RunPod Startup Program
$1,000 in free RunPod GPU credits for pre-Series A AI startups
What you get from RunPod Startup Program for free
Overview
The RunPod Startup Program offers GPU cloud credits to AI startups through two tracks. The Starter tier provides $1,000 in free credits with self-serve onboarding. The Growth tier is not a free offer: it requires a $50,000 upfront commitment and adds $25,000 in bonus credits, for $75,000 of total spending power under a 12-month agreement.
Free Credits (Starter)
- $1,000 in credits with no upfront cost and self-serve onboarding.
- Aimed at pre-Series A startups with a working product and near-term GPU needs, and primarily for new RunPod customers.
- Usable across Pods, Serverless, Instant Clusters, Public Endpoints, and Storage.
- No GPU-type restrictions are listed.
What Credits Cover
Credits apply to RunPod's full platform: on-demand GPU Pods on Secure and Community Cloud with per-second billing, auto-scaling Serverless endpoints for inference, multi-node Instant Clusters for distributed training, and network volumes plus S3-compatible object storage. Available GPUs include H100, H200, A100 80GB, L40S, RTX 6000 Ada, RTX 4090, and AMD MI300X.
How to Get Started
- Apply at runpod.io/startup-program with company details, funding stage, investors, team, and workload description.
- Select the Starter or Growth tier on the form.
- If accepted for Starter, the $1,000 credit is applied to your account and you can deploy immediately.
Before you claim
- Funding stage: Pre-Series A startups
- Other: With a working product and near-term GPU needs
- Verification: Apply via the 'Apply now' button on the program page
- Who can claim: Pre-Series A startups with a working product and near-term GPU needs; venture backing strongly preferred.
- Payment card: Not needed.
- Account: Sign up with the provider.
Key limits
- Starter: $1,000 in credits to get started
- Aimed at pre-Series A startups with a working product; primarily new customers
- Venture backing strongly preferred; applications reviewed holistically
- Growth tier requires a $50,000 deposit under a 12-month agreement ($25,000 bonus)
Eligibility and Applying
RunPod reviews applications holistically and prefers venture-backed teams; it is primarily designed for new customers. Existing customers and bootstrapped or pre-product teams are directed to standard pay-as-you-go access instead.
As the provider states it on the date shown above. The provider decides who qualifies.
Not eligible? 3 alternatives open to everyone
This offer is only for startups. These offers have no student, startup, nonprofit or country requirement.
- Anthropic Academy free courses — Free AI courses from AnthropicAnthropic · Verified · No card
- Anyscale $100 Free Signup Credit — $100 in Anyscale credits for CPU and GPU compute on Ray, no cardauthkit.anyscale.com · Verified · No card
- Hetzner Community Tutorial Credits — Up to EUR 50 in Hetzner Cloud credit per accepted community tutorialgithub.com · Verified · No card
Check everything you qualify for — five questions, no signup.
History
Verified by a person on · last automated check : no change found. Automated findings never change this page until a person confirms them (how we verify).
- Terms updatedby a person · Content updated from https://www.runpod.io/startup-program (checked 2026-10-21).
- Verifiedby a person
- Listedby a person
Full history with screenshots · How we verified this offer · Sitewide changelog
Still works?
Work at runpod.io? Add an aifree.dev badge
<a href="https://aifree.dev/offer/runpod-startup-program"><img src="https://aifree.dev/badge/runpod-startup-program" alt="RunPod Startup Program on aifree.dev" height="20"></a>[](https://aifree.dev/offer/runpod-startup-program)Appears in
Related offers
Referred user must spend $10 before the bonus is granted
$1,000,000 annual pool across CNCF projects
$650K+ in AI perks from day one (NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, Nebius, GCP, Azure and others)
No API credits included
12-month discount, once
Manual email-based approval