The startup credit database

Three tiers. Start gives bootstrapped teams up to $2,000 in Google Cloud and Firebase credits, self-serve. Scale covers 100% of usage up to $100,000 in year one plus 20% of usage up to another $100,000 in year two. The AI-First tier adds up to $150,000 on top of Scale, reaching $350,000 total for teams whose core technology is AI.

The largest cloud credit program by ceiling. A small self-serve tier is open to any incorporated startup with a live product, while the six-figure tiers are routed through Activate Providers — accelerators, incubators, VCs and startup-friendly banks. Credits are redeemable on third-party models through Amazon Bedrock, and AWS lists additional credits for AI startups ready to scale.

Cleanly tiered by how much you have raised. Tier 3 gives $10,000 to bootstrapped teams with no minimum funding. Tier 2 gives $100,000 to companies under $5M raised that are backed by an affiliated partner. Tier 1 gives $350,000 to companies at $5M+ raised with an affiliated partner, plus priority support and bi-weekly Solutions Architect office hours.

Credits usable across Azure, GitHub and other eligible Microsoft platforms, with the top of the range reserved for VC-backed companies coming in through Microsoft's investor network. The entry tier is genuinely self-serve and needs no funding, which makes this one of the few six-figure programs with a real bootstrapped on-ramp. Includes access to AI models and go-to-market support.

Two clearly separated tracks. Self-funded teams under $1M raised get up to $1,000 in Neon credits with onboarding support and early feature access. VC-backed teams get up to $200,000 in combined Neon and Databricks credits, plus co-marketing and speaking slots at Neon events. Decisions usually land within a few business days.

Amount is set per company and per partner organisation, with a $10,000 monthly spend ceiling on credited usage. Comes with 15 months of free Standard-tier support, one-on-ones with DigitalOcean PMs and engineers, and a partner perk bundle from 15+ ecosystem companies. Watch the carve-out: core credits do not cover GPU Droplets or dedicated inference.

Free Claude API credits plus priority rate limits so you can run production traffic without throttling. Anthropic does not publish the credit amount. Joining the program is open, but the credits specifically require institutional equity funding. Members get early notice of model releases and access to Builder Days, hackathons and Founder Days.

A five-week cohort program open to founders at any stage, including pre-idea and pre-product. Participants receive $50,000 in API credits, early access to unreleased tooling and hands-on mentorship from OpenAI staff. This is the largest OpenAI credit allocation a founder can reach without a VC or accelerator relationship, and it is competitive rather than automatic.

OpenAI does not run a broad self-serve credit program. Allocations are routed through partners: a business banking or spend-management relationship commonly unlocks around $2,500, while VC and accelerator partners can nominate startups for more. Direct applications without a partner relationship are rarely accepted, so the practical route is through whoever already banks or backs you.

Up to €30,000 in La Plateforme API credits for selected early-stage startups, plus one-to-one support from Mistral's Solutions and Science teams. Worth applying if any part of your stack can run on open-weight European models — the review is selective but the application does not require a VC introduction.

One of the more generous open-model inference programs, with the allocation scaling by which partner refers you. Useful if you are serving Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek or other open weights and want to move off per-token frontier pricing without standing up your own GPUs.

Twelve months of the full ElevenLabs platform — Conversational AI, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, sound design and music — with 33 million characters included, roughly 680 hours of agent usage. Rolling applications, decisions within about a week. Note the branding condition: recipients display the ElevenLabs Grants logo on their site for at least 12 months.

Free to join, no fees and no equity. The direct value is preferred pricing on select NVIDIA hardware and software, free cloud credits from NVIDIA and its partners, and free self-paced technical training. The indirect value is often bigger: Inception Capital Connect makes investor introductions, and membership is a recognised signal that unlocks better tiers in other programs.

Serverless GPU credits as a one-time grant, with direct access to Modal's engineering team and go-to-market help around launches and fundraising. Modal does not publish amounts. The Seed to Series A track needs either a partner-network VC or more than $1M raised from any fund; the Series B+ track needs $30M+ raised and a partner-network investor.

Four tiers — Inspire for bootstrapped teams through Scale for fast-growing ones — with Atlas credits rising at each step. Includes Voyage AI tokens for embedding and reranking models, a one-on-one session with a MongoDB expert, and matching partner credits from Fireworks AI and Temporal for eligible startups. Existing MongoDB users can still apply, which is unusually flexible.

Up to $30,000 as a flexible commitment amount, together with Enterprise-tier platform access and startup-focused support. Vercel does not publish hard eligibility rules on the program page, which in practice means the size of the offer is negotiated — worth going in with traffic numbers and a growth story rather than just filling the form.

