| 500 Global | 1) No standalone public free cloud-credit program, free tier, or education license exists at 500 Global — the "Startup Cloud-Credit Programs (VC/Accelerator Funded)" front is realized only as bundled partner perks (the 500 FounderHub platform, 400+ perks, "$1M+ in credits" claim on the official Eurasia page) that are reachable exclusively by 500-affiliated founders; nothing is open to students or the general public. 2) Flagship deal restructured: the historical ~$50K–$100K for 5–7% (and 2025 third-party listings citing "$150K for 6%, $37.5K fee") is no longer published; the current official flagship page (read today, 2026-10-22) states "up to $50K right away, up to $1M more as you progress" with a $35K Phase 1 program fee — so known-so-far numbers are stale. 3) LatAm: the Nov 2025 call was "$300K for 10% to 5 startups" (contxto, Nov 11, 2025); the official page now shows a $300K investment commitment with a July 31, 2026 deadline, equity undisclosed. 4) Domain note: www.500global.com refused connections (ECONNREFUSED on a DigitalOcean IP, Oct 22, 2026) — the official site of record is 500.co; treat 500global.com as parked/unreliable. 5) No 2025–2026 sunset of the FounderHub perks platform itself; credit amounts are partner-controlled and unpublished. |
| a16z | a16z is a VC, not a SaaS provider: it has NO standalone free tier, trial, or education (.edu) license of its own. Every "free offer" routes through third-party provider programs where a16z acts as an investor/provider/referrer (AWS Activate, Microsoft for Startups, Alchemy) or through its own Speedrun residency. Active as of 2026-10-22: (1) a16z is a confirmed AWS Activate Provider — Portfolio tier is currently capped at up to $200K; self-funded (Founders) tier only up to $5K; AI-startup credits are invite-only. (2) a16z Speedrun is not sunset — SR008 is scheduled Feb 1 - Apr 16/18, 2027 in San Francisco, applications closing Nov 1, 2026. (3) The a16z x Alchemy onchain program is active but explicitly excludes teams that already received $5K+ in AWS credits (no double-dipping). NOT completed this session: verification of a16z's Microsoft for Startups / Azure (~$150K) referral leg — the Microsoft page 404'd and the shared web-search budget was exhausted, so that finding is low-confidence and should be re-verified. No student-specific free offer from a16z was found. |
| Adyen | For Adyen (Payments & Fintech Dev Tools), of the four requested categories only the free test/sandbox environment + test-mode API access is a genuine, currently-available free offer. Verifications (all done via WebFetch of official Adyen pages + Adyen's docs sitemap + two third-party directories; the second WebSearch hit was blocked because the session web-search budget was exhausted): (1) No perpetual FREE production tier - adyen.com/pricing is per-transaction (cards ~US$0.13 + Interchange++ + 0.60%), 'no setup fee / no monthly fees,' with a per-industry minimum invoice; published fees are indicative, not guaranteed. (2) No 'trial credits' program - Adyen's dev flow is the self-service test/sandbox, not a time-boxed product trial. (3) Startup program: the 'Adyen Accelerator' (impact/social startups, EMEA, 2021-2022, mentorship/visibility, no fee) has no publicly confirmed 2025-2026 cohort and appears dormant; an 'Adyen for Startups' credits offer exists only as an unconfirmed third-party listing. (4) No student/education license or .edu discount found anywhere on Adyen's site or docs. The Adyen developer-docs sitemap (docs.adyen.com) contains NO page matching 'startup,' 'student,' 'education,' 'trial,' or 'free credit.' No material 2025-2026 change was detected: the 'no monthly fee / per-transaction / free test environment' model persisted. |
| Airplane | FULLY SUNSET - nothing live as of 2026-10-22. Timeline (verified today via DNS, live probing and Wayback): (1) 2024-01-03: Airtable announces acquisition of Airplane in official blog 'Airtable acquires Airplane' (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240310140454/https://www.airplane.dev/blog/airtable); same post states 'we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1' and that new signups had already closed. (2) 2024-03-01: platform sunset date. (3) 2024-05-16: /startups already returning 404. (4) No 200-status HTML captures of any airplane.dev page (incl. subdomains) exist after mid-March 2024; all 2025-2026 captures are 301s. (5) As of 2026-10-22 the domain itself is lapsed/parked: authoritative Googledomains NS shows apex A-record 198.49.23.145 (NSI-style parking IP) and NXDOMAIN for www.airplane.dev; www paths serve self-referential 301 loops behind a 'Server: Squarespace' header, apex 301s to www - a broken-redirect parking loop, so even the parked page won't render. GitHub orgs 'rethink-dev' and 'getairplane' both 404. The team was absorbed into Airtable; Airtable did not continue Airplane as a standalone product on that domain. No education/student offer existed at any point: no /education, /students, or /student-programs pages in the archive and zero 'student'/'.edu' mentions on archived pricing/startup pages. Note the sunsetting happened in 2024, not 2025-2026; during 2025-2026 the domain simply went from dead to parked - no offer changes. All claims above therefore rely on archived copies of the official pages (read today), not on live ones, since the live pages no longer exist. |
