Get access

Creating an account and an organization is free. Save and verify your first eligible card to receive $15 in credit without a payment, then try a Micro instance from $9 a month (see Pricing). If someone at Hamster invited you, claim the invitation and use its credit without a card.

Your agent can also set you up. Connect it to https://tryhamster.dev/mcp and ask it to create a Hamster OSS instance. You sign up or sign in and approve the agent in your browser. When funds are needed, the agent gives you a link to a Stripe page where you save and verify your card without a payment, or add funds when you need them; afterwards, the dashboard tells you to return to your agent. ChatGPT instead gives you links to your organization's overview page in the dashboard, to Pricing and to this page. See Hamster OSS MCP server. If you started that way, the steps below show where you are.

1. Create your account

Open tryhamster.dev/signup and enter your name, email and a password of at least 12 characters, including a symbol. Hamster emails you a verification code; enter it when asked, then sign in.

With an invitation, open the link in your invitation email instead, or go to tryhamster.dev/claim and enter your Design Partner Code. Choose Create account and claim. Your invited email is filled in, and the invitation verifies it, so no second email arrives. Opening the claim page doesn't use the code; the code works once, only for the invited email, and expires after 30 days.

2. Create your organization

Choose New organization and give it a name. A claimed invitation's credit goes on this organization.

If your agent already started creating an instance, skip this step. It created an organization named "your name's organization" for you, and that is where funds and instances go. With more than one organization, your agent has to ask which one to use.

3. Activate your credit

Open Payment Methods and save and verify a card to receive $15 in starter credit. No payment is taken and automatic top-up remains off. The credit is available once per verified person, email, card and organization. If your agent gave you a Stripe setup link, complete it there instead; it is for the same organization.

A Design Partner Code gives $150 by default and needs no card. If you also save an eligible first card, the credits add up to $165.

Instance time, inference and storage draw from your balance. To continue when it runs low, use Top Up to add from $10 to $10,000, or explicitly enable Automatic top-up. At exhaustion, compute pauses and your data is preserved. Prices are on Pricing.

4. Create an instance

On Instances, choose New instance and fill in:

• Name — 4 to 30 characters.
• Address — the first part of <address>.tryhamster.dev, in lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens. A few platform names, such as auth, api and www, are reserved.
• Size — Micro (the default), Small, Medium or Large.

Your email needs to be verified first. The dashboard shows each setup step while the instance starts, which can take a few minutes. Charges begin once the instance is provisioned. When setup completes, open Studio at https://<address>.tryhamster.dev.

5. Connect your agent

In Studio, choose Connect your agent, or Agents in your settings. It shows your MCP server address, https://<address>.tryhamster.dev/mcp.

• Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other clients with sign-in — add the address in the agent, sign in to your instance when it opens, and approve a project.
• Clients that need a header — create a token there and send it as Authorization: Bearer <token>. Studio shows the token once.

Your agent's first call is the read tool with path /, which returns every path the tools accept. Hamster OSS MCP server covers client setup, and Hamster OSS API has example requests.

Run it yourself

Install the system CLI to run Hamster OSS locally or deploy it on your own cloud VM without a Hamster fee. You pay your cloud provider for any resources you use.