You get $1,000 in AWS credits that apply to 200+ eligible AWS services, plus $350 in AWS Developer Support credits for unlimited email-based support cases. The AWS credits can cover real usage on EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, and AI services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, so it’s meaningful even if you’re building an AI feature and a normal web stack. The practical value depends on your architecture: lightweight serverless MVPs stretch it far, while heavy GPU or high-volume model usage burns it quickly. AWS also applies the credits automatically to eligible monthly charges, so you won’t be manually “spending” them line by line.

Yes, AWS requires a credit card to create an AWS account.

The Activate credits expire 1 year after they are issued, and AWS notes there are no extensions.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

They stop applying to charges, and any ongoing usage bills your card at standard AWS rates. AWS sends exhaustion alerts (75% and 100%) plus expiration warnings around 60, 30, and 0 days before expiration, but you should still set up AWS Budget Alerts to avoid surprises.

The most common reasons are using a personal email domain, having no live product website (or a placeholder “coming soon” site), and looking like a services company. AWS also rejects applications with inconsistent public info, missing LinkedIn company pages, or prior AWS Activate credits under any package. If you fix the issues, you can re-apply, and many startups get approved on a later attempt.

Yes, AWS Activate credits can be used for Amazon Bedrock, which provides managed access to foundation models (including Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama, Mistral, and Amazon Nova) via a single API. AWS notes that most Bedrock models require no approval, but Anthropic access requires a one-time use case submission.

They’re worth up to $300,000 in promotional credits that automatically offset eligible AWS usage. In practice, that can cover large chunks of Bedrock model usage (including third-party models), EC2 GPU capacity (P5/G5), and Trainium/Inferentia workloads, plus the supporting stack like S3 and databases. The “worth it” part depends on whether you actually run compute-heavy training or inference over the next two years. If your product doesn’t need that level of infrastructure, you’ll leave value unused.

Yes. The AWS account setup step includes confirming a credit card.

These Activate credits expire 2 years from activation, and AWS won’t extend them.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

After expiration, you’re charged standard pay-as-you-go rates for any running services. AWS sends reminder emails around 60 days before, 30 days before, and after expiry, but it won’t pause your infrastructure for you.

Not exactly. Credits do not stack: if you already received $100K in Portfolio credits and later qualify for the Generative AI tier, AWS grants the difference (an additional $200K) to reach the higher allocation.

Using a personal email (Gmail/Yahoo) and looking like an API wrapper are the big ones. AWS also flags vague product/workload descriptions, missing or invalid Org IDs, and prior Activate credits at an equal or greater value. One more: your Builder ID email cannot be tied to another Builder ID, or AWS rejects it as a duplicate. Treat the application like a technical spec, not a branding exercise.

Up to $100,000 in AWS Activate Credits can offset eligible AWS usage across 200+ services (compute, databases, storage, analytics, and AI/ML). On top of that, the package can include up to $10,000 in AWS Business Support credits, 80 self-paced training lab credits, and access to $800K+ in partner offers. The practical value depends on what you run, but it’s enough to support real production infrastructure if you plan usage before the expiration window. One standout: third-party foundation models on Amazon Bedrock (Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, Stability, and more) are explicitly covered, which can save a lot if you’re doing serious inference.

Yes, your AWS account must be on a Paid Tier Plan (not free tier).

Portfolio Package credits expire in 1–2 years from issuance, and the exact duration depends on your provider arrangement.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Unused credits are permanently forfeited, and standard AWS rates kick in immediately for any running services.

Yes. Activate Credits explicitly cover third-party foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, including providers like Anthropic (Claude), Meta (Llama), Mistral, Cohere, AI21 Labs, Stability AI, and Amazon Titan.

Yes, but only in a specific scenario. If you previously received a smaller amount (for example $10,000) and you now qualify for $100,000, AWS allows you to reapply and receive the difference. That means you would be considered for the remaining balance rather than “double dipping” the full amount again. If you previously received credits of equal or greater value, you’re not eligible for this package.

Up to $500,000 total, typically split into about $200K for general AWS services and about $300K for AI silicon and AI usage (Trainium/Inferentia, Bedrock, and reserved H100 capacity). In real usage, that can fund a full AWS stack plus meaningful LLM inference or training, as long as you stay inside eligible services. The exact split may vary by YC batch because AWS and YC negotiate it.

Yes.

These Activate credits last 2 years from activation (when they’re applied to your AWS account). They cannot be extended, and unused credits are forfeited when they expire.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

They’re forfeited, and you can’t get an extension.

