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 $5,000 of pay-as-you-go usage across eligible Cloudflare developer services (like Workers, R2, D1, Pages, Queues, Durable Objects, and Workers AI), usable for up to one year or until consumed. In real usage, that can cover an MVP running at the edge plus storage and a database without paying cash for a while. If you’re doing AI inference through Workers AI, those credits also apply (Workers AI is billed at about $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons). The exact “how long it lasts” depends on traffic, storage volume, and whether you use paid-only products like Stream.

Yes. A credit card is required on file, and Cloudflare bills it once credits are exhausted or expire.

These credits last one year from activation, or until you use them up.

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

Once they expire (or you spend them), Cloudflare charges your card for usage above the always-free limits, while free-tier services continue at their free caps and enterprise domain protections revert unless you subscribe.

The credits apply to pay-as-you-go developer platform products, including Workers, Pages, R2, D1, Images, Stream, Queues, Durable Objects, Workers AI, KV, and Hyperdrive. You also get enterprise-grade protections on up to three domains (CDN, DDoS, DNS, WAF, Zero Trust, Argo Smart Routing, and Advanced Certificate Manager).

No.

They’re worth $25,000 of Cloudflare platform usage applied over 12 months, covering the Developer Platform (Workers, R2, D1, Pages, Durable Objects, Queues) plus up to three Enterprise-level domains. Practically, that can fund a real production rollout on Workers/Pages and absorb meaningful overages beyond the always-free limits. If you’re doing storage-heavy work, remember R2 + Cache Reserve is capped together (so you can’t spend the entire $25K there). With AI inference, Workers AI can also be a substantial consumer of credits once you go beyond free Neurons.

Yes. Cloudflare’s steps specify adding a valid credit card when creating the free account.

These startup credits last 1 year, and unused credits expire at the end of that window.

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

They’re use-it-or-lose-it: credits are non-transferable, non-refundable, and expire after 12 months. Once they’re gone, Cloudflare applies the free tier where it fits, and anything beyond that runs on standard pay-as-you-go pricing.

No.

Workers AI is available, and all accounts (including free) get 10,000 Neurons/day at no cost. When you exceed the free Neurons, usage can be covered by your credits (still subject to the $25K total). Cloudflare lists model options like Llama 3.x Instruct, Llama Vision, Whisper, and image models such as Stable Diffusion/FLUX, with pricing varying by model and token type. Beta models can have unlimited free usage until they graduate, which can be a nice bonus if you’re experimenting.

Up to $100,000 in compute credits spread across 12 months, issued as a fixed monthly allocation that doesn’t roll over. In practice, they can cover most of your DigitalOcean bill for CPU infrastructure (Droplets, DOKS, managed databases, Spaces, networking, and more) as long as you stay under your monthly cap. If you’re expecting to “save them for later,” don’t. Unused monthly credits are forfeited.

Yes, a valid credit card is required during signup.

The Hatch compute credits last 12 months and are issued monthly as use-it-or-lose-it allocations.

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

Unused monthly Hatch credits are forfeited, and once you exceed your monthly credit amount, overages are charged to the credit card on file.

No. Hatch compute credits do not cover GPU Droplets. Qualified startups can get up to 3 months of free GPU usage, then GPU costs are billed separately at a discounted rate (listed around $1.90 per GPU hour for 12 months, versus $2.99 on-demand standard pricing). This is the part to plan for. If your roadmap involves fine-tuning or training, estimate GPU spend early and set billing alerts so you don’t accidentally turn “free credits” into a surprise invoice.

Partner affiliation. Startups referred by recognized accelerators, incubators, or VCs typically receive the highest tiers, while direct applicants can still be accepted but often get lower allocations.

Up to $5,000 (faculty, postdocs, nonprofit researchers) or up to $1,000 (PhD students, renewable annually) in Google Cloud spend on most GCP services. Because GPUs are allowed, the credits can translate into a lot of training time; Google’s example suggests roughly 1,350 hours on a T4 GPU for the $5,000 level. You can also use them for Vertex AI training/deployment, BigQuery analysis, Cloud Storage, and data pipelines. The “real” value depends on whether you use on-demand GPUs, Spot VMs, or mostly CPU and storage.

No.

Once activated, the Research Credits expire after 365 days (or earlier if you spend them all). You also have to activate them within 60 days of the project start date you provided.

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.

Running workloads will be stopped unless you have another funding source linked to the billing account.

They can’t be used for Google Maps Platform (Maps/Routes/Places APIs), paid Google Cloud Support packages, or Google Colab products (Colab Pro, Pro+, Colab Enterprise). Cryptocurrency mining is explicitly prohibited. And the credits are for academic research only, so commercial use or personal benefit is out.

Treat the 250-word proposal as the core of the application. Be concrete about the research problem, name the exact GCP services you will use, and tie your Pricing Calculator estimate to those workloads. Include a timeline with milestones and expected outcomes like publications, datasets, or open-source tools. Frankly, vague proposals (“explore cloud computing”) tend to lose to proposals that read like a real plan.

Students get up to $50 in GCP credits per course, and faculty/teaching staff get up to $100 per course, delivered as coupon codes that create a billing account with the credit. The value is straightforward: it offsets paid usage across most Google Cloud services (Compute Engine, BigQuery, Vertex AI, Cloud Storage, and many APIs). For a typical class project, that can cover a small deployment and some experimentation, especially if you lean on Free Tier where possible. If you plan to use GPUs or leave VMs running, assume the credits will vanish quickly and budget accordingly.

No.

You typically have a 16-week window from the course start date to redeem the coupon, and then the credits are valid for 12 months from redemption.

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.

When credits run out, running VMs are stopped, storage persists for about 30 days, and then it is deleted.

