Up to $100,000 in compute credits spread across 12 months, issued as a fixed monthly allocation that doesn’t roll over. In practice, they can cover most of your DigitalOcean bill for CPU infrastructure (Droplets, DOKS, managed databases, Spaces, networking, and more) as long as you stay under your monthly cap. If you’re expecting to “save them for later,” don’t. Unused monthly credits are forfeited.

Yes, a valid credit card is required during signup.

The Hatch compute credits last 12 months and are issued monthly as use-it-or-lose-it allocations.

Yes. If you have DigitalOcean credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted DigitalOcean credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Unused monthly Hatch credits are forfeited, and once you exceed your monthly credit amount, overages are charged to the credit card on file.

No. Hatch compute credits do not cover GPU Droplets. Qualified startups can get up to 3 months of free GPU usage, then GPU costs are billed separately at a discounted rate (listed around $1.90 per GPU hour for 12 months, versus $2.99 on-demand standard pricing). This is the part to plan for. If your roadmap involves fine-tuning or training, estimate GPU spend early and set billing alerts so you don’t accidentally turn “free credits” into a surprise invoice.

Partner affiliation. Startups referred by recognized accelerators, incubators, or VCs typically receive the highest tiers, while direct applicants can still be accepted but often get lower allocations.

They’re not a fixed dollar balance; the value is free access to shared notebook machines, most reliably the Free-GPU M4000 (8GB VRAM), plus 5GB persistent storage. In practice, you can run unlimited 6-hour notebook sessions with restarts, which is plenty for coursework, quick model experiments, and iterative prototyping. The “worth” depends on what you would otherwise pay for GPU time, but the big win is no weekly GPU hour cap. Treat any free Ampere GPU access as a bonus, not the baseline.

Yes. A valid credit card is required for account verification, even on the free tier.

For this program, the key limit is the 6-hour auto-shutdown per notebook session, and you can restart sessions without a weekly GPU-hour cap.

Yes. If you have DigitalOcean credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted DigitalOcean credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Gradient’s free tier isn’t a spendable credit balance, so there’s nothing to “expire” like a coupon. What you will hit are usage limits: your notebook shuts down after 6 hours, and you may be unable to start a free GPU when capacity is tight. If you move to paid on-demand GPUs, that usage is billed hourly (for example, A100 instances are priced around $3/hour). So the practical outcome is: free access can be unavailable or time-limited, and paid usage is billed normally.

Some Ampere free instances exist but are frequently unavailable, and the A100 is not free (it requires a paid plan plus hourly charges).

Not really. Free tier notebooks are public, so you should not put API keys, credentials, or proprietary code in them.