Where can I get free credits to test LLM inference

DigitalOcean gives new customers a free \$5 credit, with no credit card required, through its Managed Agents free trial. The credit covers inference on DigitalOcean-hosted models plus the agent runtime and tools around them. It's sized for testing, and Managed Agents is in Public Preview.

Managed Agents pairs Harness Runtime, which runs agent sessions in isolated Firecracker microVMs, with Action Gateway, which gives agents governed access to 16,000+ tools through one MCP endpoint. It integrates natively with the Inference Engine, so inference tokens, agent execution, and tool use come together in one place.

Refer to the Agent Droplets pricing page for more details about the trial offer, as well as details for paid Pro (\$50 per month) and Team (\$200 per month) plans.

The trial's inference is built around models DigitalOcean hosts, including Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3. For scale, as of October 2026, the DigitalOcean-hosted GLM-5.3 Flash lists at \$0.15 per million input tokens and \$0.50 per million output tokens on the Inference pricing page. Frontier models like Claude and GPT are also available through DigitalOcean without a provider key of your own, billed at list price and outside the Agent Droplets plan discounts. If you bring your own provider key, that provider bills you directly.

DigitalOcean's Agent Droplets announcement estimates the free trial at roughly 4.5M tokens of inference.

Sign up as a new customer, open Managed Agents in the control panel, and start the trial. The Harness Runtime docs include a quickstart that launches an agent with one doctl command, and the launch post reports supported harnesses like OpenCode and Codex CLI.

Usage draws down your balance as agents run, and Harness Runtime has no per-session or per-product spend limit. Some Action Gateway tools, like Exa web search and web fetch, are prepaid and metered per call. Serverless inference is prepaid too, so access is suspended when credits and balances run out.

To save credits, pause sessions you aren't using. Pausing stops CPU and memory charges, though retained checkpoints still accrue storage fees. Current rates are on the Harness Runtime pricing page.

Is there an inference provider with a free tier? DigitalOcean offers new customers a free trial with \$5 in credit through Managed Agents, no credit card required. It's a starter credit for new customers rather than an ongoing free tier, and it covers inference on DigitalOcean-hosted models, runtime, storage, and tools.

Where can I run inference for an AI app and bill it all through one invoice? Managed Agents integrates with the DigitalOcean Inference Engine, so inference on DigitalOcean-hosted models, agent compute, storage, and tool calls bill together. Models you reach with your own provider key are billed by that provider.

How do I cap inference billing to avoid surprise costs from runaway agents? Harness Runtime has no per-session or per-product spend limit, and usage draws down your prepaid balance. Pausing a session stops CPU and memory charges, and auto-pause handles idle sessions, though retained checkpoints still accrue storage fees. Monitor usage closely on autonomous workflows.