- Free allowance
- 'New workspaces get $30 of free credit, once per person ... and the tour starts a box on it with no card.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tierpaid plans from USD 10.22/month
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quotaUSD 30 one-time free credit, once per person; one box at a time on the credit; no process at full CPU for more than 30 minutes on the credit
- Evidence
- documented7 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | 'New workspaces get $30 of free credit, once per person ... and the tour starts a box on it with no card. It does not refill.' While on the credit alone: sizes Nano to Small only, one box at a time, no process at full CPU for more than 30 minutes. unit mixed; metered on wall-clock; Smallest grant, but the only one whose meters let a single credit run a box for multiple months. |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - volume-quota (binding) USD 30 one-time free credit, once per person source
- volume-quota (binding) one box at a time on the credit source
- volume-quota (binding) no process at full CPU for more than 30 minutes on the credit source
The 30-minute full-CPU rule can pause the workspace and answer 409 workspace_held on the next create or wake; it is a use cap that no other provider here imposes. |
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| Binding | volume-quota The 30-minute full-CPU rule is what fails first for any real build; the credit itself is generous at the Nano size. |
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| Identity | email 'the tour starts a box on it with no card' and the credit is once per person by email or by Google or GitHub account. No card, no phone, no ID at signup; paid plans use Stripe Checkout, cards only. |
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| Egress | not published: the billing, machines, sandboxes and pricing pages state no egress allowance and no overage price; outbound traffic from a box is not filtered |
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| Per-object cap | On the free credit 'Nano, Micro, Extra Small, or Small only'; Medium and larger answer 409 tier_unavailable. A Nano is 2 vCPU / 2 GB / 40 GB at USD 0.014 an hour awake. |
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| Retention | Asleep, a box costs only its disk at USD 0.0001 per GB-hour; a Small asleep for a month is about USD 22. Credit rolls over up to two months of the plan. |
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| Interface | ssh, cli, rest SSH to the box (plain ssh or prized ssh); the prized CLI (macOS, Linux, Windows); an HTTP API for boxes and sandboxes; a browser dashboard |
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| Tooling | not stated |
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| Reliability | On the credit a box auto-pauses itself after 2 hours idle unless the window is changed or switched off per box; it never pauses in its first 24 hours. |
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| Notes | USD 30 / USD 0.014 = 2,143 hours, which is 89 days of a 2 vCPU / 2 GB box with no card. The page's own claim of 'about three months on a Nano' matches. This is the longest no-card calendar coverage and it is a real VM, not a sandbox, but a 2 vCPU / 2 GB box is also the smallest shape any row here offers for a full month. |
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| Evidence note | documented Every number is from the billing page read. Not observed: whether the 30-minute CPU rule is enforced by cgroup throttling or by pausing, which decides whether a long build is slowed or killed. |
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| Parsed numbers | - price USD 4.2 10 hours a day / month
- price USD 10.22 / month
- has-free-tier 1
- volume-quota 30 minutes
|
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