Paperspace (DigitalOcean) Gradient free tier
Sibling records disagree:
- verdict:
compute/paperspacesays qualifies-with-caveat, compute/paperspace-gradient-free-tier says qualifies
- Free allowance
- Quoted from the machine table: 'GPU+ (M4000) | $0.45/hr | Free, Pro, Growth' and 'C4 | $0.04/hr | Free, Pro, Growth'.
- Verdict
- ★ qualifiesusable as stated; the read path was probed
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- retention-clampedfree machines auto-shutdown at 6 hours; a notebook inactive for one hour is shut down
- Evidence
- documented10 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-25checked 2026-10-25 (live); stale on 2026-11-25
| Free tier | Quoted from the machine table: 'GPU+ (M4000) | $0.45/hr | Free, Pro, Growth' and 'C4 | $0.04/hr | Free, Pro, Growth'. The Free plan row reads 'FREE GPU ... $0 ... Plus utilization costs on paid instances' with 'Public projects', 'Auto-shutdown (12 hour limit)', '5GB storage', 'Basic instances'. No credit card is required for the free machine types. unit hours; metered on wall-clock |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
|
| Binding | retention-clamped The six-hour auto-shutdown and the one-hour inactivity reap are what end a session, so this is a working machine for a run, not a host. |
| Identity | email no card, no phone, no document. The signup page offers '1-click sign up ... Sign up with DigitalOcean, Sign up with GitHub, Sign up with Google' plus an email-and-password form, and carries no payment field. The vendor states it twice: 'Gradient includes a free tier that comes with no-cost CPU and GPU instance types (no credit card required!)' and 'While Gradient requires a subscription tier (and credit card) to enable paid instances, you can always use Free-tier CPU and GPU notebooks for free.' |
| Egress | Quoted: 'We do not charge for ingress or egress bandwidth for Paperspace Machines.' Free machines are not metered on traffic. free allowance: unmetered |
| Per-object cap | Quoted: 'Notebook Limit: Only one notebook can use a free machine at a time.' |
| Retention | Quoted: 'For your machine learning work on Free machines, you have 5GB of dedicated Persistent Storage.' The storage is per-region and is not shared with paid machine types. |
| Interface | ssh, rest Jupyter notebooks in the browser, a terminal inside the notebook, and a public IP address on the machine for SSH. The Paperspace API and CLI drive machines programmatically. |
| Tooling | a browser for notebooks; any SSH client against the machine's public IP; the Paperspace CLI or REST API |
| Composes with | A free NVIDIA M4000 with 8 vCPU and 30 GiB of RAM behind it, no card, for six hours at a stretch: the best free GPU shape found that does not ask for an institution. |
| Reliability | No reliability event observed. Free machines come from a limited pool and can queue: 'your notebook may be Pending in the queue as you wait for a free machine to become available'. |
| Notes | The best free GPU that needs no institution and no card: an M4000 with 8 vCPU and 30 GiB of RAM for six-hour stretches, on 5 GB of persistent storage, with unmetered egress. Three caveats. First, the marketing card says a 12-hour auto-shutdown while the documentation says 6; the documentation is recorded and the conflict is left visible rather than resolved. Second, free machines come from a limited pool and can queue, so availability is the real constraint on a busy day. Third, the free plan forces public projects, so a notebook's contents are visible. Whether the machine exposes a reachable SSH port on its public IP, as opposed to notebook-only access, is not stated on any page read. This record adds the shape and the free-GPU row that paperspace lacks; the two are different records because paperspace prices the C-series hourly and this one prices the free plan. |
| Evidence note | documented The free machine types, their shapes, the reaps, the storage and the no-card statement are quoted from DigitalOcean's Paperspace pricing and machine-type pages and Paperspace's own marketing pages read. Whether a free machine can be reached over SSH on its public IP rather than only through a notebook is not stated on any page read, so inbound listening is recorded as unknown rather than yes. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 10
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-24 | docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/pricing/ | quoted: '| GPU+ (M4000) | $0.45/hr | Free, Pro, Growth |' and '| C4 | $0.04/hr | Free, Pro, Growth |' |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/pricing/ | quoted: '### Free Machines ... | Free Machine | Available Plans | ... | Free CPU (C4) | Free, Pro, Growth | | Free GPU (M4000) | Free, Pro, Growth |' |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/pricing/ | quoted: 'We do not charge for ingress or egress bandwidth for Paperspace Machines.' |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/machines/details/f | quoted: 'Auto-shutdown: The auto-shutdown limit for free machines is six hours.', 'Inactivity: Notebooks that are inactive for one hour are automatically shut down.', 'Notebook Limit: Only one notebook can use a free machine at a time.' |
| 2026-10-24 | paperspace.gitbook.io/gradient/more/instance-types/free-inst | quoted: 'For your machine learning work on Free machines, you have 5GB of dedicated Persistent Storage.' and 'Note: We are currently offering a limited pool of free machines so your notebook may be Pending in the queue' |
| 2026-10-24 | ml-showcase.paperspace.com/guide | quoted: 'Gradient includes a free tier that comes with no-cost CPU and GPU instance types (no credit card required!)' |
| 2026-10-24 | blog.paperspace.com/sagemaker-studio-notebooks-alternative-c | quoted: 'While Gradient requires a subscription tier (and credit card) to enable paid instances, you can always use Free-tier CPU and GPU notebooks for free.' |
| 2026-10-24 | console.paperspace.com/signup | the form carries 'Sign up with DigitalOcean', 'Sign up with GitHub', 'Sign up with Google', 'Email address', 'Password' and no payment field |
| 2026-10-24 | docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/machines/details/m | quoted: '| C4 | 2 | 4 | Linux |' and '| GPU+ (M4000) | 8 | 8 | 30 | Linux |' (GPU memory GB, vCPU, RAM GB) |
| 2026-10-24 | www.paperspace.com/pricing | quoted: 'FREE GPU ... $0 ... Public projects, Auto-shutdown (12 hour limit), 5GB storage, Basic instances'. Note the marketing card says 12 hours where the documentation says 6; the documentation is recorded and the disagreement is kept |
More fields 14
{
"shape": {
"vcpu": 8,
"ram_gib": 30,
"disk_gib": 5,
"gpu_class": "NVIDIA Quadro M4000",
"gpu_count": 1,
"note": "the M4000 row is 8 GB GPU memory, 8 vCPU, 30 GB RAM; the CPU-only alternative C4 is 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM; disk is the 5 GB persistent allocation, not an instance disk"
},
"billing_model": "free",
"term": "per session; persistent storage survives",
"m10h_usd": 0,
"m24h_usd": 0,
"price_arithmetic": "USD 0.00 for the free machine types; the published USD 0.45/hr for the M4000 is the paid Core rate and is not charged on the Free plan",
"free_tier_kind": "always-free",
"network_out": {
"allow_outbound": true,
"allow_inbound_listen": null,
"ports": "a public IP is assignable to Paperspace machines; whether a free machine gets one is not stated",
"static_ip": null,
"ipv6": null,
"per_session_bytes": null
},
"session_cap": {
"wall_clock_min": 360,
"idle_reap_s": 3600,
"restart_required": true,
"note": "6 h auto-shutdown and 1 h inactivity reap per the documentation; the marketing card says 12 h"
},
"signup_url": "https://console.paperspace.com/signup",
"credit_usd": null,
"credit_hours_at_shape": null,
"card_hold_usd": null,
"payment_methods": "none for the free machine types; a card is required only for paid instances"
}