The biggest free AI allowances right now: 100M one-time tokens at Inception Labs, 1M tokens a day at Cerebras, and up to $350k in startup credits
Asked (summary):
Which AI companies offer a significant free tier or big trial — like OpenRouter's 1,000 requests/day, Colab, Kaggle or Lightning AI free instances, Google AI Studio's 500 RPD, or Inception Labs' 100M free tokens? Look at ex-founder teams and big seed rounds — they usually offer a lot of credits at the start.
This shortlist covers 45 extracted rows, consolidated into 16 distinct offers across three lanes — free model APIs, free compute/hosting, and application-based startup credits — as documented on the open web on 28 Sep 2026. It is a ranked shortlist, not an exhaustive universe: offers change frequently and some limits are published only inside logged-in consoles.
Tier board — what you actually get, by lane
Badges: recurring renews on its own · one-time a starter grant that runs out · apply maximums awarded case by case. Source tags: official page vs third-party guide — reconfirm before planning spend.
Read the fine print
OpenRouter's 1,000 requests/day on free models requires having purchased at least $10 of credits; otherwise the pool is 50 requests/day.
25 of Lightning AI's 30 starter credits unlock only after adding a card, credits expire in 12 months, and the ~80 GPU hours are on interruptible machines.
Google's 500-RPD figures apply to Search and Maps grounding tools, not necessarily general Gemini generation; free-tier content may be used to improve Google's products.
Colab publishes no fixed GPU allowance — quotas fluctuate, are not guaranteed, and free runtimes can be terminated without warning.
Startup awards ($350k Google, $200k AWS, $150k Microsoft, $100k+ NVIDIA, $25–100k+ Anthropic) are maximums decided case by case, not guaranteed amounts — and several figures here come from third-party guides, not official pages.
Findings
Only two self-serve API tiers in the shortlist publish a hard daily token number: Cerebras' 1M tokens/day and Inception Labs' one-time 100M-token grant — everything else is rate limits or "generous". inference-docs.cerebras.ai
Inception Labs is the clearest match for the "well-funded newcomer gives big credits" heuristic in these rows: every new account gets the one-time 100M-token credit, shared across all models. docs.inceptionlabs.ai
Lightning AI is the only free compute tier here with a quantified GPU allowance — roughly 75 T4, 31 L4, 10 A100-40GB or 5 A100-80GB hours from 30 starter credits — while Colab, Modal and Paperspace leave amounts unstated. lightning.ai
The application-based pool dwarfs the self-serve lane in dollar terms — up to $350,000 from Google Cloud for AI-first startups over two years — but it is a maximum granted at Google's discretion, not an entitlement. cloud.google.com
All 45 source rows
Lane
Provider
Type
Offer
Limits & conditions
Source
Method: 45 shortlist rows extracted from provider pricing pages, docs and third-party credit guides during live web research on 28 Sep 2026, after scanning 5,973 URL-deduplicated candidate pages (571 API, 523 compute and 561 startup-program rows extracted before ranking; stream counts may overlap). Duplicate extracts of the same pricing page (notably Lightning AI and Google) are consolidated into one card each on the tier board; the table keeps every row. Numbers measure the allowance each page states — tokens, requests/day, GPU hours or credit dollars — and startup figures are program maximums. Long offer and limit texts are truncated for space; follow the source links for full terms.