Free credits and free tiers for model APIs: LLMs, embeddings, speech and vision, from the labs and the inference clouds. Every offer is checked against its official page.
OpenAI makes the GPT models and sells access to them through its API. Startups backed by its partner VCs can get free API credits, possible rate limit upgrades, time with solutions engineers and events.
Verified Oct 231 post on X
AssemblyAI sells speech AI APIs that turn live or recorded audio into text. Its startup program gives 12 months of recurring free credits on Speech-to-text, Streaming speech-to-text and Dictation, plus discounted pricing, forward deployed engineer help and co-marketing.
Verified Oct 231 post on X
Perch AI's free Starter plan gives a monthly hosted-usage allowance and a rotating set of free models, currently Laguna S 2.1, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash, plus MiniMax M3.1 Flash for a limited time.
Verified Oct 231 post on X
$20per month, no card
Deepgram credits for its speech-to-text, text-to-speech and Voice Agent APIs, plus invite-only events, engineering support groups and the Deepgram startup community.
Verified Oct 231 post on X
$100kup to, 12 months
Baseten's research lab released two open-source decision models, mammoth-1 and elephant-1, and made them free to try for one week on Baseten Model APIs from Oct 21.
Released Oct 21Verified Oct 231 post on X
Freefor 1 week
Meta's ten-day virtual AI hackathon (Oct 26 to Nov 4) gives each selected participant $150 in Meta Model API credits to build with, plus a shot at a $1M prize pool.
Released Oct 13Verified Oct 231 post on X
$150in API credits
Max and Team subscribers get a monthly Claude API balance to build their own apps and agents.
Released Oct 7Verified Oct 232 posts on X
$200/moup to, with Max 20x
A year of voice AI usage for early startups building with ElevenLabs.
Released Aug 12, 2025Verified Oct 23
$5.5k+33M characters
Anthropic's founder program with partner perks, API credits, and events. The current cohort is full.
Verified Oct 232 posts on X
$45k+ up to $100k via VC
One credit balance for Grok, Grok Build, Grok Bot, and the Grok API, paid out in two stages.
Verified Oct 237 posts on X
Inference credits that work across 500+ models through one API.
Verified Oct 23
$3kup to, inference
Six free months of Claude's top Max tier for people who maintain widely used open source.
Verified Oct 232 posts on X
6 moClaude Max 20x
Anthropic's help center now says the Agent SDK credit announced in June isn't available. The monthly API credits above replace it.
Verified Oct 23
Some promos are so fresh they might not be available in all regions yet. Looking at you, EU 🇪🇺