| Airship | No verifiable free offer (free tier, trial credits, startup program, or education license) exists on Airship's official pages as of 2026-10-22. (1) The known 'Free tier: 100 MAU (Engage)' appears SUNKEN: the product name 'Engage' no longer appears anywhere on airship.com (checked nav, /pricing/, /docs/, homepage, /company/faqs/) — the product line was rebranded into 'Airship Experience Platform' (AXP) and 'Airship Essentials'. The current pricing page (https://www.airship.com/pricing/) lists only two tiers: AXP (enterprise, quote-form only) and Essentials (self-service registration at go.airship.com/accounts/onboarding/register/). No 'free', 'trial', '30 days', 'no credit card', or MAU figures appear anywhere on the page; the 'START WITH ESSENTIALS' CTA promises nothing about cost or trial. (2) The 'Airship guarantees results' promo (https://www.airship.com/lp/airship-results-guarantee/, reinforced by CEO blog post 2026-10-21) is an enterprise outcomes/money-back-style commitment, NOT a free offer; terms are not public. (3) No startup program and no education/student license were found on the current site. (4) The Essentials registration page is JS-rendered, so trial duration/credit-card requirements could not be verified from static fetch; if a trial exists it is not advertised with published terms. CAVEAT: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so I could NOT independently verify the exact sunset date of the legacy Engage 100-MAU free tier or scan for 2025-2026 announcements via search; absence claims are based on reading the official pages today (high confidence for absence-of-mention on the checked pages, medium for 'definitively sunset' since a trial may exist inside the unrendered registration flow). |
| Airtable | 2025-2026 changes: (1) Q2 2025 — Airtable discontinued the paid AI add-on; AI credits are now bundled into all plans (Free gets 500 credits/editor/month; paid tiers 7,500+). (2) Q3 2025 — ProductCentral add-on discontinued; Enterprise Scale Portals pricing moved to 'contact sales'. (3) Sep 2026 — a new 'automations per base' cap of 50 was imposed on ALL plans, then reversed two days later into tiered caps: 75 (Free) / 100 (Team) / 150 (Business) / 200 (Enterprise Scale) — automation RUN limits unchanged. (4) Airtable became part of Bending Spoons in Sept 2026 (per community announcements and third-party trackers) — program terms may shift; all offers above re-verified against official pages Oct 2026. (5) Third-party claim that the free record limit was 'cut from 1,200 to 1,000 in Feb 2026' (hackceleration) is unverified and contradicts the official 1,000-record limit that has stood since the 2023 pricing revamp — treat as noise. (6) 'Airtable Classrooms' is no longer a listed product; the current education offer set is the 120-day .edu Team trial + free Student plan (6-24 months) + 50% Education/Non-profit Team discount, all applied through support.airtable.com/articles/4920135568. Non-profit 50% Team discount exists in parallel but was out of scope (not a student/startup offer). |
| Airwallex | 2025-2026 changes: (1) PRICING RESTRUCTURE (Jul 2025): Airwallex moved to per-user pricing (Explore $0/user/mo, Grow $12/user/mo + platform fee, Accelerate custom); customers who signed up before June 1, 2025 were placed into fee-free Explore as of July 1, 2025. The older market-conditional 'free Explore' thresholds (AU A$5K/mo deposit or A$10K balance, else A$29; UK £10K, else £19) still appear for AU/UK/CA, while the US page now markets Explore as flat $0 with no minimum — the task's known fact ('$0 if deposit ≥$10K/mo or hold ≥$10K') reflects the older threshold model, now superseded on the US page. (2) STARTUP PROGRAM REFRAMED (29 Oct 2025): the global 'Airwallex for Startups' program was relaunched in Singapore with three pillars (stage-appropriate infrastructure, CFO Expert Panel, AI Sandbox) before expanding to the US/UK; the prior version's 'win a $10,000 local-currency business acceleration grant in select regions' was replaced by the current per-stage perk structure (US: $150K fee credits etc.). US program T&C last updated Sept 9, 2026, application window open through 31 Dec 2027. (3) LATITUDE 37 (30 Apr 2026): new A$100K equity-free grant for under-25 Australian AI founders — applications opened late May 2026, likely closed by today's date. (4) UoM partnership extended 24 Apr 2026 with a further ~A$2M; its 'Opportunity Fund' bursary has reached funding capacity and is closed. No Airwallex free offer for students was sunset, because none ever existed as a public product tier. |
| Aiven Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes that materially altered the free landscape: (1) 15 May 2025 — free-plan storage for PostgreSQL and MySQL reduced from 5GB to 1GB for all new and existing free services (changelog aiven.io/changelog/6ad6c429-6c1c-4418-abfb-2ca82f927414); no data loss, connections unchanged, but hobbyists needing more must move to paid 'hobbyist/Developer' plans. (2) Nov 12 / Dec 10 2025 — a new $5/month Developer tier launched for PostgreSQL and MySQL (1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, Basic support, services never auto-power-off, region area but not cloud selection); one changelog dated Nov 12 2025 says the Postgres Developer plan starts 'at $8 USD' while the Aiven blog states $5 — treat $5/month as the advertised starting price and verify in-console. (3) Dec 10 2025 — the Kafka free tier itself is new (previously Kafka had no $0 plan); before that date the free tier was PostgreSQL/MySQL/OpenSearch/Valkey only. (4) The startup program rebranded from 'Aiven Cluster Startup Program' to 'Aiven for Startups' (revamp in Aug 2023: age cap 5→7 years, funding cap Series A→B, new $12K non-partner tier; current form is aiven.io/startups). (5) One-off prize competitions, not recurring offers: $5,000 Free Kafka competition (closed 31 Jan 2026) and $1,000 Free Tier competition (closed 17 Apr 2026, winner announced 27 Apr 2026). Nothing was shut down in this window; the only reductions were the 2025 free-tier storage cut and Kafka's free-service-per-org limit (1). |
