits page says 5 RPM and 30K uncached TPM for the same id. Both sentences are on Cerebras pages fetched the same day. This page does not pick one. The Qwen model card matches the rate-limits table: 5 requests per minute, 30K uncached TPM, 90K total TPM, and 1M tokens per day, with context 65,536 on Free Trial and 131,072 on paid tiers.
Data use
The privacy policy says Cerebras does not retain inputs and outputs associated with its training, inference, and chatbot services, and deletes logs for those services when they are no longer necessary to provide the service. The policy does not state a separate free-tier exception.
How to get a key
Sign in at the Cloud Console and create a key under API Keys. The free-trial FAQ says API access stays inactive until a verified payment method is added. Set CEREBRAS_API_KEY.
Other free-tier notes
Sources
Last checked 2026-10-22.