The ladder

Startup credits for chatbots and assistants — hosted models, APIs, and inference you can wire up without a sales call.

Credits that stack for general-purpose conversational apps.

37 curated16 free tiersVerified weekly

Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub

MicrosoftVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$150,000

Azure + OpenAI

Claim

Neon for Startups

NeonVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$2,500

credits

Claim

OpenAI Free Evaluation Credits

OpenAIVerified

Curated
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

API credit on signup (subject to change)

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Groq Developer Free Tier

GroqVerified

Curated
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free tier — Llama, Mixtral inference on LPU

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Hugging Face Inference — Free Tier

Hugging FaceVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free serverless inference with monthly quota

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Railway Trial

RailwayVerified

Curated
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

trial + Hobby plan for solo projects

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AWS Activate

Amazon Web ServicesVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

From

$1,000

Founders · up to $100,000 with accelerator/VC partner · 2 years

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Google for Startups Cloud Program

Google CloudVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$350,000

over 2 years

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DigitalOcean Hatch

DigitalOceanVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$5,000

credits

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MongoDB for Startups

MongoDBVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$5,000

Atlas

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Pinecone for Startups

PineconeVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$2,500

Pinecone

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ElevenLabs Startup Grant

ElevenLabsVerified

Curated
No VC needed

Voice API credits for startups

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Together AI Startup Credits

Together AIVerified

Curated

Inference credits for early-stage

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PostHog for Startups

PostHogVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

$50,000

PostHog credits + Teams plan

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Anthropic for Startups

AnthropicVerified

Official source

$5,000

API

Claim

Cloudflare for Startups

CloudflareVerified

Official source

Free Pro/Business plans + credits

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Vercel for Startups

VercelVerified

Official source

Credits + Enterprise features

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Deepgram — Startup Program

DeepgramVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$100,000

credits over 12 months (tiered)

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AssemblyAI — Startup Program

AssemblyAIVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

200,000 hours speech-to-text credits (approved startups)

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Fireworks — For Startups

Fireworks AIVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Build credits + higher rate limits (application required)

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Baseten — AI Startup Program

BasetenVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$27,500

credits (inference + model APIs, tiered)

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LangSmith — For Startups

LangChainVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Up to

$10,000

LangSmith credits on Scale tier (eligibility applies)

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Upstash — Free Tier

UpstashVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free tier — Redis, vector search, QStash within published limits

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Mistral — API Free Tier

Mistral AIVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free experiment tier — rate-limited API (see console)

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OpenRouter — Starter Credits

OpenRouterVerified

Curated
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

starter credits + free-model routing (verify in dashboard)

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Google AI Studio — Gemini API Free Tier

GoogleVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free Gemini API access with daily rate-limited quota

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Cohere — Trial API Key

CohereVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free trial API key — rate-limited model + embeddings access

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Cerebras Inference — Free Developer Tier

CerebrasVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free inference on Llama + Qwen — fastest tokens/sec available

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Replicate — Free Tier + Pay-As-You-Go

ReplicateVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free runs on many public models — usage-billed hosting after

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Perplexity API — Free Monthly Credit

PerplexityVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

/month API credit on Pro — web-grounded model access

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xAI — Developer API Credits

xAIVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Developer credits via x.ai console — amount varies by promotion

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Voyage AI — Free Embedding Tokens

Voyage AIVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Millions of free embedding tokens per model on signup

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NVIDIA Build — Free NIM API Credits

NVIDIAVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free API credits across NIM-hosted open models

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SambaNova Cloud — Free Developer Tier

SambaNovaVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free developer access to hosted Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek

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Tavily — Free Search API Credits

TavilyVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free monthly search API credits — built for LLM agents

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Exa — Free Search API Credits

ExaVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free monthly search credits — neural + keyword web search

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Qdrant Cloud — Free 1GB Cluster

QdrantVerified

Official source
Solo founder OK
No VC needed

Free 1GB managed Qdrant cluster — no credit card required

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