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!!

Hi!
Are there any companies offering free or discounted AI credits (like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for early-stage startups? Would love to hear about any options out there!

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.

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!