Resources // LLM Tokens
Cerebras Cloud Free Tier
Offer 1M tokens/day
Suits for Non-VC-backedVC-backed
Updated Jun 2026
The offer
- Free Cerebras Inference: sign up, get an API key (no credit card), run open models free at very high speed
- Generous daily allowance: ~1,000,000 tokens/day (expanded in 2026), the headline benefit
- Open models (Llama 3.x, Qwen3, gpt-oss-120b); context defaults to 8,192 tokens/request on the free tier (described as temporary; some paths run higher)
Who qualifies
- Free for everyone to sign up; for evaluation/experimentation, not high-volume commercial production (paid tiers required to scale)
- Limits: ~30 req/min and ~60,000-150,000 tokens/min depending on model, plus the ~1M tokens/day cap
- Higher context (64K-131K+) and ~10x rate limits are reserved for the paid Developer tier
Community Insights
Cerebras’ free tier is loved for one thing above all: speed. Wafer-scale inference returns 1,000+ tokens/sec, so replies feel near-instant, and the ~1M tokens/day free allowance is among the most generous around. The recurring frustration is the caps: the daily token limit and the 8K free-tier context (described as temporary) get hit fast under real coding, and even the $200 Pro plan is capped (~40M tokens/day) which heavy users find restrictive. Treat it as a fast, free sandbox, good for demos and latency-critical tasks, less so for sustained agentic coding.
Best Practices (from community tips)
- Use it for latency-critical, throughput-heavy tasks (chat, summarization, real-time). Speed is the differentiator, not deep reasoning.
- Plan around the ~1M tokens/day cap and per-minute limits: batch jobs, cache results, use smaller models for continuous tasks.
- Don’t assume 8K context across the board. It’s the temporary free default; some model paths run higher, and paid unlocks 64K-131K+.
- Benchmark vs Groq / NIM for your workload before committing; expect model lineup and limits to evolve.
Free tier model limits
| Model | Free-tier limits |
|---|---|
| gpt-oss-120b | 30 req/min · 60k tok/min · 14,400 req/day · 1M tok/day |
| Qwen 3 235B (Instruct/Thinking) | 30 req/min · 60k tok/min · 14,400 req/day · 1M tok/day |
| Qwen 3 Coder 480B | 10 req/min · 150k tok/min · 100 req/day · 1M tok/day |
| Llama 3.3 70B / Qwen 3 32B | 30 req/min · 64k tok/min · 14,400 req/day · 1M tok/day |
| Llama 3.1 8B / Llama 4 Scout / Maverick | 30 req/min · 60k tok/min · 14,400 req/day · 1M tok/day |
(Also available via gateways: OpenRouter, Hugging Face, Vercel AI Gateway.)