Cerebras Inference free tier

What Cerebras Inference's free tier allows

Free Trial limits are 5 RPM and 30K TPM per model, capped at 1M tokens per hour and 1M tokens per day, for gpt-oss-120b, zai-glm-4.7 and gemma-4-31b. New accounts receive $5 in credits that expire 30 days after being granted. Cerebras states that if you skip adding a payment method at sign-up, Playground and API access remain inactive until you add one.

Published limits

5 requests per minute

Free access type

Free trial credit

Credit card

Required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://api.cerebras.ai/v1

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-07-25

This entry is marked as requiring a card because a verified payment method is a precondition for API access, even though the trial itself costs nothing.

Where Cerebras Inference sits in this catalog

Cerebras Inference is one of 3 free trial credit entries among the 25 providers detailed here. It asks for a credit card, as 2 of the 25 do. It publishes fixed numbers — 5 requests per minute — which only 9 of the 25 do.

Models Cerebras Inference lists as free

• gpt-oss-120b — gpt-oss, also free at 9 other providers here
• zai-glm-4.7 — GLM, also free at 3 other providers here
• gemma-4-31b — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers

9 other providers here also host the gpt-oss family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: GroqCloud, SambaNova Cloud, Cloudflare Workers AI, Hugging Face Inference Providers, Fireworks AI, Ollama Cloud, Vercel AI Gateway, Together AI, Scaleway Generative APIs. 3 other providers here also host the GLM family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: SiliconFlow, Z.AI Open Platform, Chutes.

Checking a Cerebras Inference key

The CORS preflight allows any origin to send an Authorization header, so a browser can call this endpoint directly. That was measured against https://api.cerebras.ai on 2026-07-25.

So a key can be checked in the browser checker without installing anything. If you would rather not paste a key into a web page, this does the same thing:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
set -eu

: "${CEREBRAS_API_KEY:?Set CEREBRAS_API_KEY to a key you created yourself at the provider console}"

# Prints the models this key can reach, then the HTTP status on its own line so
# 200, 401, and 429 stay distinguishable.
curl --silent --show-error \
  --write-out '\nHTTP %{http_code}\n' \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $CEREBRAS_API_KEY" \
  'https://api.cerebras.ai/v1/models'

Using a Cerebras Inference key

Cerebras Inference serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.cerebras.ai/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from CEREBRAS_API_KEY so the value never lands in a config file:

# Merge this snippet into ~/.codex/config.toml.
# Project-level config cannot select a custom model provider.
model = "gpt-oss-120b"
model_provider = "cerebras"

[model_providers.cerebras]
name = "Cerebras Inference OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://api.cerebras.ai/v1"
env_key = "CEREBRAS_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Cerebras Inference free tier

Does Cerebras Inference ask for a credit card?

Yes. Cerebras Inference requires a card on file before the free allowance is usable, which 2 of the 25 providers with a page here also do.

What are Cerebras Inference's free-tier rate limits?

Cerebras Inference publishes 5 requests per minute. Those are the numbers in its own documentation as reviewed on 2026-07-25.

What happens when a Cerebras Inference key hits the limit?

The endpoint answers 429. That is a statement about the request that was refused, not about how much quota is left; only a reset header from the provider tells you when it clears.

Is the Cerebras Inference free tier going away?

Nothing in Cerebras Inference's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. This entry is marked as requiring a card because a verified payment method is a precondition for API access, even though the trial itself costs nothing.

Can Cerebras Inference be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Cerebras Inference serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.cerebras.ai/v1, so any client that accepts a custom base URL can use it. Claude Code is the exception, because it speaks the Anthropic protocol instead.

Official sources

• Cerebras rate limitshttps://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/support/rate-limits
• Cerebras pricinghttps://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/support/pricing
• Cerebras OpenAI compatibilityhttps://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/resources/openai

Every figure above was read from those pages on 2026-07-25. Where a provider states a limit only inside a console, this catalog records that fact instead of a number. See the methodology for how an entry gets in and how it gets corrected.