◆ Cloud Provider Credits
Cloud Provider Credits — $2.7M on the table.
73 verified programmes for startups that need compute, storage, and bandwidth — sorted by face value, each with the eligibility gate spelled out so you know whether you qualify before you apply.
Cloud Provider Credits compared
The 8 largest programmes that publish a figure, side by side with what it takes to get them.
| Programme | Value | Eligibility gate |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare for Startups | $350K | Partner referral needed |
| Google Cloud for Startups | $350K | Partner referral needed |
| Google for Startups Cloud Program | $200K | Startups |
| Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub | $150K | Partner referral needed |
| Akamai RISE | $120K | Partner referral needed |
| Alibaba Cloud Startup Catalyst Program | $120K | Under 10 years old |
| IBM Cloud for Startups | $120K | Under 5 years old |
| IBM for Startups | $120K | Startups |
All 73 programmes
Every cloud infrastructure credits programme we have verified, sorted by face value. Programmes without a published figure sit at the end.
Cloudflare for Startups
$350KTiered credits for the whole Cloudflare stack — $10K bootstrapped, $100K with partner funding, $350K at $5M+ raised — covering Workers, R2, D1 and Workers AI, valid one year.
Partner referral needed See eligibilityGoogle Cloud for Startups
$350KGoogle for Startups Cloud Program offers AI-focused startups up to $350K in GCP credits over two years — plus Workspace, Firebase, Maps and access to Google's AI and ML services.
Partner referral needed See eligibilityGoogle for Startups Cloud Program
$200KAccelerate your startup journey with flexible tiers that match your company's growth stage—providing up to $200,000 USD in Google Cloud credits, technical resou
Startups See eligibilityMicrosoft for Startups Founders Hub
$150KMicrosoft for Startups Founders Hub gives early-stage companies up to $150K in Azure credits over 5 years — plus GitHub Enterprise and Microsoft 365, with no investor requirement.
Partner referral needed See eligibilityAkamai RISE
$120KAkamai Cloud RISE Program (formerly Linode) gives qualifying startups up to $120K/year in cloud credits — compute, GPU, object storage and CDN via the infrastructure Akamai acquired from Linode.
Partner referral needed See eligibilityAlibaba Cloud Startup Catalyst Program
$120KThe Alibaba Cloud Startup Catalyst Program provides comprehensive support for startups to build and scale their cloud infrastructure, offering up to $120,000 in
Under 10 years old See eligibilityIBM Cloud for Startups
$120K$120K in IBM Cloud credits — enterprise-grade infrastructure, AI, and data services at zero cost for early-stage teams
Under 5 years old See eligibilityIBM for Startups
$120KPartner with IBM for Startups to accelerate innovation with IBM AI, scale globally, and present your solution to enterprises and investors—no cost, no equity re
Startups See eligibilityAWS Activate
$100KAWS Activate gives startups up to $100K+ in AWS credits via accelerator and VC partners — the Founders self-serve track offers up to $5K with no sponsor required.
Partner referral needed See eligibilityAiven Cluster Startup Program
$100KThe Aiven Cluster Startup Program offers up to $100,000 in credits to help startups build scalable data infrastructure using Aiven's fully managed services, exp
Under 7 years old See eligibilityDatadog for Startups
$100KUp to $100K or 1 year free Datadog Pro — observability and monitoring stack for Series A and earlier engineering teams
Raised under $15MPartner referral needed See eligibilityDigitalOcean Hatch
$100KDigitalOcean Hatch offers up to $100K in cloud credits for startups under $5M ARR — Droplets, Managed Databases, Spaces and App Platform covered by simple, developer-friendly infrastructure.
Raised under $50MPartner referral needed See eligibilityGrafana Labs Startup Program
$100KGet up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits for 12 months with enterprise plugins and 24/7 support
Startups See eligibilityNeon YC Startup Deal
$100KY Combinator startups can claim $100k worth of Neon credits for their first year with a competitor match guarantee.
