Is Lightning AI Studios free?

Why the Studio walkthrough is on hold

The official notice says Lightning identified unauthorized access to credentials on October 15 at 11:00 PM UTC and revoked all user platform access on October 16 at 1:00 AM UTC. In Philippine time, those are October 16 at 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM. It says the platform will remain inaccessible during the active investigation; no restoration time was stated in the version we checked.

We could not inspect the Studio editor or test the current free route. Previous documentation about a free CPU Studio or introductory GPU credits is not proof of present availability. Our planned click-by-click walkthrough is therefore unfinished, and we are not presenting screenshots from another date as a completed test.

What we will verify when access returns

This is the remaining test plan, not a description of steps already completed. We will check the restored interface and account’s actual free allowance before running anything.

• Confirm the official recovery update and the account’s current Free access without adding a payment method.
• Create a separate Studio using a machine explicitly labelled Free; record the selected CPU and any displayed cost.
• Run a small original Python example and inspect the output and saved file.
• Check how to preserve or download the file and verify the actual result.
• Stop only the demo Studio and confirm that it is no longer running.
• Inspect GPU choices and credit costs separately; do not describe introductory credits as recurring free GPU access.

When to choose Google Colab instead

Our Colab guide includes a tested CPU exercise and a separate tiny PyTorch training run on a Tesla T4. It is a practical notebook workflow to inspect while Lightning’s platform is inaccessible.

Colab’s free hardware and usage limits vary. Our successful test does not guarantee another GPU allocation, a fixed quota or enough memory for your own model. Save required files before ending a runtime.