| Aiven Startup Program | No free offer was sunset in 2025–2026. The aiven.io/education URL 404s (no dedicated education/.edu license has ever been offered; students use the general Free Tier). A dedicated /startup-program and /blog/aiven-startup-program URLs 404; the live startup program lives at aiven.io/startups and is currently active (Typeform applications open). WebSearch budget was exhausted this session, so 2025–2026 change claims could not be verified via search; findings above were read directly from the live official pages (aiven.io/free-tier, aiven.io/pricing, aiven.io/developer-tier, aiven.io/startups) today, so current-state detail is high-confidence. The $300 new-account credit figure and the 30-day trial end-of-trial behavior (auto-charge vs downgrade vs data deletion) are not fully corroborated on the official pages — verify in-console before relying on them. |
| Akamai Linode | 2025 changes (verified against live pages on 2026-10-22): (1) Rebrand — Linode is now 'Akamai Cloud' following Akamai's 2025 acquisition of Linode; linode.com/pricing (and the whole marketing site) now 301-redirects to akamai.com/cloud, and signups still run through login.linode.com. The old standalone 'Linode $100/30-day trial' link (linode.com/trial) now 404s — the trial is now the 'US$100 in credits' promo on Akamai Cloud pages, with the FAQ example stating a 60-day window (older promos were 30 days; ~30-60 days is the right mental model, but the exact window is per your signup/confirmation). (2) No perpetual free VPS tier has ever existed at Linode — the only recurring 'free' element on the pricing page is Object Storage's monthly free outbound egress allowance before overage (quantity not quantified on the page). (3) learn.linode.com (Linode Academy) no longer resolves (DNS ENOTFOUND) — training content moved to training.akamai.com/learn; there is no student/educator free-hosting license at Akamai Cloud today, so any 2025/2026 source claiming a 'Linode free student plan' is outdated. (4) WebSearch was unavailable in this session (budget exhausted), so corroboration relied on official pages fetched today; the $100 offer's exact day count remains a FAQ example rather than a hard-published policy figure. |
| Algolia Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes: On October 2, 2025 Algolia launched the Grow Plus plan, bringing AI search capabilities (AI Synonyms, AI Ranking, Advanced Personalization, Query Categorization, Collections, 90-day analytics retention) to the self-serve/pay-as-you-go lineup at $1.75/1K requests - a material expansion of the paid tiers; Grow plan terms were last updated June 30, 2025 (previous version Sept 25, 2024). No core free offer was sunset or reduced in 2025-2026: the Free plan still lists 10K requests / 50K records / 5K recommend / 5K crawls with no credit card required, matching the known figures. There is no dedicated student/education license: /education and /for-education both return 404 and the pricing page exposes no student URL; the only education-adjacent item is 'Algolia Academy' resources offered as a perk inside the Startup program. One unresolved on-page discrepancy in the Startup program: the main block says <7 years old and <US$15M funding, while its FAQ says <3 years old and <US$5M funding. Note: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so the startup/education verification relied on direct WebFetch of official Algolia pages (fetched 2026-10-22), which is the intended high-confidence path. |
| Anthropic | As of 2026-10-22, confirmed today on official pages: (1) Claude Startups was EXPANDED on Oct 6, 2026 (free year of Claude Team up to 5 Premium seats + $1,000 one-time API credit + $45K Startup Stack + up to $100K via partner VCs), but within days (~Oct 9–13) Anthropic PAUSED the free Team/credit offers after ~21x expected applications ('currently over capacity'; all applications re-reviewed), and the official page now (Oct 22) says 'Our current cohort is now full, and we're not accepting new applications right now' — the program continues for existing members; the benefit line items were dropped from the live page. Next cohort is TBA (newsletter signup is the only official channel). (2) The original Claude Startups invite-only (partner-VC-link) model of early 2026 was replaced by a direct self-serve form between May 21–31, 2026; older guides describing the VC-link flow are outdated. (3) Claude for Open Source criteria were overhauled July 2026: the 5,000+ stars / 1M+ npm-downloads gate no longer applies, replaced by the six usage/maintainer thresholds now on the official page. (4) Claude Campus is closed for Fall 2026 (application window Sep 1–12, 2026; program runs Sep 2026–Jun 2027; next cycle not yet announced). (5) Claude for Teachers: sign-up deadline June 30, 2027 for the free-year. (6) Nothing was sunset for the consumer Free plan or the API docs' 'small free credits to test the API.' General credit terms (secondary): promotional credits expire one calendar year from issuance; the Oct 2026 startup $1,000 credit was reported to expire six months after grant — the two sources conflict, re-verify per-award. Also note: Anthropic no longer maintains a public 'startup program official terms' page beyond the May 22, 2025 version; the active program now lives under claude.com/programs/* and the domain rebranded anthropic.com → claude.com (301 redirects), so some archived anthropic.com URLs now 404 or redirect. Research caveat: the session's web-search budget was exhausted mid-run; all primary claims above were verified by direct fetch of official pages today (claude.com/pricing, claude.com/programs/startups, /campus, /team-plan-for-scientists, /frontier-academy, /contact-sales/claude-for-oss, claude.com/solutions/education and /teachers, support.claude.com article 11199177, anthropic.com/news/ai-for-science-program, platform.claude.com/docs pricing); items marked medium/low come from the klymentiev.com tracker (checked 2026-09-25) and Oct 2026 press (TechCrunch, CNBC, 9to5AI, Times of India) or the fund's own page (Aug 2026). |
