All free AI credits & deals

The Google for Startups Cloud Program has a Start tier (up to $2,000 in Google Cloud credits valid for one year) for startups planning to raise, and a Scale tier for VC-funded startups (up to $200,000 over two years: 100% of usage up to $100,000 in Year 1 and 20% of usage up to another $100,000 in Year 2). AI-first startups in the Scale tier can receive up to $350,000, with Year 1 covering 100% of usage up to $250,000. Members also get Google Skills training credits and Google Workspace Business Plus free for 12 months for new signups, and Scale members get support credits, Google Maps Platform credits and a Startup Success Manager. Credits cover Google models such as Gemini and Gemma; third-party models in Model Garden are billed directly.

Cloudflare for Startups offers three credit tiers: $10k for bootstrapped or self-funded startups that raised under $1M, $100k for startups that raised under $5M from an affiliated partner, and $350k for startups that raised $5M or more from an affiliated partner. Credits cover usage-based developer products such as Workers, Workers AI, R2 and D1, with product caps for R2 and Workers AI. Core security and network features (three Enterprise domains, DDoS, WAF, CDN and DNS) are free at every tier. Credits last one year or until used, with no extensions.

AWS Activate offers promotional credits in two main tiers: Activate Founders for bootstrapped or self-funded startups (starting at $1,000, up to $5,000 for select participants) and Activate Portfolio for pre-Series B startups backed by an Activate Provider such as a VC, accelerator or angel group (up to $200,000). An invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' tier offers $200,000+ for startups scaling beyond Portfolio. AWS says credits cover more than 200 eligible services, including Amazon Bedrock and third-party models on Bedrock, and usually expire within one to two years depending on the package.

Databricks relaunched its startup program on June 16, 2026. Qualifying startups can get up to $200K in credits across Databricks and Neon (the serverless Postgres company Databricks bought in 2025) through a single application, plus hands-on technical guidance, community access and go-to-market support. It targets early-stage, venture-backed startups building on data and AI, especially those that recently raised pre-seed to Series A funding.

Microsoft for Startups (formerly marketed as Founders Hub) gives startups Azure credits that grow from a starter amount to as much as $150,000. Without an investor code you get $200 after verifying with a personal LinkedIn account. With a 10-character Investor Network referral code you get $1,000 straight away and may unlock bigger benefits sooner. After that, credits rise through published milestones ($5,000, $25,000, $50,000 and $150,000) based on business verification and sustained use of Azure.

The Together AI Startup Accelerator is a selection-based program for AI-native startups, launched on October 15, 2025. Your tier depends on how much you have raised: Build (up to $5M raised) gets up to $15K in platform credits and 3 hours of forward-deployed engineering, Scale ($5M–$10M) gets up to $30K and 6 hours, and Grow (over $10M) gets up to $50K and 10 hours. Credits cover serverless inference, dedicated endpoints, fine-tuning and instant clusters, but not Reserved GPU Clusters. Members also get go-to-market support, events and VC introductions.

Notion for Startups gives eligible startups the Notion Business plan, including Notion AI, free for up to 6 months, worth up to $12,000 for a 100-person team. The length depends on your route: 6 months if you're affiliated with one of Notion's startup partners, 3 months if you have a valid business website and company-domain email, and 1 month for companies under 10 employees, SMBs, service businesses, or applicants Notion can't verify as startups.

The ElevenLabs Grants Program gives eligible startups 12 months of free access to the full ElevenLabs platform on a grant version of the Scale plan, with 33 million characters of credits. ElevenLabs says that's over 680 hours of Agents usage and more than $5,500 in value. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with no deadline, and decisions come within about a week.

Lambda offers qualifying AI researchers up to $5,000 in cloud credits to develop and showcase their work on Lambda Instances. Select research may be featured on Lambda's website. The grant launched in December 2024 with rolling applications. It is a research grant, not a startup program, and Lambda does not publish detailed eligibility criteria.

Anthropic's Claude for Open Source Program gives qualifying open-source maintainers and contributors six months of Claude Max 20x at no cost. It is a personal subscription for individual use, not an API credit grant. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with no fixed deadline, and the official terms cap the program at 10,000 approved recipients, a number Anthropic may increase.

New Google Cloud customers get a $300 Welcome credit to spend over a 90-day Free Trial on most Google Cloud services. You must add a valid payment method, but you are not billed during the trial. The credit cannot pay for the Gemini API in AI Studio or for partner models offered as managed APIs, and trial accounts cannot add GPUs, use Marketplace or request quota increases. If you don't upgrade, resources are stopped at the end and deleted after a 30-day grace period. Separately, the always-free Free Tier keeps running with no end date.

