Quick Answer
Last verified:
High confidence

Cerebrium costs Free to $100 per month as of May 2026, with 3 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Hobby (free), and Standard at $100/month. Enterprise pricing is available on request. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: Yes

Cerebrium offers 3 pricing tiers: Hobby, Standard, Enterprise. A free plan is available. Paid plans include Standard at $100/month. The Standard plan is production teams running continuous inference workloads needing higher concurrency and compliance.

Compared to other ai model hosting & inference software, Cerebrium is positioned at the mid-market price point.

  • 2 documented hidden costs beyond list price

How much does Cerebrium cost?

Cerebrium offers 3 pricing plans, starting with a free tier and scaling to custom enterprise pricing. Plans include Hobby (free), Standard at $100/month, Enterprise (custom pricing).

Cerebrium Pricing Overview

Cerebrium has 3 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $100/month. The Hobby plan is free and is best for individual developers and hobbyists experimenting with serverless ml inference. The Standard plan costs $100/month, best for production teams running continuous inference workloads needing higher concurrency and compliance. The Enterprise plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote and is designed for large-scale inference workloads requiring enterprise compliance, dedicated support, and unlimited capacity.

There are at least 2 documented hidden costs beyond Cerebrium's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in May 5, 2026 from 2 independent sources.

Cerebrium is a serverless GPU inference platform for deploying ML models without managing infrastructure. It bills per second for GPU, CPU, and memory usage, so teams only pay for active inference time. The Hobby plan has no monthly fee; the Standard plan costs $100/month and unlocks unlimited apps and 30 concurrent GPUs. Enterprise is required for H100 and A100 access. Cerebrium is a Y Combinator company.

How Cerebrium Pricing Compares

Compare Cerebrium pricing against top alternatives in AI Model Hosting & Inference.

All Cerebrium Plans & Pricing

Plan Monthly Annual Best For
Hobby deployedApps: 3 appsuserSeats: 3 Free Custom Individual developers and hobbyists experimenting with serverless ML inference
Standard containerConcurrency: 1000gpuConcurrency: 30 $100 /month Custom Production teams running continuous inference workloads needing higher concurrency and compliance
Enterprise gpuConcurrency: UnlimitedcontainerConcurrency: Unlimited Contact Sales Contact Sales Large-scale inference workloads requiring enterprise compliance, dedicated support, and unlimited capacity
View all features by plan

Hobby

  • No monthly platform fee
  • Pay-as-you-go GPU compute (per second billing)
  • All GPU types available (T4, L4, A10, L40s, A100, H100, H200, B200)
  • T4 GPU: $0.000164/s (~$0.59/hr)
  • L4 GPU: $0.000222/s (~$0.80/hr)
  • A10 GPU: $0.000306/s (~$1.10/hr)
  • L40s GPU: $0.000542/s (~$1.95/hr)
  • A100 (40GB): $0.000555/s (~$2.00/hr)
  • A100 (80GB): $0.000583/s (~$2.10/hr)
  • H100 GPU: $0.000944/s (~$3.40/hr)
  • H200 GPU: $0.001166/s (~$4.20/hr)
  • B200 GPU: $0.00167/s (~$6.01/hr)
  • Up to 3 deployed apps
  • 3 user seats
  • 500 container concurrency
  • 5 concurrent GPUs
  • 7-day log retention
  • Real-time observability
  • Community support

Standard

  • $100/month platform fee
  • Everything in Hobby
  • Unlimited deployed apps
  • 10 user seats
  • 1000 container concurrency
  • 30 concurrent GPUs
  • Custom domains
  • 30-day log retention
  • SOC2 compliance
  • Private Slack support

Enterprise

  • Everything in Standard
  • Unlimited concurrent GPUs
  • Unlimited container concurrency
  • Volume compute discounts
  • Dedicated Slack support
  • White glove onboarding
  • ML engineering services
  • Unlimited log retention
  • HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 compliance
  • Custom seat allocation

Compare Cerebrium vs Alternatives

Before committing to Cerebrium, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.

All Cerebrium alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Cerebrium

Review scores

Cerebrium Year 1 Total Cost by Company Size

Real deployment costs including licenses, implementation, training, and admin — not just the sticker price.

Solo Developer / Hobbyist $0 Year 1 total
in onboarding credits $1,000
Total $0

Individual developer experimenting with GPU inference on the Hobby plan. No monthly platform fee — pay only for compute consumed. Up to $1,000 in free onboarding credits available to offset early usage costs.

Small Production Team (Standard Plan) $100 Year 1 total

Engineering team deploying AI applications to production. $100/month covers the platform subscription; actual GPU compute (A100, H100, or standard GPUs) is billed on top at per-resource, per-second rates.

Llama 3 Inference at Scale (On-Demand) ~$12.5 per million tokens on-demand Year 1 total

Running Llama 3 inference on-demand without reserved capacity. Founder-cited on-demand rate is approximately $12.5 per million tokens, which can be reduced with model quantization or a reserved capacity agreement.