| Anthropic | As of 2026-10-22 the Claude for Startups program has changed materially from its 2024-2025 form: it is now run in cohorts, and the current cohort is FULL with no new applications accepted, so the $45K/$100K credits are only claimable when the next cohort opens (newsletter sign-up is the only current action). No program is sunset, but two notes: (1) The Claude API no longer lists a standalone free trial-credit offer for new accounts on the official pricing page — free API usage is only via the startup credits or the Team plan for scientists, so any historical small free API trial should not be assumed. (2) Two genuinely free education-side offers DO exist today and are the effective 'education' equivalents of a free tier: the Claude Team plan for scientists (standard seats $0 for 12 months for accredited-university/nonprofit PIs, then renews at paid price) and Claude for Teachers (free premium access for US K-12 educators, sign up by June 30, 2027 for the free year). A university-wide 'education license' exists but is a paid discounted institutional plan, not a free self-serve student offer. WebSearch budget was exhausted this session, so claims above were verified by reading the official pages directly today (claude.com/programs/startups, /pricing, /solutions/education, /programs/team-plan-for-scientists, /solutions/teachers); figures like the $45K/$100K amounts and the $0 scientist pricing were confirmed on the pages, but I could not cross-check third-party news coverage of 2025-2026 changes. |
| Appsmith | Changes and gaps as of 2026-10-22. (1) Jan 2025 pricing overhaul (announced in Launch Week, Jan 12, 2025): moved from usage-based pricing (tracker cites $0.40/hour) to Business at $15/user/month; Free capped at 5 cloud users (previously unlimited) and 5 workspaces (new quota); Business capped at 99 users (previously unlimited); Enterprise $2,500/month for 100 users. Sources: https://www.appsmith.com/blog/appsmith-launch-week-1 and https://pricingsaas.com/companies/appsmith/diffs/2025Q1. (2) GitHub SSO: the tracker says it was removed from Free in 2025, but the official page shows both 'Google SSO' (bullet) and 'Google and GitHub OAuth' (table). Verify before relying on GitHub login on Free. (3) The brief's '10 apps' Free limit is not on Appsmith's official pricing; it matches ToolJet's free cloud plan. (4) Third-party comparison pages dated Aug to Oct 2026 (Softwr, 30 Aug 2026; Taskade, Sep 2026; Jetadmin, 26 Sep 2026; Awesomic, 8 Oct 2026) show the same Free (5 cloud users, 5 workspaces, 3 Git repos) and Business ($15/user/month) terms, so the plan terms look unchanged through October 2026 (medium confidence, secondary sources). (5) No education, student, teacher or academic license found, so no education finding is listed. Checked: the pricing page; appsmith.com/industry/education (only 'Start building for free' and sales@appsmith.com); the docs intro; the homepage; and the GitHub Student Developer Pack page (Appsmith not found there; the fetch may not have shown every offer). Institutions are routed to sales@appsmith.com. (6) Startup program: no end date or acceptance timeline is stated; aggregator record dates (Sept to Oct 2026) are not program start dates. (7) The Business Cloud 30-day promo is from June 2025, time-limited, and its current status is unconfirmed. (8) Search gap: the web search budget ran out during this run, so I could not search for other 2026 announcements, other startup or education programs, or the current status of the Business Cloud promo. Official pages were fetched directly instead. To run those searches, raise CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION and rerun. |
| Autodesk Education | 2025–2026 changes confirmed from official pages read today: (1) Single Sign-On mandate — Autodesk Education accounts will be required to use SSO (school credentials) starting August 7, 2026; schools like SMU enabled it in Aug 2025 (blog.smu.edu, 2025-08-07). (2) Multi-seat sunset — the US Education products page states 'Starting December 31, 2027, Autodesk will no longer offer new network and multi-seat licenses' and pushes institutions to Education institution subscriptions; the Asia-Pacific page (dated May 2025) states the cutoff as March 2026 for that region — i.e., the network/multi-seat lab-license model is being rolled off region by region starting 2026, so multi-seat classroom plans should be migrated now. (3) Startup program — status unverifiable as of 2026-10-22 (403 fetch blocks + exhausted shared web-search budget); no active free startup offer appeared in results. (4) No evidence today that the core 1-year free education license for students/educators changed, was reduced, or sunset — it remains 1-year, renewable, 3-device, full-feature. (5) Consumer free tiers (e.g., Fusion personal-use, AutoCAD Web basic) were NOT re-verified today and should be treated as unconfirmed; if they were sunset, that would land here after re-verification. