For individuals, the free trial includes up to $1,700 in credits; verified enterprises can get up to $8,500. ECS free trial packages can run up to 12 months, while other PAYG product credits typically expire after 60 days, so “worth” depends on what you activate. Practically, it’s enough to run ECS plus common building blocks like OSS and ApsaraDB long enough to validate an MVP architecture. If you’re here mainly for GenAI, Model Studio also has a separate free inference quota for Qwen models that lasts 90 days (Singapore region only).

Yes. Alibaba Cloud requires a credit card and verifies it with a small temporary hold (under $1) and a verification code.

ECS trial packages can be valid for up to 12 months, while other PAYG product credits expire after about 60 days.

Yes. If you have Alibaba Cloud 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 Alibaba Cloud credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

ECS trial packages won’t auto-bill after expiration, but PAYG products can start charging at standard rates if you keep using them or exceed the free credits. If you do not upgrade after the trial ends, Alibaba Cloud may delete your data.

No. Individual and Enterprise trials are mutually exclusive, so you can’t switch the same trial after signup.

No. The free inference quota for Model Studio is available only in the Singapore region, and the quota covers real-time inference only (not batch calls or context cache). Usage in the console updates hourly, which means you should leave some buffer if you’re trying to stay strictly within the free tier. Also, your Alibaba Cloud account and RAM users share the same free quota, so one noisy test script can burn it for everyone.

They’re worth $5 of prepaid Anthropic usage across Claude models (Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus), and you can spend them via API calls, the Console Workbench, or Claude Code. In terms of scale, Anthropic estimates about 5 million input tokens on Claude Haiku 4.5 or about 1 million input tokens on Claude Opus 4.5. Your real mileage depends on output tokens too, since generation is billed separately. If you keep prompts tight and prototype on Haiku first, $5 is enough for a meaningful test run.

No.

The free $5 expires 14 days after you click the “Claim” button, not when you create the account.

Yes. If you have Anthropic 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 Anthropic credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Once the free credits expire (or you use them up), API calls return errors and you must prepay to continue; you are not charged automatically.

Most failures come down to number type or region. VoIP numbers (including Google Voice), app-generated numbers, and landlines are not accepted. US-based phone numbers tend to work reliably, UK numbers are explicitly excluded, and other regions can be hit or miss, so try a different eligible mobile number if you’re stuck.

Yes, but it requires a separate $5 deposit to reach Build Tier 1, which needs a credit card and is not the same as the free credits.

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’re worth $100 in Azure spend for 12 months from activation. Practically, that can cover small VMs, storage, databases, and paid AI features for demos, especially if you lean on Azure’s Always Free and 12‑months‑free service limits. For Azure OpenAI specifically, the dollar value matters less than the quota restrictions, because many student subscriptions hit low token-per-minute caps and “insufficient quota” deployment errors. If your goal is an LLM-powered app, plan around lightweight models first (GPT‑4o‑mini or GPT‑4.1‑nano) and expect to iterate.

No.

The Azure for Students credits last 12 months starting on the day you activate the offer, and unused credits do not roll over when you renew.

Yes. If you have Microsoft 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 Microsoft credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Unused Azure for Students credits are lost (no rollover), and if your balance hits zero your subscription is disabled and running services stop. You won’t be charged. If you are still a student and your 12 months are up, you can re-verify to get a fresh $100; otherwise you have about 90 days to upgrade to Pay‑As‑You‑Go before resources are decommissioned.

No. Microsoft explicitly tells you to sign in with a personal Microsoft account and use your institutional email only for the student verification step.

Student subscriptions often have Azure Policy and quota restrictions. In the real-world reports Microsoft references, quotas can be as low as about 1,000 tokens per minute across all models, and “insufficient quota” errors are common when deploying higher-end models like GPT‑5 series or GPT‑4.1. Region availability can also be blocked even if Azure OpenAI exists in that region. If you need fewer errors, start with GPT‑4o‑mini or GPT‑4.1‑nano, try supported regions (East US, South Central US, West Europe), and request a quota increase in the Azure Portal, knowing approval is not guaranteed.