Eligible US college students aged 18+ can get the Google AI Pro student plan free for one year if they redeem by December 31, 2026. It includes 4x higher Gemini usage limits, 5 TB of storage, Gemini Spark, Gemini Omni and study tools. In other countries the student pages offer Google AI Plus free for one year instead, with 2x higher limits and 400 GB of storage. Student status is verified through SheerID, a payment method is required, and the plan renews at the normal price unless you cancel.

Every new Deepgram account gets $200 in free credit on the Pay As You Go plan, with no credit card required. Deepgram says this is about 43,000 minutes (over 700 hours) of Nova transcription, and the credit works across speech-to-text, text-to-speech, the Voice Agent API and audio intelligence. Deepgram's pricing page says the credit lasts until used, but its developer docs say free promotional credits expire one year from signup.

Lovable gives students and teachers 50% off Lovable Pro for up to 12 months. That cuts the 100-credit monthly plan from $25 to $12.50 a month. You verify by logging in with your school email, and no card is needed to verify. Lovable's docs limit the discount to the 100-credit Pro plan billed monthly. Higher tiers, annual billing, Business and top-ups are charged at full price.

OpenAI gives verified university students in the United States and Canada $100 in Codex credits (shown as 2,500 credits) to use with Codex in ChatGPT. It works with a personal ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus or Pro account. Students verify through SheerID with their university email, and the credits expire 12 months after they are granted.

Azure for Students gives full-time university students aged 18+ $100 in Azure credit to use within 12 months. It also includes free monthly amounts of 20+ popular services for 12 months (new Azure customers only) and 65+ always-free services. No credit card is required, and you can renew each year while you remain a student.

AssemblyAI gives new accounts $50 in free credits with no credit card required. AssemblyAI's pricing FAQ says this covers up to 185 hours of pre-recorded or 333 hours of streaming transcription, depending on the model. Free accounts can use pre-recorded transcription, Speech Understanding and streaming, but not the LLM Gateway, and have lower concurrency limits until they upgrade.

Verified students get GitHub Copilot free through the Copilot Student plan, introduced on March 12-13, 2026. It includes unlimited code completions, a monthly allowance of GitHub AI Credits (200 credits, worth $2.00, since June 1, 2026), agent mode, the cloud agent, code review and MCP, with model access through Auto model selection only. New Student sign-ups were paused on April 20, 2026, and GitHub began reopening them gradually from June 17, 2026.

The GitHub Student Developer Pack bundles free developer tools from GitHub and about 80 partners for verified students aged 13+. AI-related items include GitHub Copilot Student, Camber's free agentic data-science plan, Deepnote's Team plan and Microsoft 365 with built-in AI. It also includes GitHub Pro, Pro-level Codespaces, $100 Azure credit (18+), Heroku ($13/month for 24 months), MongoDB Atlas ($50), Stripe ($25), a free JetBrains IDE subscription and many one-year SaaS plans.

Perplexity offers Education Pro, a discounted version of Perplexity Pro for verified students and educators. It includes everything in Pro plus education-specific tips and nudges, and verified students get Learn Mode. SheerID handles verification, and the discount is applied at checkout. Perplexity's help center lists it at $10/month and mentions no free period.

Figma's Education plan gives verified students and educators free access to Figma and FigJam at the Professional tier. Higher education and bootcamp users also get Figma's AI tools, including Figma Make, with 3,000 AI credits a month. High school and K-12 users don't get the AI tools. K-12 schools and districts can get the Enterprise tier for free through a school application.

JetBrains gives students free educational licenses for its IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PyCharm, WebStorm and Rider, plus ReSharper and its .NET tools. Licenses last one year and you can renew them while you remain a student. JetBrains says AI Pro isn't included in free student, teacher and classroom subscriptions. Students get the AI Free tier and can start a 30-day AI Pro trial.

Notion offers a free Education Plan to students and educators at accredited colleges and universities. You need a school email. Notion's pricing page describes it as the Plus plan for free, limited to one member, with unlimited pages and blocks, unlimited file uploads, up to 100 guests and 30-day page history. Full Notion AI isn't part of the plan. Notion lists Plus with only a limited AI trial.

NVIDIA Inception is a free program for AI startups: no application, membership or equity fees. Members get NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute training credits, access to free cloud credits from NVIDIA and partners, preferred pricing on select NVIDIA hardware and software (paid as rebates through suppliers), and introductions to investors through the NVIDIA VC Alliance. There are no cohorts or deadlines, and NVIDIA doesn't publish a fixed credit amount.