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | SUNSET / MATERIAL CHANGES 2024-2026: (1) The classic AWS 12-month free tier (EC2 750 hrs/mo, S3 5 GB, 1M input + 1M output free Bedrock model-invocation tokens per month for 12 months across ~75 models, RDS 750 hrs, etc.) has been SUPERSEDED by the new Free plan / Paid plan model: $100 signup credits + up to $100 earned, 6-month window, 30+ 'always free' services, and notably no payment method required for most new customers. The Bedrock-specific free-token docs page (docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/free-trial.html) now renders empty/removed, and the new Free Tier FAQ contains zero mention of Bedrock free tokens, 750 EC2 hours, or 5 GB S3 - legacy per-service allowances no longer exist. So the 'free Bedrock tokens for students' front is effectively dead; Bedrock access now comes via (a) Free plan $100-200 credits, (b) AWS Activate credits, or (c) Kiro credits for agentic coding. (2) June 2024: AWS doubled the portfolio/accelerate credit ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 (announced July 1, 2024, for startups that raised Series A in the past 12 months; seed stage stayed at $100,000 at the time; credits' expiry moved from 1 year to 3 years - per CNBC 2024-06-28). The current credits page (2026) shows one Portfolio tier at up to $200,000. (3) 2026: the credits page was redesigned (awslabs/startups PR #75, June 2026) renaming tiers to Activate Founders ($1,000 start, up to $5,000 - NOT the ~$100 sometimes misreported; the $100 figure matches the new Free plan signup credit, not Activate), Activate Portfolio (up to $200,000), and adding the invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' tier ($200,000+) plus the new Kiro Startup Credits program. (4) 'Known so far' figures from the task (~$100K Portfolio, ~$100 Founders) are outdated: Portfolio is now up to $200K and Founders is $1,000-to-start/up-to-$5,000. No standalone student Bedrock/LLM free offer from AWS exists today - the closest student fronts are the no-card Kiro Student Offer (1,000 credits/month x 12 months) and AWS Academy (training only, no credits). Verification caveat: today's live fetches of aws.amazon.com/startups/credits/ and free sub-pages intermittently returned 403 via proxy, but credits-page content was captured today via the official page mirror in the awslabs/startups repo and search snippets of the live page; free-plan figures came directly from aws.amazon.com/free/ and /free/free-tier-faqs/ read today.</sunset_notes> |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Major 2025-2026 changes (all verified on official AWS pages fetched today, 2026-10-22; WebSearch budget was exhausted so only official-page fetches were used): (1) The legacy usage-based 12-month AWS Free Tier (750 RDS hours, 5 GB S3, etc.) was replaced by a credit-based model for accounts created on/after July 15, 2025 — $100 at sign-up + up to $100 earned, Free plan (6-month auto-closing account) vs Paid plan (12-month credit validity); a refreshed sign-up experience launched October 2026, and pre-October accounts still see the old credits console. The RDS pricing page still documents the legacy 750-hour/20 GB free database for pre-July-15-2025 accounts only. (2) Per-service 'Always Free' and legacy free-trial figures (e.g., Athena GB-per-month, Redshift RA3/RA2 1-node 12-month developer tier and 30-day standard tier, Glue 1M source-records ETL free allowance, Bedrock character-based free tiers) no longer appear on today's service pricing pages — the credit model absorbed them, so do not quote legacy numbers for new accounts. (3) Activate program structure is now three tiers: Founders ($1,000, up to $5,000), Portfolio (up to $200,000 via provider Org ID), and an invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' tier adding $200,000+ for AI startups scaling past the Portfolio ceiling. Credits now explicitly cover Amazon Bedrock third-party models (OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Meta). Note a discrepancy: /free/offers/ still lists Activate as '$1,000 to $100,000' — likely stale vs the $200,000 ceiling on the credits page/FAQ. (4) New Kiro startup credits program (up to a year of Kiro Pro+, 2/10/30-user tiers, 'limited time only', excludes France/Germany/Italy/Spain/Poland/UAE and ~13 other countries). (5) AWS Academy / Cloud Career Academies: no working page found on today's main AWS site (URLs 404; cloudcareeracademies.org DNS-failed) — status unconfirmed; AWS Educate (free, 13+, no credits/vouchers) is explicitly still active with a 2026 copyright. Also of note: AWS Educate bundles no cloud credits and no free exam vouchers on any page I could read today. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | (1) AWS Free Tier revamp: the classic structure - 12 months of Free Trial on ~75 services plus a separate 'Always Free' tier - is no longer on the official page; it has been replaced (2025-2026) by the Free plan / Paid plan model with up to $200 in credits, 90+ services for up to 6 months, and '30+ services always free within monthly usage limits'. The exact launch date of the revamp could not be confirmed (web-search budget exhausted mid-session); the page read today (2026-10-22) shows only the new structure. (2) AWS Activate: the legacy 'standard program up to $1,000 in credits' copy no longer appears on the live portal; the join page now says 'Apply for up to $200,000 in Activate Credits' while the application widget caps at 'up to $100,000' - consistent with a headline increase beyond the old $100K Accelerate ceiling, unconfirmed via a dated press release. (3) AWS Impact Accelerator, the US-only predecessor (part of AWS's 2022 $30M commitment to Black, Women, Latino and LGBTQIA+ founders), was superseded by the global AWS Impact Bootcamps announced Jul 30, 2025; the 2022-2023 US cohorts are closed. (4) All AWS Impact Bootcamps application windows through the 2026 Tokyo and Berlin cohorts are closed (deadlines Feb 27 and Mar 13, 2026), so as of 2026-10-22 the $5,000 credits, $50K grant and $15K credits are only obtainable in future, not-yet-announced cohorts. (5) Research caveat: https://startups.aws.com/lp/aws-impact-bootcamps currently returns HTTP 500 at the server level (its Next.js content payload is intact and was extracted from the raw HTML); the shared WebSearch budget for this session was exhausted, so 'was this changed in 2025-2026' checks rely on today's live pages rather than dated announcements. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Key 2025-2026 changes: (1) 2025-07-15 cutover - AWS replaced the legacy 12-month service-level Free Tier with a credit-based model: new accounts get a 6-month 'Free plan' ($100 signup credits + up to $100 service-exploration credits = up to $200) or a Paid plan; accounts created before 2025-07-15 are grandfathered on the old 12-month per-service free tier (e.g. RDS: 750 hours/month single-AZ, 20 GB gp2 storage, 20 GB backup). (2) Free-plan accounts auto-close at 6 months or when credits run out; data retained 90 days, then permanently erased. (3) Startup program restructuring: the /startups/credits/ page now lists 'Activate Founders' (up to $5,000; starts at $1,000) and 'Activate Portfolio' (up to $200,000, was the $150,000 Founders' Program era ceiling; the previous 'Accelerate' up to $100,000 tier name no longer appears) plus two newer tracks - 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' ($200,000+, invite-only post-Portfolio) and 'Kiro Startup Credits'. The exact 2025-2026 rename/retirement dates could not be confirmed: WebSearch budget for this session was exhausted, so only the current official pages could be verified. (4) No .edu-gated student dollar-credit license was found: the education front is AWS Educate (free training/badges, no credits) and institutional 'special pricing' programs; AWS Academy pages returned 404 on fetched sub-paths, so its current status/offerings are unverified rather than confirmed active or sunsetting. (5) Free-plan credits are unavailable in China regions or AWS GovCloud (US); the Free plan also excludes all promotional credits (Activate), so startup credits effectively require a Paid-plan account. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Major 2025-2026 changes: (1) July 15, 2025 - the classic 12-month per-service Free Tier was replaced for NEW accounts with a credit-based model: $100 sign-up credit + up to $100 earned via 5 console activities, a 6-month Free plan window (account closes at 6 months or when credits run out), 90+ services, and 30+ always-free services; accounts created before July 15, 2025 retain the legacy 12-month tier. Free-tier-eligible EC2 instances changed too (t2.micro dropped; t3.small, t4g.small, c7i-flex.large, m7i-flex.large added). (2) Short-term free trials are now paid-plan-only; the Free plan only gets 'Always Free' offers. (3) Feb 21, 2023 - AWS Educate stopped its old monetary grants ($35/$100 student grants, $75/$200 educator grants); educator tooling moved to AWS Academy. (4) Feb 16, 2026 - Free plan (Free Tier) accounts became ineligible for promotional credits, which affects AWS Cloud Credit for Research and similar programs (a Paid plan is required to hold awards). (5) Aug 20, 2026 - AWS launched Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center as part of a $500M+ student commitment; the old 'AWS Activate for Students' style offer no longer appears on aws.amazon.com - student benefits are now Builder Center Student Rewards + AWS Educate + AWS Academy. (6) October 2026 - new AWS sign-up experience launched; credit-expiry display moved to the Settings Portal (accounts that signed up before Oct 2026 still use the Credits page in the Billing console). No free offer listed above was fully sunset as of 2026-10-22. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Major 2025-2026 changes: (1) July 15, 2025 — AWS replaced the long-standing 12-month Free Tier (750 hrs/mo t2.micro/t3.micro + 30 GB EBS + 100 GB egress, 30+ always-free services) with a credit-based model for NEW accounts: $100 sign-up credits + up to $100 earned = up to $200, with a 6-month no-cost Free plan that auto-closes. Legacy 12-month benefits remain ONLY for accounts created before July 15, 2025. Also, since the revamp, a credit card/payment method is no longer required to sign up for most new customers (previously mandatory). A new sign-up experience (Settings Portal credit tracking) launched October 2026. (2) June 2026 — AWS Activate Portfolio credit ceiling doubled from $100,000 to $200,000; the Founders tier was standardized at $1,000 with an 'up to $5,000' extension for select participants; a new invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' tier (>$200K) was introduced (confirmed by the redesigned aws.amazon.com/startups/credits page © 2026 and the awslabs/startups repo content update June 16, 2026). Note: CNBC's June 28, 2024 report that Series A startups got $200K from July 1, 2024 was NOT reflected in 2025 official materials (which still said 'up to $100,000'); the cap only officially moved to $200K in June 2026. (3) April 2025 — AWS launched the $30M Impact Accelerator (new program, not a sunset). (4) No VPS/bare-metal/dedicated specific free offer was sunset, because none existed as a standalone front: bare-metal and dedicated hosts have never had free tiers and remain credit-eligible under Activate/Free Tier credits only. (5) GAIA 2025 cohort status and Impact Accelerator 2026 track openings could not be re-verified this session (shared web-search budget exhausted); confidence ratings above reflect that. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Sunset/changed in 2025-2026: (1) 15 Jul 2025 (announced AWS Summit NY, 15-16 Jul 2025): the 12-month Free Tier was retired for NEW accounts and replaced by the credit-based Free Plan ($100 signup credit + up to $100 explore credits, 6-month auto-closing plan, 90-day post-expiry data retention); pre-cutoff accounts keep their legacy 12-month offers until each one's own expiry. (2) EC2 free-VPS offer sunset: t2.micro (and hours-based t3.micro 750 h/mo) free tiers no longer apply to new accounts; new free-tier-eligible EC2 types are t3.micro, t3.small, t4g.micro, t4g.small, c7i-flex.large, m7i-flex.large, consumed via credits. (3) AWS Activate was folded into AWS for Startups: /aws.amazon.com/activate/ now serves the startups program (startups.aws.com); headline credit figure is 'up to $200,000' with published tiers $1,000-$100,000, 80+ partner offers valued up to $800,000, plus undisclosed extra AI-startup credits and Kiro credits — replacing older multi-year $1M total caps and old student/faculty Activate tiers (up to $100k/$150k) which no longer appear on official pages. (4) The Free Plan explicitly cannot combine with any other promotional/incentive offer, and joining AWS Organizations/Control Tower auto-upgrades to Paid and voids remaining explore credits. (5) AWS signals a new sign-up experience in October 2026 (FAQ note); Free Tier Terms last updated 9 Jul 2025. Note: session web-search budget was exhausted, so 2025-2026 change verification relied on WebFetch of official AWS pages (free/, free/offers/, free/free-tier-faqs/, free/terms/, startups/, education/, EC2 docs, Lambda pricing, RDS free page, what's-new Jul 2025 entry, AWS blog 15 Jul 2025) rather than broader search. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Material 2025-2026 changes (all verified against AWS pages today, 2026-10-22): (1) Jul 15, 2025 — the legacy "12 months free" tier was replaced for NEW accounts by a credit-based Free Tier: $100 sign-up credit + up to $100 earned, 6-month Free plan; every legacy 12-month offer on pre-Jul-15-2025 accounts (including legacy CloudWatch 12-month items) has now fully lapsed. (2) Oct 2026 — AWS launched a new sign-up experience: social sign-in (Google/GitHub/Apple/Amazon), no credit card needed for most customers, and credit tracking moved from the Billing console to a Settings Portal for accounts signed up after the rollout; the Free Tier FAQ now states base credits expire 6 months (vs. 12 months in the Jul 9, 2025 Terms) — a live contradiction AWS hasn't harmonized, so treat 6 months as the safe planning horizon. (3) Dec 3, 2025 — Kiro Startup Credits v1 launched (up to 100 users, pre-seed to Series B, apply by Dec 31, 2025) and closed; relaunched Apr 7, 2026 with 2/10/30-user tiers, early-stage to Series A (VC-backed per the current promotion), apply by Dec 31, 2026; startups with active AWS Activate credits are excluded from the Kiro promo. (4) Jun 2024 (context) — AWS doubled Portfolio credits $100K to $200K and extended expiry 1 year to 3 years; still the structure in effect. (5) Feb 2023 (context) — AWS Educate stopped issuing universal/institutional credit grants; it is now free learning only, and student credits now flow through Builder Center Student Rewards (up to $579 incl. $30 credits + $100 exam voucher, launched Aug 2026). (6) CloudFront's classic "100 GB/month always-free" line is now presented as a standing $0 "Free" plan tier with 100 GB + 1M requests + 5 GB S3 storage credits and no overage charges — not sunset, but restructured. No CloudWatch/observability offer was sunset; the known limits (10 metrics, 1M API requests, 5 GB logs, 100 canaries, 3 dashboards, 10 alarms, 100K X-Ray traces) all still apply as ALWAYS-FREE allowances. There is no CloudWatch-specific startup or student grant beyond the general AWS Free Tier credits and Activate credits, which can offset CloudWatch usage on a Paid plan. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Major 2025-2026 changes verified on official pages today (2026-10-22): (1) The legacy 12-month Free Tier is gone — the old 'free for 12 months' language no longer appears on aws.amazon.com/free; it has been replaced by the credit-based Free Plan ($100 signup + up to $100 explore = up to $200 over 6 months), after which the account auto-closes (data kept 90 days, then erased). (2) The classic 'Always Free' list was narrowed in messaging to '30+ services' with monthly limits (legacy tier had 60+ services); per-service quota numbers are no longer published on the hub. (3) SageMaker notebook free allowance shrunk to 250 hours of sc.t3.medium for the first 2 months (vs legacy 750 hours/month ml.t3.medium for 12 months). (4) AWS Activate tiers renamed/revalued: 'Activate Community' no longer appears on the current credits page — it is now 'Activate Founders' (up to $5,000, start $1,000) alongside 'Activate Portfolio' (now up to $200,000, previously up to $100,000) plus a new invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' ($200,000+); a new Kiro Startup Credits track (up to 1 year of Kiro Pro+, 1/10/30 users) was added. The stale /free/offers page still shows old $1,000-$100,000 figures and 7-10 day processing, inconsistent with the current credits page ($5,000/$200,000, 5-10 days) — treat the credits page as authoritative. (5) WebSearch was unavailable during this run, so no third-party press confirmation of announcement dates was possible; all claims above are from the official AWS pages fetched today. |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | 1) Amazon Pinpoint sunset (HARD DATE): AWS ends support for Amazon Pinpoint on October 30, 2026 — console access and all Pinpoint resources (endpoints, segments, campaigns, journeys, analytics) terminate that day; only the messaging-channel APIs (SMS, voice, mobile push, OTP, phone number validate) continue under the rebranded "AWS End User Messaging" service. Anyone relying on Pinpoint journeys/campaigns must migrate before 2026-10-30. 