Startups See eligibilityOpen Telekom Cloud TechBoost Program
$100KAccelerate your cloud-based startup with Deutsche Telekom's TechBoost program, offering up to €100,000 in Open Telekom Cloud credits, access to a vast B2B netwo
Startups See eligibilityTencent Cloud Startup Program
$100KEmpower startups to build and grow with the full force of Tencent Cloud. The program offers comprehensive support including financial vouchers, service discount
Under 5 years old See eligibilityVIP Digital Startup Program
$100KReceive up to $100,000 in free credits for your Vultr migration and enjoy up to 35% long-term discounts on cloud services, complemented by exclusive executive s
Startups See eligibilityAirbyte Y Combinator Startup Program
$75KAirbyte offers Y Combinator startups up to $75,000 in Airbyte Cloud credits along with free educational resources, workshops, swag, and priority support to acce
Students See eligibilityCloudways Startup Program
$50KEmpowering startups with managed hosting discounts, exclusive growth tools, and personalized mentorship for sustained business success.
Startups See eligibilityModal Startup Program
$50KUp to $50K in serverless GPU/CPU credits for early-stage AI startups building on Modal's elastic compute platform.
Startups See eligibilityConvex for Startups
$25KReactive backend-as-a-service credits for early-stage teams building full-stack apps on a TypeScript-first platform
Startups See eligibilityRender for Startups
$25KRender for Startups hands early-stage teams managed cloud credits so infra stops eating the runway.
Startups See eligibilityAppwrite Startups Program
$20KThe Appwrite Startups Program supports early-stage startups with a complete backend solution, offering $20,000 in cloud credits for Appwrite Scale for 12 months
Under 10 years old See eligibilityDigitalOcean Open Source Credits
$20KDigitalOcean offers grants of credits to open source projects to help with their development, infrastructure, and testing needs.
Osss See eligibilityPulumi for Startups
$10KPulumi for Startups offers up to $10,000 in Pulumi Credits and exclusive technical support to help pre-Series A companies scale their cloud infrastructure effic
Startups See eligibilitySunrise Startup Program
$10KCloudzy's Sunrise startup program empowers early-stage startups with up to $8,000 in cloud VPS credits in the first year, a 30% rebate on VPS purchases in the s
Under 5 years old See eligibilityAkamai $100 Free Trial & Business Credits
$5KSign up for a new Akamai Connected Cloud account and receive $100 in free credits. A valid payment method is required to verify your identity, but you won't be
Startups See eligibilityCloudinary for Startups
$2KCloudinary's startup program turns image and video headaches into a free media-management runway for early-stage teams.
Startups See eligibilityEstuary Flow Startup Program
$2KGet $2,000 in free credits for Estuary Flow's Cloud plan over 12 months, plus complimentary email and Slack-based technical support and access to step-by-step t
Startups See eligibilityFramer Startup Offer
$2KEmpowering early-stage startups with a $2000 credit package: $1,000 for hiring a vetted Framer Expert via Contra and $1,000 for Framer hosting and maintenance,
Startups See eligibilityTiDB Cloud Serverless Credits for Open-Source Heroes
$2KReceive up to $2,000 in free TiDB Cloud Serverless credits for open-source contributors to build scalable, innovative applications.
Osss See eligibilityScalingo Startup Program
$2KEligible startups receive up to €1,800 in hosting credits (up to €200/month for 9 months), priority developer support, and GitOps-powered continuous deployment
Startups See eligibilityUpstash Open Source Program
$1KServerless Redis/Kafka/QStash costs covered up to $1,000 a month for open-source projects — effectively a $12K/year infrastructure grant.
Osss See eligibilityMeteor Cloud Galaxy Professional Plan
$600Get $600 in credits for 1 year on Galaxy, the only cloud platform built specifically for Meteor.js applications with auto-scaling and professional DevOps featur
Raised under $50M See eligibilityHeroku Open Source Software Credit Program
$500Receive monthly platform credits for 12 months designed to support open source software projects hosted on Heroku.