Up to six months free on the Business plan with Notion AI included, worth up to about $12,000 for a 100-person team. The length you get is decided at review: six months for startups affiliated with select partners or fully verified companies, three months for verified non-paying customers, and one month for small SMBs or incomplete applications.

The steepest discount curve in go-to-market software: 90% off year one, then 50% off year two and 25% off year three for startups that raised pre-seed, seed or Series A and are either partner-affiliated or have venture funding verifiable on Crunchbase or PitchBook. A lower tier gives 30% off year one and 15% off year two through approved entrepreneurial organisations.

Up to six months off Linear's Basic or Business plans. Partner affiliation is required, so this is one to claim through your accelerator or investor rather than directly. If you do not qualify, Linear's free plan still covers unlimited workspace members and 250 issues, which is enough for a pre-launch team.

Incorporating through Atlas unlocks a bundle of partner offers alongside the company formation itself — cloud credits, SaaS discounts and tooling from a rotating partner list. Most valuable at the very start: if you have not incorporated yet, routing the formation through Atlas is one of the cheapest ways to trigger several partner perks at once.

Free access to Retool for 12 months for early-stage companies, aimed at teams building internal tools, admin panels and customer portals instead of hiring for them. The program also bundles a large set of partner deals, which makes it a useful single application to reach several smaller offers.

Error tracking, performance monitoring and debugging credits for early-stage teams, most commonly reached through partner packs rather than a direct application. Small in absolute terms but it lands on a bill you will otherwise pay every month from the day you have real users.

Observability credits distributed largely through accelerators and VC partners. Worth claiming before you scale rather than after: Datadog bills grow with host and container count, and startups routinely discover the cost only once the credit window has closed.

Discounted or free access to Figma's professional design tooling for qualifying startups. Modest on its own, and mostly reached through partner perk lists, but it is one of the few design-side offers that exists at all for pre-seed teams.

Compliance automation for SOC 2 and similar frameworks at a startup rate. The reason to care is deal velocity rather than the discount: if enterprise prospects are asking for a SOC 2 report, this is the line item that unblocks revenue, and the startup tier makes starting early affordable.

Up to 90% off Intercom's AI-first customer service platform for early-stage startups. Comparable in shape to the HubSpot offer, so it is worth deciding your support and CRM stack before you claim either — both discounts are one-time and tied to net-new accounts.

Six months of Zendesk at no cost, usually claimed through fintech and banking partner perk packs rather than directly. A straightforward win if you already know you want a ticketing system, and easy to stack on top of a banking relationship you were opening anyway.

Airtable credit commonly appears inside partner perk bundles — DigitalOcean's startup program lists a $2,000 Airtable credit, and larger amounts show up in accelerator packs. Rarely worth a standalone application; claim it as a side effect of a cloud or banking program.

Free or heavily discounted JetBrains IDE licences for young companies, renewable annually. Genuinely self-serve with no investor requirement, which makes it one of the easiest first applications for a bootstrapped team — and a good way to confirm your company documentation is in order before you attempt a six-figure program.

Hosting credits for early-stage teams that want managed deploys without running their own infrastructure. A reasonable alternative if the hyperscaler programs reject you for lack of investor affiliation, since the bar here is lower and the developer experience is closer to what a small team can actually operate.

Aimed at funded companies migrating real workloads rather than at first-time builders: up to $100,000 in credits for the migration itself, then long-term discounts of up to 35%, executive sponsorship, architecture reviews and a dedicated account manager. Relevant specifically because GPU access is carved out of several larger cloud programs — if you need sustained GPU time rather than API calls, a GPU-friendly provider often beats a bigger credit you cannot spend on accelerators.

Opening a business account unlocks a bundle of partner credits at once — cloud, AI API and SaaS offers that would each need a separate application otherwise. This is the highest-leverage single action for a pre-seed team: one onboarding, dozens of downstream perks, including AI API credit that has no self-serve path elsewhere.

Same mechanic as Brex: the banking relationship is the key that opens a partner perk catalogue. Worth comparing the two catalogues against your actual stack before choosing, since the overlap is partial and each has offers the other does not.

Discounted global hiring and contractor payments, normally surfaced through fintech partner catalogues. Relevant the moment your team spans more than one country, which for most AI-era startups is from the first hire.

Cap table and equity management at a discount, with implementation fees commonly waived through partner routes. Least exciting perk on this list and the one founders most often wish they had set up before their first priced round rather than during it.

Free GitHub Enterprise seats and Copilot allocations for young companies, reached either directly or bundled into fintech and accelerator catalogues. Straightforward to claim and easy to forget to renew or downgrade when the 12 months end — put the expiry in a calendar the day you activate.

Sonar API credits plus Enterprise Pro seats for startups coming in through an approved accelerator or VC partner. Narrow but genuinely useful if your product needs grounded search-and-cite behaviour rather than raw generation.