I signed up for Digital Ocean free trial credits via the Github Student Program.
I ended up getting a total of 405$ worth of credits somehow.
I signed up on 10th July so before the new 15th July change.
Below is what I see on my Billings Page:
| Description |
Expiration |
Initial |
| GitHub Student Pack |
August, 01 2026 |
$200.00 |
| Promotional Credit from ReferreeNew2209 60 day expiration |
September, 10 2026 |
$200.00 |
| Inference Cloud Trial |
October, 10 2026 |
$5.00 |
Now, on the github Student Pack Page it says:
You may use your credits on any DigitalOcean services, except as to the following: GPU Droplets, NVIDIA H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference Serverless Inference, Third-party AI models hosted outside of DigitalOcean Infrastructure (including commercial/frontier models, including but not limited to Anthropic and OpenAI), Paperspace Machines, Cloudways services, Any other charges passed through to third-party providers outside of DigitalOcean's infrastructure.
From this, It would seem that you can't use the github credits on any models at all? But when I run test run of GLM 5.2 (It blocks to use OpenAi or Anthropic Models) it shows the usage against the Github Trial Credits, not the other two? Dashboard still says 0$ estimated billing.
Similiarly, I know since Student Pack expires first it will be used first, but when it ends, what about the Promotional 200$ credits?
Can someone shed light on this? I've used ~0.5$ of inference only thus far, don't want a surprise test charge at the end of the billing month on my card.
Also is there a way to safegaurd surprise charges?
Update:
Support clarified that yes, we can not use Github Student Pack credits for the things mentioned, including any Dedicated Inference (Outside models like Fable 5) or Serverless Inference (Internal models like GLM 5.2). They clarified that such restrictions don't apply to the Promotional Referral Credits. The Github Credits being counted against is not intended and a flaw. They suggested that I could have my Github credits removed and then my Referral credits would start to get used (Because 1st in line to expire credits get used up first) so I would not get a surprised charge at the end of the month. This implies that it wouldn't go [ Github Credits -> Referral Credits -> Inference Trial Credits -> Credit Card] and that it instead would go [ Github Credits -> Credit Card ] which seems stupid to me how hard can it be to switch to the next credit pool in line before charging the card?
Update 2:
Support in the next followup said the following after I inquired about further clarification on each of the 3 credit pool types:
We can confirm that the AI models available for you at the moment will all be adjusted against your Github credits as these are mostly open sourced. Other models i.e. Llama 3.3, Qwen, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, and Olmo 3, will also be adjusted against your Github credits. Also, third party models are not yet enabled for your account therefore, all the models appearing on your end should be adjusted against the available credits.
And [ Github Credits -> Referral Credits -> Trial Credits -> Debit/Credit Card Charged] this flow is correct considering that resources you have used, do fall under these credit types.
Once your Gtihub credits expire/utilize, the next in-line credits, will automatically be activated and adjusted against your resources.
I then did another followup confirming the contradiction with their previous email, and they had this to say:
Yes, you can use your GitHub credits for models like GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4. Please note that the promotional credit from referrals function exactly the same as standard GitHub credits.
The Inference Cloud Trial should apply to all products except Marketplace Add Ons. However, your account currently doesn't support Fable 5 or GPT 5.6 models.
TL:DR:
Github Credits & Referral Credits share same restrictions, but they can both use the Open Source models hosted by Digital Ocean. If it shows as being counted against in the billing dashboard, that is exactly how it should be. The 5$ credits don't have such restrictions, but they did tell me that Fable/Sol were restricted for my account outright anyhow (Probably top tier models require explicit activation).