Osss See eligibilityMux for Startups
$500Get a minimum of $500 in Mux video credits, free video analytics, and expert onboarding support to build and scale live and on-demand streaming.
Raised under $15MPartner referral needed See eligibilityCockroachDB Cloud Free Trial
$400New organizations receive $400 in free credits to trial CockroachDB Cloud, available across all cluster plans.
New customers onlyPartner referral needed See eligibilityAWS Rapid Ramp Credits
$300Small businesses can apply for $300 in AWS credits to quickly test and validate their cloud workloads.
Startups See eligibilityGoogle Cloud $300 Trial
$300New GCP customers can receive $300 in credit to explore and deploy a range of Google Cloud products, plus additional perks for verified business accounts.
Startups See eligibilityOracle Cloud Free Tier
$300Oracle Cloud Free Tier enables users to build, test, and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud for free, starting with a US$300 free trial and continuing with a s
Startups See eligibilityVultr
$300Vultr is one of the largest independent IaaS providers — VPS, bare metal, NVIDIA H100 / A100 / GH200 GPU compute, Managed Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage across 32 global data centres. New accounts get $300 in cloud credits.
Startups See eligibilityCivo Free Trial $250
$250Get $250 free Civo credit for 1 month to explore managed Kubernetes, cloud services, and more. Enjoy blazing fast cluster deployment, expert mentorship, and fre
Startups See eligibilityInfluxDB $250 Trial
$250Enjoy a $250 credit for 30 days to explore InfluxDB Cloud Serverless, a fully-managed, elastic, and pay-as-you-go time-series database optimized for smaller wor
Startups See eligibilityAzure $200 Trial
$200Azure's free account offers new users $200 in credits to explore and build on the platform within 30 days, plus 12 months of free use of 20+ popular services.
Startups See eligibilityDigitalOcean $200 Free Trial
$200Start your free trial with a $200 credit for 60 days. A valid credit card is required, but you won't be charged unless you exceed the free credit or continue af
Startups See eligibilityNeon $100 Credits
$100Get $100 in Neon credits to try out their serverless Postgres database platform for free.
Startups See eligibilityNamecheap Education Program
$50University students get a free .ME domain for one year plus GitHub Pages hosting and professional tools to kickstart their online presence
Students See eligibilityBrowserless Free Tier
$20Get 1,000 free monthly requests for headless browser automation including web scraping, PDF generation, and screenshot capture with zero infrastructure setup
Startups See eligibilityCloudflare R2 Storage Free Tier
$8Cloudflare R2 Storage offers a permanently free allowance of S3-compatible object storage, operations, and zero-egress data transfer so teams can test and launc
Startups See eligibilityAgora for Startups
Agora for Startups turns minutes of live video into product — without burning runway on real-time infrastructure
Startups See eligibilityCleura Startup Program
European open-source cloud credits for early-stage startups that need GDPR-native OpenStack infrastructure
Osss See eligibilityClickHouse Cloud Startup Program
Real-time analytics database credits for early-stage startups building data-heavy products
Startups See eligibilityConfluent for Startups
Managed Kafka and Flink free for up to a year — serious infrastructure if you are doing anything event-driven or real-time AI.
New customers onlyPartner referral needed See eligibilityCoreWeave Ventures / Startup Accelerator
GPU-first cloud credits built for AI startups that need real NVIDIA horsepower, not a generic $100K voucher.
Startups See eligibilityDatadog for Startups Program
Real-time performance monitoring at startup-friendly cost. Datadog offers a comprehensive Startup Program with dedicated support, technical training, and access
Raised under $50MUnder 5 years oldPartner referral needed See eligibilityGumlet Startup Credits Program
Gumlet's SCP enables startups to deliver optimized video and image content across platforms at half the cost.
