AI Agent Automation Platforms
How do I sign up for TinyFish and get the 500 free steps without a credit card?
6 min read
Most teams hit the same wall on day one: you want to see TinyFish run your real workflow, but you don’t want to hand over a credit card just to kick the tires. That’s exactly why the platform starts you with 500 free steps on the pay-as-you-go plan, no commitment, no card on file.
Quick Answer: You sign up for a TinyFish account on the dashboard, verify your email, and you’re automatically provisioned with 500 free steps on the pay‑as‑you‑go plan—no credit card required to activate or use those steps.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I sign up and unlock the 500 free TinyFish steps without a credit card?
Short Answer: Create a TinyFish account on the dashboard, confirm your email, and you’ll see 500 free steps available immediately on the pay‑as‑you‑go plan—no credit card entry required.
Expanded Explanation:
TinyFish’s default onboarding is designed for fast evaluation, not billing friction. When you register with your work email and sign in to the dashboard, you’re placed on the pay‑as‑you‑go tier at $0.015/step—but your first 500 steps are free. Those free steps sit in your account as a usage allowance you can burn through while you experiment with agents, run test workflows, and validate fit for your stack.
You only need to add a credit card if you want to keep running once the 500 free steps are consumed or if your team wants to move into higher-volume plans like Starter, Pro, or Enterprise. Until then, you can build, deploy, and observe agents in production-style conditions without any payment method attached.
Key Takeaways:
- Sign up and verify your account to automatically get 500 free steps on pay‑as‑you‑go.
- No credit card is required until you exceed the free 500‑step allowance or opt into a paid plan.
What’s the step‑by‑step process to get started with TinyFish and use my free steps?
Short Answer: Sign up, verify, generate an API key, and run your first agent—your free 500 steps are consumed automatically as you execute workflows.
Expanded Explanation:
The goal is to get you from “curious” to “live agent run” in minutes. You don’t need to set up browsers, proxies, or LLM accounts; those are bundled into the step price and included even while you’re in the free tier. The process looks like any serious infrastructure onboarding: account, environment, key, first run, observability.
As you run agents—whether from the dashboard Workbench or via the API—TinyFish automatically deducts from your free 500‑step balance. You can watch step consumption in the dashboard while you test how many steps your typical workflow takes (e.g., a 30‑step multi‑page quote flow vs. a 5‑step authenticated price check).
Steps:
- Sign up on the TinyFish dashboard
- Go to
tinyfish.aiand click Sign In or Playground, then create a new account with your email.
- Go to
- Verify your email and log in
- Confirm your email address, then sign back in. Your account will be on pay‑as‑you‑go with 500 free steps available.
- Generate an API key and run your first agent
- In the dashboard, create an API key, configure a simple agent (e.g., navigate → authenticate → extract), and execute it. Each action the agent takes will consume steps from your free balance automatically.
Is there any difference between the free 500 steps and paid TinyFish usage?
Short Answer: No—the free 500 steps run on the same infrastructure, pricing model, and success guarantees as paid usage.
Expanded Explanation:
Those first 500 steps are not “sandbox-only” or throttled. They’re standard pay‑as‑you‑go steps at $0.015/step; you’re just not billed for the first 500. That means you’re testing the real thing: the same remote browsers, anti‑bot handling, authentication support, and LLM inference pipeline used by production customers.
You can deploy agents in parallel, hit authenticated workflows, and access agent observability (screenshots, logs, run history) during your free usage. When your free steps run out, the only change is billing—execution characteristics stay the same.
Comparison Snapshot:
- Free 500 Steps: Full pay‑as‑you‑go capabilities, no card, no throttling on features.
- Paid Steps (after 500): Same infrastructure and behavior, now billed at $0.015/step or under your chosen plan.
- Best for: Teams who want to validate TinyFish on real workflows before committing budget or integrating into production pipelines.
What do I need in place to actually use my 500 free steps effectively?
Short Answer: You need a clear web workflow to test, basic familiarity with APIs or the dashboard Workbench, and any credentials for the sites you want agents to access.
Expanded Explanation:
TinyFish removes the overhead of browser farms, proxies, and LLM accounts, but you still need a concrete job for the agents to do. The best use of your 500 free steps is to replicate an annoying real-world problem: an insurance quote flow, an authenticated competitor checkout, or portal-based pricing/eligibility checks that your team currently runs manually.
You can start entirely from the dashboard’s visual builder or call the API from your own environment. Either way, you define what an agent should do—navigate, authenticate, fill forms, handle CAPTCHAs, extract structured outputs—and TinyFish handles live execution at production speed.
What You Need:
- A target workflow: e.g., “Fetch live checkout totals across 5 sites” or “Run a 20‑step quote journey on a carrier portal.”
- Access details/credentials: Any logins, keys, or parameters required for the websites you want to hit, managed according to your org’s security policies.
How should I use the free 500 steps strategically before adding a credit card?
Short Answer: Treat the 500 free steps as a small but powerful baseline load test—measure step counts, success rates, and observability on your real workflows before you scale.
Expanded Explanation:
The free tier isn’t about toy demos; it’s about proving whether TinyFish can replace your brittle Playwright/Selenium stack, manual ops, or stale indexed data. You want to know: How many steps does my workflow actually take? What’s the success rate? How does the platform handle logins, bot detection, and multi-step forms? Can I run multiple sites or carriers in parallel?
By running a representative sample of your production workflows—say, 10–20 full journeys across 2–3 sites—you’ll learn whether TinyFish gives you reliable, structured outputs from live execution and what your monthly step volume will look like. That data lets you choose between staying pay‑as‑you‑go or moving to a committed plan when you do add a card.
Why It Matters:
- Accurate sizing and budgeting: You use real step counts (not guesses) to forecast cost at $0.015/step or under a higher plan.
- Risk-free validation: You confirm concurrency, success rate, and observability fit your requirements before putting payment details on file.
Quick Recap
You can sign up for TinyFish, verify your email, and immediately get 500 free steps on the pay‑as‑you‑go plan—no credit card required. Those steps give you full access to the same enterprise Web Agent infrastructure used in production: remote browsers, proxies, LLM inference, anti‑bot handling, and observability. Use them to run real workflows, measure step usage and reliability, and decide how (or if) TinyFish slots into your web data operations stack before you commit billing details.