They’re worth $200 of eligible Azure usage for 30 days, plus access to 12-month free services and 65+ always-free services within monthly caps. In practice, that can cover a meaningful Azure OpenAI evaluation (since Azure OpenAI isn’t always-free), some small compute and database experiments, and a bunch of “free forever” AI utilities like Speech to Text (5 hours/month) or Language (5,000 records/month). The big lever is focus: spend the $200 on what isn’t included in free tiers, then lean on always-free limits for ongoing testing. Also remember the timer starts at signup, so don’t activate it and then wait two weeks to build.

Yes. Microsoft requires a non-prepaid credit/debit card for verification, and you may see a temporary ~$1 hold that disappears within 3–5 days.

The $200 credit lasts 30 days.

Yes. If you have Microsoft 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 Microsoft credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

After 30 days or credit exhaustion, you must upgrade to pay-as-you-go to keep free-tier services, and after 12 months there’s no auto-shutoff so some services can transition to paid rates.

Most Azure OpenAI models are available to all Azure customers without a separate registration form, and you can deploy models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 right away once you create an Azure OpenAI resource. Some models are limited-access, though. For GPT-5 (full), GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, and a few related variants (including “codex” versions and o3 streaming), you may need to apply and wait about 4 days to 1 week for approval via aka.ms/oai/access. One more wrinkle: extra approval is also required if you want to modify content filters or abuse monitoring, and that typically requires a Microsoft account team relationship.

No.

The Pack is advertised as $500+ in combined value across 80+ partner offers, including GitHub Copilot Pro (normally $10/month), $200 in DigitalOcean credits, and $100 in Azure credits. What it’s “worth” to you depends on which offers you actually activate and use. If you claim only Copilot Pro and one cloud credit, you can still get a few hundred bucks of practical value without trying that hard. If you go deeper (IDE licenses, domains, monitoring, testing tools), it adds up fast.

No for the Pack itself, but individual partners may have their own requirements.

Pack benefits are valid for 2 years from your approval date, and some partner offers have their own durations (like 1 year or 6 months). When they expire, you keep your GitHub account and repos, but you lose student benefits unless you renew with updated proof of enrollment.

Yes. If you have GitHub 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 GitHub credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

You lose access to the student benefits after expiration, but your GitHub account, repositories, and contribution history remain.

Apply for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, get verified, then enable the Copilot Pro benefit. Verified students receive Copilot Pro for free, and it is the full Pro plan (not a limited version), including Copilot Chat in the IDE and on github.com, the coding agent, and Copilot CLI.

The common rejection reasons are fixable: missing a current date on your documents, an unclear school name, or a location mismatch (often caused by using a VPN or blocking location access). GitHub also flags cropped or edited document photos as potentially manipulated, so upload clear, unedited images. If your academic email is not recognized, you may need to add documentation even if the email is real. You can resubmit after updating your proof, and approvals are often faster once the paperwork is clean.

There’s no fixed dollar amount. Google Cloud Always Free is a bundle of monthly quotas (like 1 e2-micro VM, 2 million Cloud Run requests, and 1 TB of BigQuery queries) that reset each billing cycle, which can be worth anywhere from “a small bill” to “meaningful savings” depending on what you run. For AI, Gemini API access via AI Studio is rate-limited (requests per minute, tokens per minute, and requests per day) rather than budget-limited, so the value is really “how many calls you can make” for free. If you’re building a lightweight backend plus a small demo UI, Always Free can cover hosting and basic usage for a long time. If you’re pushing heavy traffic or large data scans, you’ll hit the caps fast.

Yes for the GCP Always Free tier (billing account creation requires a credit/debit card), but Gemini API via Google AI Studio does not require a card.

The Always Free tier never expires; the quotas reset every billing cycle.

Yes. If you have Google 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 Google credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

Always Free quotas don’t expire, but if you exceed them on a paid billing account you are billed automatically at standard rates.

Yes. Use Google AI Studio to get an API key without a billing account or credit card, and you’ll be limited by free-tier rate limits (overages return HTTP 429 errors, not charges).