Yes. AWS Activate credits can be used on all models available through Amazon Bedrock, including third-party foundation models from providers like Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI, Cohere, AI21 Labs, and others listed by AWS. Frankly, this is one of the biggest upgrades versus older rules, because before April 2024 AWS credits couldn’t be used for third-party Bedrock models.

No, AWS Marketplace purchases are not covered (except third-party Bedrock models).

Students can receive up to $100 in promotional credits (often lower if your institution isn’t a member), and educators can receive up to $200. The credits are meant for learning and coursework inside an AWS Educate Starter Account, alongside the included labs and training.

No.

AWS Educate promotional credits are valid for up to 12 months.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

In AWS Educate, your credits simply stop being usable after their validity window (up to 12 months). Because the Starter Account cannot be billed, you won’t get surprise charges when credits are gone. What you will hit is access friction: if your Starter Account expires after graduation or you don’t renew, you may need to move to a regular AWS account to keep building. For long-term projects, plan that transition early and don’t wait until the last week.

It depends on whether your institution is an AWS Educate member: students at member institutions can get $100, while non-members typically get about $25–$35.

The Starter Account is a restricted learning sandbox: no credit card, us-east-1 only, about 75% of services, and no IAM or billing dashboard. EC2 is also limited (including instance types and about 20 concurrent instances), and sessions time out after about 3 hours of activity. A regular AWS account is the opposite: full regions and services, full IAM and billing, but you can be charged if you exceed free-tier limits. That’s why Educate is safer for beginners, but less useful for production work.

Up to $200 total: $100 is applied at signup, and you can earn another $100 by completing five onboarding tasks worth $20 each. You can spend the credits across eligible AWS usage, including Amazon Bedrock prompts (which are billed per token and deducted from your credits). Practically, it’s enough to build a small demo stack and run a meaningful Bedrock evaluation across multiple model families. It’s not meant to cover long-running production workloads, so treat it like a 12-month evaluation budget with a 6-month “no-billing” safety mode if you pick the Free plan.

Yes. AWS requires a valid credit or debit card and places a temporary $1 hold (released in about 3–5 days).

All credits expire 12 months from account creation, regardless of plan.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

The credits stop applying to usage after the 12-month expiration, so any continued usage depends on your plan. On the Paid plan, usage continues and you pay standard rates once credits are gone. On the Free plan, AWS does not charge you; when the Free plan period ends (about 6 months, or earlier if credits are exhausted), AWS closes the account and keeps data for about 90 days so you can upgrade and recover it.

You earn $20 each for launching and terminating an Amazon EC2 instance, configuring and launching an Amazon RDS database, building a simple web app with an AWS Lambda function URL, submitting a prompt in the Amazon Bedrock text playground, and setting a budget alert in AWS Budgets. You track completion in the “Explore AWS” widget in the AWS Console.

For most builders, start with the Free plan. AWS’s zero-charge guarantee means you won’t be billed, even if you burn through credits, and the downside is simply that the account is closed when the Free plan period ends. You can upgrade to Paid later and keep whatever credits remain (they still expire 12 months from signup). Be careful, though: once you upgrade you can’t downgrade back, and the Paid plan will bill you automatically after credits are exhausted, so set up Budgets before you flip that switch.

They aren’t dollar credits; you get about 4 GPU hours/day (NVIDIA T4 16 GB) plus about 8 CPU hours/day (T3.xlarge) and 15 GB persistent storage. In practice, that’s enough for repeated small training runs, short fine-tunes, and GPU inference experiments without paying anything. The real “value” comes from persistence: your conda envs and installed packages stick around, so you don’t burn time rebuilding your setup each session.

No.

Studio Lab’s compute limits reset each 24-hour period (4 GPU hours/day and 8 CPU hours/day), and storage persists while you have access to the service.

Yes. If you have AWS credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.

AI Credit Mart has discounted AWS credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

When Studio Lab session time runs out, your running computations stop, but your files and installed packages remain in your persistent storage.

No. Only one runtime session can be active at a time, which means you have to choose CPU or GPU per session.

Studio Lab requires approval, and AWS says review can take up to about 5 business days (though many requests clear faster). If you’re in a hurry, a referral code from a workshop or hackathon can bypass the wait and grant instant access. Also check your inbox carefully: after approval, the registration link expires in 7 days, and if it expires you have to submit a new request. One more gotcha is SMS verification on first launch; AWS supports 240+ countries but has reported delivery issues in some regions, and VoIP numbers typically don’t work.