# Free Cloud Credits for Startups

URL: https://danylovorvul.com/blog/cloud-credits-for-startups/
Author: Danylo Vorvul
Date: 2026-08-15
Tags: tooling, economics
Description: A live registry of free-credit programs for startups on major clouds and developer platforms. Agent-maintained, re-verified on schedule, showing only programs open right now.

Headline numbers hide gates and caps. Google's $350k is really $250k in year one plus a 20% match in year two. Cloudflare's $350k has per-product sub-caps inside it. AWS's $200k and Render's $100k both need a partner referral. The credits column keeps every figure welded to its condition: read it before you plan a burn rate around a headline.

## What's not here, and why

Vercel has no direct-apply route open today. Its standing credits program (up to $30,000) requires affiliation with an approved partner VC or accelerator, and its one direct route, the AI Accelerator, shows a live-looking "Apply now" button that leads to a form closed since February 2026. Vercel says applications reopen later this year; the sweep will catch it.

Fly.io runs no credit program on purpose. Their own words: "usage-based pricing without a sales process or credit-program gate."

Oracle and IBM have no startup credit program verifiable on their own sites. Oracle's startup pages route to a generic free tier or return 404s. IBM's famous "$120,000 in credits" lives only on aggregator sites and a 2016 press release; IBM's own application page now offers a $200 credit.

Also out of scope by design: programs reachable only through a specific VC or accelerator, hackathon one-offs, and free tiers anyone can claim with a signup.

## How this page is maintained

An agent re-runs the sweep on a schedule, using site-scoped searches against each provider's own domain:

```
site:aws.amazon.com startups activate credits
site:cloud.google.com startup program credits
site:vercel.com startup program credits
site:ovhcloud.com startup program cloud credits
```

It then fetches the official program page and quotes amounts exactly as stated there. Aggregators and press releases are never sources; stale numbers like IBM's $120k survive on other lists precisely because they are. Buttons aren't trusted either: a form's actual state beats its "Apply now" label. A program that closes or fails re-verification is dropped from the table on the next run.

Current sweep: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, DigitalOcean, Render, Vercel, Fly.io, OVHcloud, Oracle, IBM.