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API credits, free inference tiers, startup programs and research grants from the frontier labs and the long tail. Every offer is checked against the provider’s own page: value, eligibility, limits, deadline, fine print.
VC-backed startups building on Gemini can get up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits over two years.
For: Startups that raised Pre-Seed/Seed within 5 years (or Series A within 12 months), founded within 5 years, built on Gemini, with under $5,000 in prior Google Cloud credits
Credits over 2 years
The Gemini API has a free tier with free input and output tokens on Gemini 3.x Flash and Flash-Lite models, no card needed.
For: Anyone with a Google account
Per-project RPM/TPM/RPD, see AI Studio
Max and Team subscribers get $100-$200/month (Team: up to $500 pooled) of Claude API credits, no card needed on the Console.
For: Max 5x, Max 20x or Team plan subscribers (Free, Pro and Enterprise are not eligible)
Credits refresh each billing cycle; no rollover
The Gemini API has a free tier with free input and output tokens on Gemini 3.x Flash and Flash-Lite models, no card needed.
Modal's Starter plan includes $30 of free compute credit every month for serverless GPUs, CPUs and sandboxes.
Groq's free plan gives rate-limited API access, e.g. gpt-oss-120b at 30 requests/min and 1,000 requests/day.
Workers AI includes 10,000 Neurons a day at no charge on the free Workers plan, enough for light inference on open models.
Mistral's free mode lets you create API keys and use a limited included monthly usage, no prepaid credits needed.
Cohere trial (evaluation) keys are free but limited to 1,000 API calls a month.
Z.ai lists GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and the vision model GLM-4.6V-Flash as free on input, cached input and output.
Copilot's Free plan gives limited chat and agent usage, including CLI and agent mode, at $0.
Codex has a $0 Free plan for quick coding tasks and a $8/month Go plan for lightweight use.
Signing in with a Google account on Gemini CLI via Gemini Code Assist (Individual) gives 1,000 requests a day free.
Kiro's free tier includes 50 credits and Claude Sonnet 4.5 plus open-weight models; first paid upgrade earns $20 in credit.
Lovable's free plan gives 5 build credits a day (up to 30 a month) plus 20 Cloud credits a month; students can claim a discount.
Claude's Free plan covers web, desktop and mobile chat, web search, file creation, code execution and Artifacts at $0.
Mistral's Free plan offers limited chat, web search, image generation and coding sessions on web and mobile.
ElevenLabs Free gives 10,000 credits a month for text-to-speech, speech-to-text, sound effects, voice design and music.
Runway's Free plan includes 125 one-time credits to try its generative video and image tools.
Krea's free plan gives 100 compute units every day, including its own Krea 2 image model and access to image and video models.
Supabase's Free plan includes Postgres, auth and storage for 2 active projects, with 500 MB database size and 50K monthly active users.
Pinecone's Starter plan is free for trying out and small applications with on-demand database, inference and assistant.
Qdrant Cloud's free tier is a single-node cluster with 1 GB RAM and 4 GB disk, plus free cloud inference with selected models.
Langfuse's Hobby plan is free with 50K units a month, 30 days of data access and 2 users; startup discounts exist on paid plans.
New Google Cloud users with a Gmail account can use Google's Agent Platform APIs free for up to 90 days with an API key and no billing info.
Activating Model Studio (Singapore region) gives a free token quota per model, typically 1M tokens each, valid for 90 days.
OpenRouter lists open and partner models at $0 per token; request caps depend on how many credits you have bought.
build.nvidia.com offers free API access to hosted models for prototyping once you join the NVIDIA Developer Program.
SambaNova's free tier applies when no payment method is linked: 20 requests/min, 20 requests/day and 200K tokens/day per model.
Kaggle gives free NVIDIA P100 GPU time in notebooks, with a weekly quota of about 30 hours.
Lightning's free tier gives up to 80 GPU hours (from up to 30 free credits) plus one free 24/7 Studio, no card needed.
Colab is free to use and includes access to GPUs and TPUs, though without a guaranteed allowance.