I don't remember seeing this. I guess its display is part of the new rollouts today?

What are credit grants? Does this mean I have $18 worth of free credits before I start paying? I did ask ChatGPT and it gave me info, but I'm just unclear how this works into what I actually pay monthly.

Hey guys - I know that there was (sometime ago) the possibility of getting your hands on some free credits for OpenAI api. I want to start working with n8n and I'm quite strapped for cash now.

I haven't seen any kind of new offers on the OpenAI chat and I was wondering if the promos are off the table or are available in some dark corner of the internet?

Thanks!

EDIT: Thank you all for your great inputs!

Hey there,
I recently discovered Microsoft for Startups, it's pure gold for early stage Saas founders, and it looks like most of us don't know it even exists!

The context*:* I'm building droone.co , a Saas that helps product manager and Saas founders to put their competitor monitoring on auto-pilot.
e.g. 🚨 "Competitor X shipped Y new feature", 100% automated

We heavily rely on LLMs, and notably on GPT4 to train our models. And as an early stage founder, I searched for way to reduce my costs. And I found Microsoft for Startups Founder hub.

It's a Microsoft program that provides ton of helps and free services for early stage startups. I recently applied with droone.co and was accepted. I now have access to:

• $2500 openAI credits for free

• $25K fee-frees (it's only for new clients, so don't burn this joker too soon)

• Tons of Azure credits

• A lot of others things, such as LK premium with huge discounts, github enterprise and 20+ others benefits

I don't know if it's hard to be accepted, but here is the exact process that helped me to join the program, if it can help 🙏
1 - Go to https://www.microsoft.com/fr/startups and apply with LinkedIn.
2 - Fill the form with sharp answers. Here are mine

tell us about your founder journey

I have been a Saas product manager for 2 years, in what could be a great example of what “red ocean” means: the sales automation apps.
A context where your competitors can ship 10x more than you, and reduce price even more, just to steal market shares.
And after discussing with multiple fellow product people in other areas, I realized that we are all bad when it comes to competitor monitoring. While it's key to understand our competitive landscape.
I’m here to help them change that :-)

provide a description of your startup of project

Droone is the first automated competitor monitoring tool for Saas product teams. We rely on AI and multiple-source monitoring to notify our users when their competitor do something important: ship a new feature, fundraise, start hiring, change their pricing...
We put competitor monitoring on auto-pilot, to help product people focus on their priority task without living in an unknown competitors world.

Share a product demo

I shared this link => https://vimeo.com/907038123

(this video took me 1 hour to realise, I can make a step-by-step guide, tell me if you are interested!)

TL;DR

Microsoft Founders hub provides ton of helps and free services for early stage startups. I think it's a big missed opportunity to not join it, especially for Azure, openAI and Stripe benefits (which are used by I think 90% Saas projects overall).

It can make a huge difference and can definitely help you launching a Saas without spending money, hence reducing risks.

I hope it will help!!

Is the credit grant of 5$ to new users of the OpenAI API still a thing? Today I created an account just to play a little with the APIs but after the phone number verification a message popped up saying something like "because the number was associated to an existing account, no credit will be available". Obviously, I'm sure the number was not associated to any account, before. What could be happening?

Did openAI stopped giving free 5$ trails? I’ve been creating new accounts with new emails and phone numbers and use my credit card to add another 5$ so i get 10$ and can use GPT4, but now no matter what i do they stopped giving me the free 5$ trail, i even tried creating the new account with another phone and new number from one member of my family but the moment i create and account it says 0$ credit grant. Does anybody know if they stopped giving them to new accounts for good? Or is it a temporary thing?

People kept asking how I got all the free AI credits for my app, so I put everything in one place.

I kept seeing people say “use free credits” and never saw an actual list, so I spent way too long hunting them down. Sharing so you can skip the rabbit hole.

quick hits first, links right there so you do not have to google anything:

Microsoft for Startups - Founders Hub solo founder friendly, no investor needed at the beginning, gives you Azure credits you can use on Azure OpenAI plus GitHub etc https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups

AWS Activate startup focused AWS credits, smaller chunks if you are independent, bigger if you get into an accelerator or have a VC, having an LLC and real site helps a lot https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

Google Cloud AI Startup Program for AI first startups that already raised (seed/Series A), huge Google Cloud credits if you qualify, good if you want to live on Vertex AI and Gemini https://cloud.google.com/startup/ai

ElevenLabs Startup Grants if you are doing voice or conversational audio this is crazy useful, big pool of free characters for TTS and voice cloning for early stage teams https://elevenlabs.io/blog/elevenlabs-startup-grants-just-got-bigger-now-12-months-and-over-680-hours-of-conversational-ai-audio

Cohere Catalyst Grants API credits for research, public good and impact projects, especially if you are in academia or doing civic / nonprofit stuff https://cohere.com/research/grants

MiniMax free AI voice, music and LLM testing, you get a chunk of free monthly credits on the audio side so you can try voices and music before paying, defintely worth a spin if you need sound https://www.minimax.io/audio

if you want a bigger list of recources, sites like CreditForStartups keep updated directories of tools and credit bundles from clouds, dev tools, etc, but the ones above are the stuff I would hit first

I am using this whole free credit stack to build my app Dialed. it helps ADHD brains actually start tasks with short personalized pep talks instead of staring at the screen. a bit over 2,000 people are already using it to get themselves moving. if you deal with task paralysis or ADHD inertia, search Dialed on the App Store and try a pep talk next time your brain refuses to start something.

Hello!

I have seen that there are people who are receiving 10k of Openai credits from this Microsoft For Startup program. Could it be? Or does it have to be from another program?

And on the other hand, are they giving you the Openai credits? Or don’t they even answer you?

Greetings!

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to put this out for anyone who still doesn't know about the Microsoft for Startups program with which you can get $5000 in Azure Cloud services for FREE. The signup form is pretty straight forward and they usually review it in 2-3 days.

Also since Microsoft owns a very large part of OpenAI the credits are also available for the ChatGPT API. Amazing news for everyone building ChatGPT wrappers :)

Now, the program mentions you can get up to $150k, but they are tiered in different levels and personally just started out with the first level so not sure how one could access the rest.

If anyone has experience with the program would love to hear how it worked out for you.

I'm a bit confused about all of this. Let's say I create a brand new account and just add 5 bucks of openai API credits: do I need to pay for anything else or is this all I need to start using their API?

I would think that this is basically it, but when adding credits to my wallet it said that I also need a premium plan in order to use it. Is this premium plan the "default" chatgpt.com 20 dollars subscription?