Big tech companies give away free money to people building things. It's called credits — a balance on your account that pays your bills for servers, databases and AI until it runs out. There are 60 such programmes here. Most founders never hear about any of them.
Every entry says the date it was checked and where its numbers came from. Programmes that have quietly died stay on the page, marked, so you don't waste an afternoon on one.
Two to five clicks. No email, no account, and nothing leaves your browser. If a word here is unfamiliar, tap what do these mean? — no question is a silly one.
Building a company — you're starting a business, or already run one. Even if it's just you and an idea right now, pick this.
Public code project — you wrote code that you put on the internet for anyone to use and copy, usually on GitHub. This is what "open source" means. Companies give these away free because free tools make their platform popular.
Just an idea so far — you haven't registered a company yet, or you registered it but there's no website or product. Completely normal. Pick this and we'll show you the short list of things to put in place first.
My own money — the company exists and you pay for everything yourself, from savings or from what customers pay you. The industry word for this is bootstrapped. Most founders in the world are here.
I'm in an accelerator — you got into a programme like Y Combinator, Techstars or a local equivalent. They give you a small amount of money, advice and contacts over about three months, in exchange for a small share of your company.
Investors put money in — a venture capital firm (a "VC") or a wealthy individual (an "angel") gave you money in exchange for owning part of your company. This unlocks the biggest credit amounts, because the cloud companies trust the investor's judgement.
This means total money customers paid you over the last year, before costs. If you're not selling anything yet, that's $0 — pick Under $1M. Nearly every programme here is aimed at companies under $1M, so this rarely counts against you.
On GitHub, a star is a bookmark — anyone who likes your project can click a star on it. The number is public and sits at the top of your project page. It's the rough measure companies use to judge how popular a project is.
Under 100 is completely fine. Plenty of the tools here ask only that your code is public.
A licence is a short text file in your project saying what other people are allowed to do with your code. Without one, legally nobody may use it.
Most companies here require a standard, recognised licence — MIT and Apache 2.0 are the common ones, and MIT is the simplest. Adding one takes about a minute on GitHub, and it unlocks roughly a third more programmes on this page.
Almost every company on this page asks for the same five basic things before they'll give you anything. None of them need funding, permission, or much money. Once these exist, most of the list opens up.
Other directories quote you the headline number. That figure is almost always the top tier, gated behind a VC or accelerator introduction. The middle number only counts tiers a company has actually published as self-serve — for the rest we count zero rather than guess. It's a guide from published criteria, not a guarantee. Your matches are highlighted below.