Update, September 2026: this no longer holds. The free plan no longer includes a cloud machine — free is hub access from your own tools, and a machine needs a subscription (The free plan becomes the hub).

Good news that's also a small confession: cloud invites are gone. As of today, every Octomind account — free tier included — can create a machine and have it running in under a minute. No codes to redeem, no earning your way in, no subscribing just to skip a queue. Sign up, click, it's yours.

What we shipped at launch, and why we're deleting it

When we launched on Wednesday, machines were invite-only. The reasoning was honest: we're bootstrapped, hardware is bought with revenue, and a gate that scales access with capacity felt responsible. We built the whole apparatus — codes, redemption, invites you could earn with real weekly usage, automatic grants for subscribers.

Three days of watching it in production taught us the lesson faster than we expected: the gate was solving a problem we don't have yet, and creating one we definitely do. Our fleet has headroom. The bottleneck wasn't capacity — it was a new user hitting a locked door on their first visit and leaving before ever seeing what a machine is. An invite system is real complexity too: three ways in, expiry rules, earn tiers, emails explaining all of it. All of that, to meter access nobody was actually competing for.

So we did the thing we'd want any tool we use to do: deleted it. Not paused, not "temporarily opened" — the invite system is removed from the product. Fewer moving parts, one honest answer to "can I try it?": yes.

What this means for you

  • New here? Sign up, create a machine, and you're in a real Linux box — the whole agent toolchain, a web terminal, Docker inside — in under a minute. Free tier, no card.
  • Had unredeemed codes? They're moot now — anyone you would have invited can just walk in. If you liked handing Octomind to friends, the referral program is still very much alive: you both earn storage and credit bonuses, and that one isn't going anywhere.
  • Subscribed partly for instant access? Access was never the real product — caps, sizes, and slots are. Paid plans keep buying you bigger everything; they just no longer buy a key to a door that's now open.
  • Earned invites through usage? Thank you — genuinely. You were the exact user the earn program was designed to find, and it found you. Now bring anyone you like, no ceremony required.

The honest fine print

We're still bootstrapped, and the fleet still grows as subscriptions fund hardware. Removing the gate doesn't repeal physics: if demand ever outruns capacity, machine creation says so plainly and briefly rather than silently degrading — and that signal is our purchase order for the next host. We'd rather scale by buying servers than by rationing you.

One boring lever survives, because it must: accounts that abuse the platform can be blocked from cloud machines. That's a rare, manual, last-resort thing — not a gate, not a queue, and if it's ever wrong, a human undoes it.

Try it right now

The five-minute quickstart from earlier this week walks the local CLI path — install, octomind login, first fixed bug, all for under two cents. Today the hosted path is just as short:

  1. Open the panel and sign up — free, no card.
  2. Create a machine: pick a name, a size, done. It boots in seconds.
  3. Open a session and put the agent to work — or open the terminal and poke around the box yourself.

Same account, same hub, same models on both paths. The lock is gone; the machines are waiting. Tell us what you build — we read everything.