Modal for Startups gives new Modal customers a one-time grant of free compute credits, plus access to Modal's engineers, go-to-market help and a founder community. The Seed to Series A tier is for startups that raised any amount from a fund in Modal's VC partner network, or more than $1M from any fund. A custom Scaling and Series B+ tier serves AI-native companies that raised more than $30M or are post-Series B and have a partner-network VC. Modal does not publish fixed credit amounts.

HubSpot for Startups discounts net-new Professional or Enterprise HubSpot products for eligible startups. Startups that raised Pre-seed, Seed or Series A (not Series B or later) and are affiliated with an approved HubSpot for Startups partner or have verified venture funding get 90% off year one, 50% off year two and 25% off year three. Startups associated with an approved entrepreneurial organization get 30% off year one and 15% off year two. An annual commitment is required.

Google's Gemini API has a Free tier where many models are listed as 'Free of charge' for input and output, including Gemini 3.8 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4. Newer flagship, image, video and music models (Gemini 4 Argon, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Nano Banana, Veo 3.1, Lyria) are paid-only. Free-tier prompts and responses may be used to improve Google's products and can be read by human reviewers. Rate limits apply per project and are shown in Google AI Studio rather than published as a fixed table.

GroqCloud has a Free plan with per-model rate limits published on its rate-limits docs page, for models including gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, Qwen3.8-27B, Whisper and Orpheus text-to-speech. The paid Developer plan is pay-as-you-go with much higher limits (for example 1K RPM instead of 30 for gpt-oss-120b) plus Batch and Flex processing. Limits apply at the organization level and your exact numbers are shown on the console Limits page.

Mistral's docs state that API access is enabled by default in Free mode with no credit card required, with usage and rate limits applied. Free mode is the default state for new accounts: you can create API keys and use included monthly usage within the limits shown on your organization's Limits page. Mistral used to call this the 'Experiment' plan; the current docs call it Free mode and treat pay-as-you-go as a prepaid billing option rather than a separate plan.

OpenRouter offers ':free' variants of selected models that cost nothing per token, plus a Free Models Router (openrouter/free) that picks a free model for you. Free-model usage is limited to 20 requests per minute and 50 requests per day, rising to 1,000 requests per day once you have purchased at least 10 credits (all time). As of 2026-10-17 the public models API listed 16 free variants, including Gemma 4, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 and 3.5, Thinking Machines Inkling and Poolside Laguna models.

New Jina AI users get an auto-generated API key with free tokens usable across any Jina model; Jina's Reader page states that every new API key comes with 10M free tokens. Keys don't expire, no card is needed, and the Reader API also works without a key at 20 requests per minute. Free-key rate limits are 100 requests per minute and 100,000 tokens per minute for the Embedding and Reranker APIs. Jina AI has been part of Elastic since October 2025.

Voyage AI, owned by MongoDB since 2025, gives every account free tokens on its current models: 200M tokens each on voyage-4-large, voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-context-4 and voyage-code-4, 200M tokens on the rerank-3 and rerank-3-lite rerankers, and 200M text tokens plus 150B pixels on the multimodal models. voyage-finance-2, voyage-law-2 and voyage-code-2 get 50M. Older models and Batch API usage get no free tokens.

Cohere creates a free trial API key automatically when you sign up. Trial keys can use all of Cohere's models and APIs, but they are capped at 1,000 API calls per month and have per-endpoint rate limits, such as 20 requests per minute for Chat and 10 for Rerank. Cohere says trial keys may not be used for production or commercial purposes; for that you complete the Go to Production form and pay per use.

ElevenLabs' Free plan includes 10,000 credits per month, which ElevenLabs puts at about 10 minutes of text-to-speech, plus 3 custom voice slots for Voice Design. Free-plan output has no commercial license: you may publish it only non-commercially and must credit ElevenLabs with "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title. Commercial rights and voice cloning start with the Starter plan at $6 a month.

Pollinations provides an OpenAI-compatible API at gen.pollinations.ai for text, image, video, audio, realtime voice and embeddings. Generation requests need an API key from enter.pollinations.ai and are billed in Pollen, which you buy (one dollar buys one Pollen) or earn for free as 'Quest Pollen' by completing quests such as creating your first key (0.25 Pollen) or trying each model type. Quest Pollen only works on models not marked paid-only. Legacy raw publishable keys are limited to 1 Pollen per IP per hour, and the model catalogue endpoints are public without auth.

Cloudflare Workers AI includes a free allocation of 10,000 Neurons per day on both the Workers Free and Workers Paid plans, resetting at 00:00 UTC. On Workers Free, requests fail once the daily cap is reached; on Workers Paid, usage beyond the allocation costs $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons. A handful of newer frontier models (for example Kimi, GLM-5.x and DeepSeek V4) are not available on the free plan at all.

