Investors matter less than ever. Credits matter more
The brands and tools you need to build a company now hand out free credits and cash to the teams that use them: cloud, AI models, payments, analytics, CRM. A founder who claims them needs fewer employees and less cash, and gets more compute, more credits and more runway out of the same budget.
Add the programs up and one account can collect more than $3M in credits, grants and discounts. That is why The AI Corner now includes all 28 of them in the premium subscription, yearly plan included.
What premium includes
▫️ All 28 perks worth $3M+, listed in the Perks section of the homepage
▫️ Every resource library: AI Agents, AI Tools & Models, Business & Investing, Claude & Anthropic, Prompting & Context Engineering, The Corner Partner Program
▫️ Premium kits, prompts and playbooks: Excel models, Claude prompts, agent playbooks and decision frameworks
Premium is the way in, and right now it comes with a limited 50% offer.
together with Outskill
Astra now runs your computer for you, and its users finish work 5x faster
Its 3-hour Astra AI Workshop runs live this Saturday at 10 AM ET, a $395 session that’s free for the next 48 hours.
▫️ Build custom GPTs, voice agents and AI workflows with mentors who use Astra and 15 other AI tools
▫️ Leave with $5,000+ in resources, including a Prompt Bible and a roadmap to monetize with AI
▫️ Get a personalised AI toolkit builder for your own work
The 28 perks, ranked by value
Dollar amounts come first, followed by the free plans and trials.
▫️ Ramp: $350,000+ in startup perks
Spend management software with a bundle of startup discounts and credits across the tools most companies buy in year one.
▫️ Google Cloud: up to $350,000 in credits
Credits for compute, storage and AI workloads, sized to the stage of your startup.
▫️ Cloudflare: $10,000 to $350,000 in credits
Hosting, security and edge compute credits, with the amount depending on your funding stage.
▫️ Databricks: up to $200,000 in credits
Credits for the data and AI platform used to train and serve models on company data.
▫️ Microsoft for Startups: up to $150,000
Azure credits to build and scale your product.
▫️ Datadog: up to $100,000 in credits
Monitoring and observability credits for keeping production healthy.
▫️ PostHog: $50,000 in credits
Product analytics, session replays and feature flags in one place.
▫️ Runware: up to $30,000 in API credits
API credits for generating images and video inside your product.
▫️ Vercel: up to $30,000 in credits
Credits to deploy and host web apps and AI products.
▫️ Salesforce: $25,000 in CRM and cloud services
A CRM and cloud services package to run sales from day one.
▫️ Perplexity: 3 months of Enterprise Pro + $5,000 in API credits
Three months of Enterprise Pro for research, plus $5,000 in API credits to build with.
▫️ Stripe Atlas: $2,500 in Stripe credits
Incorporate a company through Atlas and receive $2,500 in Stripe credits.
▫️ Nebius AI Builder Program: credits, compute grants and founder funding
$250 in listed partner credits ($25 Nebius, $25 Tavily, $100 LangSmith, $100 Toloka and Tandem) plus a builder community. European open-source builders can apply for compute grants and founder funding through the program’s $10M expansion with NVIDIA and Accel.
▫️ Vanta: up to $1,000 in startup perks
Startup perks on the compliance automation platform that gets you audit-ready.
▫️ HubSpot: up to 90% off for startups
Up to 90% off the CRM, marketing and sales suite for startups.
▫️ Claude for Startups: a free year of Claude Team
A free year of Claude Team for your whole startup.
▫️ Build your startup on AWS
Amazon’s startup program for building on AWS.
▫️ ElevenLabs Startup Grants: 33 million free characters
33 million free characters of AI voice generation through the startup grants.
▫️ Stripe Startups: 12 months of fee credits
Twelve months of fee credits on payment processing.
▫️ NVIDIA Inception: free program for AI startups
NVIDIA’s free program for AI startups.
▫️ Carta: free cap table and equity management
A free cap table and equity management for founders.
▫️ Attio: try it free
A free trial of the CRM built for modern teams.
▫️ ElevenLabs: free plan with 10,000 monthly credits
10,000 free credits every month for realistic AI voices, narration and dubbing.
▫️ Gamma: free AI presentations from a prompt
Free AI presentations, docs and websites generated from a prompt.
▫️ Emergent: 10 free credits every month
Turn a text prompt into a working app, with 10 free credits every month.
▫️ Notion: free plan + Notion AI trial
A free plan plus a trial of Notion AI.
▫️ Aircall: 14-day free trial
A 14-day free trial of the phone system for sales and support teams.
▫️ LearnWorlds: 14-day free trial
A 14-day free trial of the platform for building and selling online courses.
How to claim all 28 perks
▫️ Become a premium subscriber (yearly or monthly) with the limited 50% offer
▫️ Open the Perks section from the homepage
▫️ Pick a perk and use its claim link; each company runs its own approval
One premium subscription: 28 perks worth $3M+ and every resource library
Know a founder or builder who could use this? Send them this post.
AWS credits only work if you're a partner - how does one go about accessing the 200k in credits via your listing?
Aggressive credit accumulation is the smartest way to subsidize the high cost of building security infrastructure today. Founders who treat these grants as pure capital rather than operational runway will gain a massive speed advantage in testing detection models. Once the initial infrastructure is funded, the real work shifts toward refining the logic behind the automated response. My recent analysis shows that even basic tools become dangerous weapons when they are pointed at the right architectural vulnerabilities. Scaling your defensive posture requires this exact blend of cheap compute and sharp, intent-driven engineering.
https://cyrilsimonnet.substack.com/p/google-is-building-a-lock-picker?utm_source=substor&utm_medium=substack&utm_campaign=comment