No. This is not a self-serve student program; a faculty member has to apply, get approved, and send you the distribution URL. If your professor has not applied, your fastest path is to ask them to do it and share the program link. If that is not possible, you will need an alternative like a different education program or a separate platform for compute.

GPU quota is not enabled by default, but you can request GPU access in the Cloud Console (IAM & Admin > Quotas). Approval can take minutes to about a week, and it is not guaranteed because it depends on availability and region. Some zones will not have the GPU type you want, so check pricing and availability before you request quota. This is a key difference from the $300 Free Trial, which blocks GPU access entirely.

Up to $2,000 in billable usage on Google Cloud and Firebase, applied to your Cloud Billing Account for 1 year. Practically, that can cover an MVP stack (Cloud Run + Cloud SQL + Storage + Firebase Auth/Hosting) or a meaningful batch of Vertex AI experimentation, depending on how heavy your workloads are. The credits can be spent across standard GCP services like Compute Engine, BigQuery, GKE, and Cloud Storage, plus Firebase services such as Firestore and Cloud Functions.

Yes. You need a Google Cloud Billing Account with a payment method (credit card or bank account) on file.

The Start tier credits expire 1 year after they’re deposited into your billing account.

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.

Your services keep running, and charges shift to the payment method on your billing account. If there is no valid payment method (or it can’t be charged), services may be suspended. Google recommends setting budget alerts in the Billing console to avoid surprise charges. The expiration happens 1 year after deposit regardless of remaining balance, so it’s on you to plan the burn.

Most rejections come down to domain mismatch: the billing admin email domain doesn’t match the company website domain, or the application is submitted from a personal Gmail address. Google also rejects companies that fall into excluded categories (agencies, consultancies, nonprofits, government entities, and similar). And sometimes you’re simply not a fit for Start because your funding counts as institutional equity.

Yes, but you need verifiable equity funding and you reapply at the same application page.

They’re worth up to $5,000 of Lambda Cloud usage on on-demand GPU instances. At posted on-demand rates, that’s roughly about 10,000 hours on a Quadro RTX 6000, about 6,000 hours on an A6000, around 3,800 hours on an A100 PCIe 40 GB, about 2,000 hours on an H100 PCIe, or roughly 945 hours on a B200 SXM6. In practice, your “real” value depends on whether the GPU you want is in stock and whether you can keep instances utilized. If you’re doing research training runs, it’s a meaningful budget.

Yes. Lambda Cloud requires a valid payment method even if you have grant credits.

Lambda doesn’t publish a fixed expiration window for the research grant credits. What they do state is that grant credits are applied as service credits and decrease at the end of each weekly billing cycle, so you should monitor usage weekly.

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

If you don’t have credits left to cover usage, Lambda will bill your registered payment method for any ongoing resources.

No. Lambda states there is no general-purpose free trial or free tier; the research grant is the only path to free compute they describe.

You’ll create a Lambda Cloud account, complete phone verification, add a credit card, and upload an SSH key (OpenSSH, RFC4716, PKCS8, or PEM formats). From the dashboard you can launch an instance by picking a GPU type and region, and attaching persistent storage. Don’t skip the storage step if you care about checkpoints, because data on terminated instances is permanently lost unless it’s saved to persistent storage at /lambda/nfs/<filesystem>. Also keep in mind capacity is first-come, first-served, so you may have to check back for popular GPUs.

At minimum, accepted teams get $1,000 in Azure credits, and qualifying teams also receive $2,500 in OpenAI credits via Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. If you reach semifinals, your Azure total increases to $5,000 (an extra $4,000). In real terms, that’s enough to host a working MVP on Azure and integrate services like Azure OpenAI plus another Microsoft AI service (Search, Speech, Vision, etc.) without immediately paying out of pocket. The exact “how far it goes” depends on what you deploy, but it’s real budget, not a tiny sandbox.

No. Microsoft states no credit card is required at any step.

You must activate the credits within 90 days of being awarded.

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.

The program is clear that you need to activate awarded credits within 90 days; if you don’t, you can lose access to them. After that, Microsoft doesn’t promise extensions, so treat the activation window as a hard deadline. For usage after you’ve spent the credits, Azure services generally require paid funding to keep running, so don’t assume things will stay online for free.

Microsoft lists Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Vision/Computer Vision, Azure AI Language, Azure AI Speech, Azure AI Document Intelligence, and Azure AI Content Safety as qualifying services.

You can try, but Microsoft explicitly warns against it because it can cause issues with Founders Hub enrollment. Use a personal Microsoft account and keep it consistent across Imagine Cup and Founders Hub.

They’re worth up to $5,000 of Azure usage, with $1,000 available for 90 days at Level 1 and the balance unlocked after business verification. You can spend the credits on Azure OpenAI Service (token-based pricing) and most core Azure services like compute, managed databases, storage, and networking. Practically, it’s enough to run a real MVP stack and do meaningful model experimentation without paying cash up front. Just remember that Marketplace products and third-party branded items are excluded, so plan for that if your architecture depends on them.

No for the initial application, but you’ll need one when activating Azure.

Level 1 credits last 90 days from redemption, and Level 2 credits last 180 days from verification approval.

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.

Your subscription auto-converts to pay-as-you-go, and you’ll be billed for any usage unless you cancel or remove resources.

Complete business verification in the Azure portal within 90 days of redeeming the initial credit. You’ll confirm your business address, provide business registration details (incorporation documents), and submit a short startup description. Processing can take up to about a week, and you can track it via “Check verification status” on the Azure portal homepage.

No. Azure Marketplace products, third-party branded products, and Microsoft Azure support plans are not eligible purchases with these credits.