Under 4 years old See eligibilityNVIDIA Inception
NVIDIA Inception is free for AI startups — hosted NIM API endpoints for prototyping, up to ~$100K in DGX Cloud credits (reported), $10K in DLI training, preferred GPU pricing, and partner cloud credits like AWS Activate up to $100K.
Startups See eligibilityNeo4j AuraDB Free Plan
Free forever graph database with 50,000 nodes, 175,000 relationships, and Neo4j Bloom included - no credit card required
Startups See eligibilityNeo4j Startup Program
The Neo4j Startup Program supports innovative startups by providing access to the world's leading graph database and advanced graph technology tools, enabling s
Startups See eligibilityOVHcloud Start
OVHcloud Start 'n' Scale gives EU startups up to €100K in cloud credits — strong GDPR-native infrastructure with data centres in France, Germany, the UK and beyond.
Startups See eligibilityOVHcloud Startup Program
Accelerate development with up to €100,000 free cloud credits
Startups See eligibilityPlanetScale for Startups
Serverless MySQL credits for early-stage startups — Vitess-powered scaling without the DBA bill
Partner referral needed See eligibilityRunpod Startup Program
GPU cloud credits and discounted on-demand pricing for early-stage AI startups training and serving models.
Startups See eligibilityScaleGrid Startup Program
Get started with the ScaleGrid Startup Program and enjoy a 50% discount on fully managed, BYOC hosting plans for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB for 12 mo
Raised under $1.5M See eligibilityScaleway Startup Program
Get up to €36,000 cost-coverage for cloud services with free consulting support from solution architects and access to a 800+ startup community
Startups See eligibilityScaleway Startup Program for NVIDIA Inception Members
Exclusive partnership offering up to €42,000 in cloud credits with NVIDIA-optimized infrastructure
Startups See eligibilitySnowflake for Startups
Free Snowflake usage credits on your first contract, plus an optional accelerator with mentorship, GTM support, and a shot at investment.
Partner referral needed See eligibilitySynadia Free Trial
The Synadia Evaluation Agreement provides a 60-day trial of the Synadia Platform for internal evaluation purposes.
Startups See eligibilityTinybird Open Source Program
Real-time analytics backend at 80% off for six months (then 20% forever) for active open-source projects with 25+ GitHub stars.
Osss See eligibilityTurso for Startups
Free credits on Turso's SQLite-compatible edge database for venture-backed startups, with architecture reviews and early access to new features.
Startups See eligibilityTwentysix Cloud Acceleratooor Web3 Startup Program
Develop your project, launch it on aleph.im, and benefit from community recognition. Access up to $1M ALEPH credits for 1 year to deploy decentralized VMs, stor
Under 5 years old See eligibilityVast.ai Startup Program
GPU compute credits on Vast.ai's marketplace for early-stage AI startups building training and inference workloads.
Startups See eligibilityVultr Startup Program
Free cloud credits for eligible startups on Vultr — high-performance compute, GPUs, and global infrastructure to build and scale without the early cloud bill.
Raised under $15MPartner referral needed See eligibilityNo programme matches that search. Browse every credit type.
It varies per programme, which is why every card shows its own gate. The recurring conditions are a funding ceiling, a company-age limit, and a referral from an approved VC or accelerator. Cloud Provider Credits programmes are aimed at startups that need compute, storage, and bandwidth.
Usually yes — they are separate vendors with separate criteria, and stacking cloud, AI and SaaS credits is the normal outcome for a funded startup. What you cannot usually do is claim the same vendor twice, or claim after you have already been a paying customer.
You land on standard list pricing for whatever usage you have by then, which is frequently the largest bill the company has ever had. Treat a credit as a runway extension with a known end date, not as a discount.
Because the vendor does not publish one. 49 of 73 cloud provider credits programmes state a figure; the rest are listed without one rather than with a number we made up.