The Gemini API free tier includes daily request caps (RPD) that reset at midnight Pacific Time, plus per-minute limits like RPM and TPM. Limits are per GCP project, not per API key, which means generating extra keys won’t increase your quota. If you suddenly start hitting rate limits more than you used to, you’re not imagining it: Google reduced Gemini free-tier quotas by about 50–80% in December 2025. Also note that Gemini 2.0 Flash is scheduled to retire on March 3, 2026, so plan to migrate to Gemini 2.5 Flash or newer if you’re still on the legacy model.

They’re worth $300 in usage across most Google Cloud services for 91 days, including core GCP products like Compute Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Vertex AI (for example, Vertex AI Studio with Gemini models). The practical value depends on what you run: you can build a real prototype, deploy an API, and test data workflows. The biggest caveat is that some high-demand resources are restricted on the trial (notably GPUs). If you need GPUs immediately, you’ll need a different path.

Yes, but it’s for identity verification only, with a temporary $0–$1 authorization hold.

The $300 Google Cloud Free Trial credits last 91 days from the day you sign up.

Yes. If you have Google 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 Google credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

If you don’t upgrade, your trial billing account auto-closes, workloads are stopped, and you get a 30-day grace period before resources are permanently deleted.

No. GPUs for Compute Engine VMs and GPUs on Vertex AI aren’t available during the free trial; they unlock only after you upgrade to a paid account.

Gemini API via Google AI Studio has its own permanent free tier that’s independent of the $300 trial. Vertex AI usage (like Vertex AI Studio with Gemini models) uses your GCP billing setup and can consume the $300 credits. Rate limits for the AI Studio free tier are roughly 5–15 requests per minute and up to about 1,000 requests per day depending on the model, and limits apply per Google Cloud project. Commercial use is allowed on that free tier.

There isn’t a single dollar figure; the value is access: full-version IBM software downloads, an IBM Cloud Trial upgrade via feature code, and 1,000+ SkillsBuild courses with AI labs and Credly credentials. For builders, the most “credit-like” benefit is the IBM Cloud Feature Code because it upgrades IBM Cloud Lite to Trial for up to 6 months (students) or 12 months (faculty). On top of that, you can use IBM Cloud free-plan limits for services like Watson Assistant (10,000 API calls/month), Natural Language Understanding (30,000 API calls/month), and watsonx.ai Lite (300,000 tokens/month plus 20 CUH/month). If you’re trying to prototype a small assistant, do summarization, or learn RAG patterns via the labs, it’s enough to build something real. Just don’t treat it like an unlimited production account.

No.

The IBM Cloud Feature Code can last up to 6 months for students (ending June 30 or Dec 31) and 12 months for faculty, and it’s renewable by requesting a new code before expiration.

Yes. If you have IBM 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 IBM credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

If your IBM Cloud trial expires without renewal, the account is deactivated and resources are deleted.

Yes, it’s renewable, but you must request a new feature code before the current one expires because the same code can’t be applied twice.

Not strictly. SkillsBuild courses and labs are open to everyone, but IBM recommends using an institutional email, and you will need verified academic email access for the software downloads portal and IBM Cloud feature codes.

You get 20 CUH per month plus 300,000 tokens per month. IBM estimates 300,000 tokens is enough for about 1,500 short Q&A prompts (~200 tokens each), around 300 document summaries (~1,000 tokens each), or roughly 375 RAG chatbot exchanges (~800 tokens per exchange). CUH value depends on what you run, since CUH consumption varies by tool, hardware spec, and runtime environment.

Yes, a credit card is used for identity verification during signup.

It’s an always-free tier, and the 20 CUH and 300,000-token limits reset monthly.

Yes. If you have IBM 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 IBM credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.

You won’t be charged unless you manually upgrade to a paid plan.

CUH is IBM’s billing unit for watsonx.ai Runtime activity except foundation model inference, and it’s consumed by things like training AutoAI models, scoring deployed ML models, and running Decision Optimization jobs. Foundation model inference uses Resource Units (RU), where 1 RU equals 1,000 tokens. CUH is measured to the millisecond with a one-minute minimum per operation, and idle deployments can stop consuming CUH after inactivity. Tokens count input and output combined, so verbose prompts burn budget fast.

Dallas or Frankfurt is recommended for full foundation model access, since model availability varies by data center.