NVIDIA's official FAQ says free NVIDIA Developer Program members get free access to NIM API endpoints for prototyping at build.nvidia.com, plus downloadable NIM microservices for research, development and testing on up to 16 GPUs. Production use requires an NVIDIA AI Enterprise license (90-day free trial, then from $4,500 per GPU per year). NVIDIA doesn't publish fixed credit amounts or rate limits for the hosted endpoints; staff describe limits as varying by model, use case and overall traffic.

Claude Startups is Anthropic's program for early-stage founders building on Claude. Members get the Claude Startup Stack (partner discounts and credits worth up to $45,000), biweekly Applied AI group sessions and event invitations, and founders backed by a VC in Anthropic's partner network may be eligible for up to $100K in additional Claude API credits claimed through that VC. An expanded version launched on October 6, 2026 with a free year of Claude Team and $1,000 in API credits, but Anthropic paused those two perks on October 9 after an application surge. As of October 17, 2026 the official page says the current cohort is full and new applications are not being accepted.

AWS offers Kiro Startup Credits worth up to one year of Kiro Pro+ (listed at $40 per user per month with 2,000 credits) across Starter (up to 2 users), Growth (up to 10 users) and Scale (up to 30 users) tiers. The official terms set an application window from April 7 to December 31, 2026. Credits are deposited into your AWS account on approval, expire one year after issue, and are used through Kiro sign-in with AWS IAM Identity Center. Startups with active AWS Activate credits are not eligible.

OpenAI's 2026 Back to School offer gives eligible US college and graduate students four free monthly billing periods of ChatGPT Plus, worth $80 at the $20/month list price. Students verify through SheerID and must add a payment method to activate it. Claims must be made by October 31, 2026.

Cerebras no longer offers a permanently free tier; new accounts get a one-time $5 promotional credit after adding a verified payment method. Credits expire 30 days after being granted, can be used across all public models, and you aren't charged unless you buy more. Free Trial usage is rate-limited per model (5 requests per minute and 1M tokens per day on gpt-oss-120b), and your first purchase moves you to the pay-as-you-go Developer tier.

Anthropic does not sell a discounted Claude Pro plan to individual students. Students get paid-tier Claude through their university when it buys the institution-wide Claude for Education plan, which covers students, faculty and staff. Anthropic also runs the Claude Campus program for 2026-27 (Claude Builder Club, Campus Conversations and Claude Science workshops), which pays selected student leaders a USD 3,600 stipend and gives Builder Club leads resources such as API credits to share with members. Applications for the 2026-27 cohort have closed.

OpenAI's startups page groups support into Build, Grow and Scale stages. Anyone can use the Build resources (starter repos, Build Hours and technical guides). The valuable benefits, free API credits, rate limit or usage tier upgrades and time with OpenAI's technical team, are unlocked through eligible VC partners. A partner VC gives you a referral code. OpenAI doesn't publish a public, self-serve credit amount.

Per Hugging Face's current pricing docs, Free accounts receive no monthly Inference Providers credits and must purchase credits to use the service. PRO users ($9/month) and Team or Enterprise organizations ($2 per seat) get $2.00 of compute credits each month, usable across Hugging Face compute services. Hugging Face passes provider prices through with no markup.

DeepSeek's official pricing page lists two API models, deepseek-flash (now served by DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017) and deepseek-v4-pro, with pay-as-you-go token pricing that is halved during off-peak hours. The docs mention a 'granted balance' that is spent before your topped-up balance, but publish no free-credit amount or eligibility rules for new users. The only free usage DeepSeek documents is a temporary promotion on its new Search and Fetch tools, which become billable on 1 November 2026 (Beijing time).

xAI's current API docs describe prepaid credits, auto top-up and promo-code redemption but do not mention a signup credit or a $150/month data-sharing credit program. The only officially documented free API credit was $25 per month for everyone during the public beta announced on 4 November 2024, which ran until the end of 2024. xAI's enterprise FAQ says it may, in some instances, offer free credits in exchange for permission to train on business data, but publishes no amount or sign-up route. Third-party sites report the later $25 signup and $150/month data-sharing credits ended; we could not confirm this on an official page.

Fireworks AI's pricing page and docs do not mention free signup credits; Fireworks runs on prepaid credits, so new users add a payment method and buy credits, with usage deducted from the balance. The only free offer listed officially is free LoRA SFT fine-tuning of Muse Glimmer 30B via the UI and Serverless Training API until 11/30 (jobs started before December 1, 2026, Pacific time), with no credit card required. Accounts with no payment method or no credits are limited to 10 requests per minute.