If you are building with AI, the fastest way to keep your costs near zero is to start with the providers that give you free credits just for signing up — no application, no pitch deck, no funding round. This guide covers the ones that actually pay out on signup in 2026, what you get, and how to stretch them.
For the always-current list with apply links and a difficulty rating on each, browse the Perkstack catalog. Below is the playbook.
What "free credits on signup" actually means
There are three different things providers call "free", and they are worth keeping straight:
- Signup credits — a one-time dollar grant added to your account automatically when you create it (for example, $5 to $300). These are the highest-value, lowest-effort offers.
- Free tiers — an ongoing monthly allowance you never pay for (rate-limited), rather than a dollar grant.
- Startup programs — large credit packages ($10k to $350k) that require an application and usually some funding or an accelerator tie.
This post focuses on the first two: the self-serve offers anyone can get today.
LLM API providers that give signup credits
- SambaNova Cloud — about $5 in free API credits the moment you create an account, no card required.
- xAI (Grok API) — promotional credits on signup, with extra monthly credits if you opt into data sharing.
- Fireworks AI — a small starter credit to test fast inference across its model library.
- Novita AI — runs a referral program that grants the new user $10 in credits when you sign up through a referral link.
If you mainly need raw tokens for free, the free tiers are often more valuable than a one-time grant: Cerebras offers up to a million tokens a day, Google AI Studio (Gemini) gives an indefinite free tier with no billing setup, and Groq, Mistral and Cohere all offer no-card free tiers for prototyping.
Voice, image and infrastructure credits
- Deepgram — $200 in credits for speech-to-text and text-to-speech.
- AssemblyAI — $50 in credits for transcription and speech understanding.
- fal.ai — around $20 in credits across image, video and GPU models.
- Baseten — $30 in credits to deploy and test model inference.
- DigitalOcean — $200 in credit (valid 60 days) for new accounts.
- Oracle Cloud — a $300 trial credit plus a genuinely generous permanent Always Free tier.
- Modal — $30 of compute credits every month on the free plan.
For the full, dated list — including which ones route through a referral link — see the catalog and filter to Free perks.
How to stretch signup credits
- Start on the free tiers, save the dollar grants. Prototype on Gemini, Groq or Cerebras free tiers, and spend your one-time DigitalOcean or Deepgram credits only when you are running real workloads.
- Pick the cheapest provider per model. The same open model can be 5–10x cheaper on one host than another. Our price trackers show the cheapest verified endpoint per model, re-pulled weekly.
- Watch expiry dates. Most signup credits expire in 30–90 days. Do not claim them until you are ready to use them.
- Stack, do not duplicate. Use one provider for inference, another for storage, another for voice — each with its own free credit.
The bottom line
You can run a real AI prototype for months without paying a cent if you combine signup credits with free tiers and always route to the cheapest provider. Create a free Perkstack account to unlock every apply link and the step-by-step claim guides, then start with the offers above.
Related reading: How to Use AI for Free and The Cheapest Way to Run LLMs.