Cerebrium current tier data (Hobby plan)

How Cerebrium Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Cerebrium Free $100/month
Banana.dev Custom Custom
Baseten Custom Custom
BentoML Free $5000/month

2 Cerebrium Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Cerebrium has at least 2 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 2 hidden costs
  • GPU Compute Costs on Top of Platform Fee 50-500% of license costs
    high 1 source
    Hacker News "We charge you exactly for the resources you need and only charge you when your code is running ie: usage-based."
  • On-Demand vs Reserved Pricing Gap 15-40% of license costs
    medium 2 sources
    Reddit "we do have lower pricing for companies/use cases that have consistent load or long running use cases with the ability to handle spikes"
    Reddit "this is the on-demand price, if you reserver you can get it lower. This is what providers do to offer lower pricing."
Tip

Ask your Cerebrium sales rep about these costs upfront. Getting them in writing before signing can save you from surprise charges later.

Full hidden costs breakdown →

Intelligence sourced from 2 independent sources
Hacker News Tech community Reddit User discussions
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 8 source citations total.

Cerebrium Contract Terms

Cerebrium contracts do not auto-renew. Changes require advance notice. These terms are sourced from verified buyer experiences.

Contract Terms
Auto-Renewal No
Mid-Term Downgrade Not allowed
Payment Terms Usage-based billing — pay only for exact compute resources consumed while code is running
Based on 1 verified source

How to Negotiate Cerebrium Pricing

Cerebrium contracts are negotiable. These 4 tactics are sourced from real buyer experiences and procurement specialists.

Negotiation Playbook 4 tactics
Negotiate Reserved Capacity Pricing high success

Cerebrium offers reserved capacity pricing for teams with consistent or predictable GPU workloads, similar to rates available from dedicated GPU providers like RunPod and CoreWeave. This is not listed on the public pricing page — you must contact the team directly. The founders have confirmed this option exists publicly on Reddit.

Reddit (cerebriumBoss founder, r/StableDiffusion, 2024-06-18)
Reduce Per-Token Costs via Model Quantization high success

Quantizing model weights lowers VRAM requirements, allowing use of a less expensive GPU tier and reducing cost per inference call. The founders specifically cited quantization as the primary lever used by major OpenRouter providers to achieve competitive per-million-token pricing. This is a technical cost reduction rather than a pricing negotiation.

Reddit (cerebriumBoss, r/googlecloud, 2024-06-13)
Request Extended Onboarding Credits medium success

The Cerebrium founding team has publicly stated they are willing to extend free credits beyond the standard onboarding offer for compelling use cases. If your project has interesting technical or commercial potential, reaching out directly via Slack, Discord, or email may yield additional runway.

Hacker News (Launch HN post, 2024-09-18)
Contact Founders Directly for Enterprise Pricing medium success

Cerebrium is a YC-backed startup (W22) with a small founding team that is directly reachable via Slack and Discord communities. For Enterprise plan discussions, direct founder engagement is likely more effective than a formal sales process, particularly for teams with well-defined workloads.

Hacker News (Launch HN post, 2024-09-18)

Full negotiation guide →

Cerebrium Pricing FAQ

01 How much does Cerebrium cost?

Cerebrium has two paid tiers: Hobby (free monthly fee, pay-as-you-go compute) and Standard ($100/month plus compute). GPU compute is billed per second — a T4 GPU costs approximately $0.000164/second (~$0.59/hour), an L4 costs ~$0.000222/second (~$0.80/hour), and an A10 costs ~$0.000306/second (~$1.10/hour). Enterprise pricing is custom for H100+ access.

02 Does Cerebrium have a free plan?

Yes. The Hobby plan has no monthly platform fee — you only pay for the GPU, CPU, and memory you consume, billed per second. New accounts also receive up to $1,000 in free onboarding credits. The Hobby plan is limited to 3 deployed apps, 3 user seats, and standard GPU types (T4, L4, A10, L40s).

03 What GPUs does Cerebrium support?

Cerebrium supports T4, L4, A10, L40s, and AWS Trainium on the Hobby plan. The Standard plan ($100/month) adds A100 40GB and 80GB. The Enterprise plan unlocks H100, H200, B200, and B300 GPUs with up to 8-GPU configurations.

04 How does Cerebrium serverless billing work?

Cerebrium charges separately for GPU time, CPU vCPU-seconds, memory GB-seconds, and persistent storage. You only pay while your app is actively processing requests — idle time between requests is not billed. This makes it cost-effective for bursty workloads compared to dedicated GPU instances.

05 Is the $100/month Standard plan all-inclusive, or do I pay extra for GPU usage?

The $100/month Standard plan is a platform subscription fee only — it does not include compute costs. GPU, CPU, and RAM usage is billed separately on a usage-based model: you pay only for exact resources consumed while your code is running. Your actual monthly bill will be $100 plus your compute usage.

06 Can I get lower pricing for consistent or high-volume GPU workloads?

Yes. Cerebrium offers reserved capacity pricing for teams with consistent or long-running workloads. This is not advertised publicly — contact the team directly via Slack or Discord. Reserved rates are comparable to dedicated GPU providers like RunPod and CoreWeave.

07 What GPU types are available, and does the plan affect GPU access?

Cerebrium offers over 8 GPU types. However, the Hobby plan restricts users to standard GPU types — A100 and H100 access requires the Standard or Enterprise plan. Higher-end GPUs cost more per second. H100 capacity can also be constrained for enterprise-scale workloads due to availability pressures.

08 How fast are cold starts on Cerebrium?

Cold starts for average workloads are 2–4 seconds. Subsequent starts on the same machine are faster due to image caching. Cerebrium achieves this through a custom container runtime that splits images into metadata and data blobs and prefetches remaining blobs in the background after initial startup.

Is this pricing incorrect? — we'll verify and update it.