2) Legacy per-service Free Tier replaced: the old model — e.g., "SES: 3,000 emails/month free for the first 12 months, then $0.10/1K" and "SNS: 100 SMS/month free, US regions" — is no longer published; as of the October 2026 sign-up experience, new accounts instead get up to $200 in Free Tier credits over 6 months (Free plan auto-closes at 6 months or when credits run out). The "then $0.10/1K" figure survives, but as the à-la-carte SES price, while NEW SES accounts default to the more expensive Essentials plan ($0.16/1K) starting July 21, 2026. 3) The formerly permanent "3,000 emails/month free (US regions, no purchase of sending capacity)" SES allowance is not listed on today's official pricing page — treat it as superseded by the credit model for new accounts; legacy account behavior not verifiable (docs pages didn't render). 4) The legacy 100-free-SMS/month US-regions tier also no longer appears on End User Messaging pricing; SMS is now fully pay-per-message. 5) AWS Activate credit ceiling was raised to $200,000 (some pages still show the old $100,000 figure — a 2025-2026 program change, not a sunset). |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | 2025-2026 changes (verified against official AWS pages on 2026-10-22): (1) Classic 12-month Free Tier sunset for NEW accounts on July 15, 2025 — replaced by the credit-based Free Plan ($100 + up to $100 earned = up to $200 over 6 months, auto-enrolled, no charges); accounts created before July 15, 2025 remain on legacy 12-month terms (750 hrs/mo t2/t3.micro etc.); legacy terms still published. (2) October 2026: AWS launched a new sign-up experience; the current FAQ now states Free Tier credits expire 6 months from account creation (vs 12 months under the July 2025 Free Tier Terms) and moved credit tracking to the Settings Portal — AWS's own FAQ is internally inconsistent between sections (6 vs 12 months), so treat credit expiry on the new experience as 6 months and verify per-account in the Settings Portal. (3) AWS Activate restructured in 2025-2026: old tiers (Starter $5k / Portfolio up to $100k / YC up to $250k / $5k-$100k sub-tiers) are no longer publicly listed; current structure is Founders ($1,000, up to $5,000 for select participants) + Portfolio (up to $200,000, cap raised from $100,000), with eligibility shifted from 'funded up to Series A' to 'pre-Series B, most recent funding round within the last 12 months', and the application flow now goes through the AWS Builder ID. AWS pages are inconsistent today: /free/offers/ still advertises '$1,000 to $100,000' while /startups/ and the June 4, 2026 AWS blog advertise 'up to $200,000'. (4) No education-only (.edu/student-email) free credits exist at AWS: no free offer requires a .edu or student email — AWS Educate is open to anyone 13/14+ with just an email, the Free Tier is open to any new customer, and AWS Marketplace 'education pricing' is a paid discount, not free. The only university-scoped free offer is AWS Academy (free institution participation + exam vouchers). (5) Free Plan/credits unavailable in China (ZHY, BJS) and GovCloud (US) regions, and not usable via AWS Organizations (auto-upgrades to Paid plan). (6) AWS Educate availability excludes China and Switzerland and raises minimum age in the EU (16) and Algeria/Lebanon/Portugal (18). |
| Axiom Free Plan | 1) The previously known '5 GB ingest/month + $10 signup credit' is STALE. On 2025-04-21 Axiom 'Reimagined pricing' (blog/reimagining-pricing): the old ingestion-focused Personal/Team/Enterprise tiers were replaced by credit-based Axiom Cloud pricing ($25/mo platform fee, 1 credit = $1, always-free 1TB/100GB-hr/100GB block) plus a new credit-card-free Personal free tier now at 500 GB load/mo (current pricing page), 10 GB-hrs query, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention. 2) The $10 signup credit no longer appears on the pricing page, FAQ, or 2025–2026 blog; it is not a documented current offer (treat as discontinued/unverified). 3) 2025-09-22 changelog added compute-credit pre-purchase discounts and spend caps (overage pauses rather than bills) — a material change for cost safety. 4) Axiom's docs moved from docs.axiom.co to axiom.co/docs in 2026. 5) No 2025–2026 sunset of the startup program found — /axiom-for-startups is live with current terms as of today's fetch. |
| Baseten | Fall Into Inference (Sept-Dec 2025, sunset 2025-12-20): Baseten ran a promo, 'Until December 20, 2025... up to $10,000 of free inference credits' for new Baseten customers (official page baseten.co/talk-to-us/fall-into-inference, acceptance terms last updated 2025-09-02). It has ended and is no longer listed on the current Google Perks page or Baseten's site; as of 2026 the standing offers are only the ~$30 starter credit and the AI Startup Program ($25K/$2.5K). No 2025-2026 change to the Startup Program amounts: both $25K and $2.5K re-confirmed on Baseten's official program page and on cloud.google.com/startup/perks today. No student/education free offer exists for Baseten — no .edu email or education license anywhere; Baseten's program acceptance terms explicitly exclude educational institutions, government entities and nonprofits. Baseten's pricing-page FAQ no longer restates the $30 figure (says only 'new accounts come with credits'), so the exact starter-credit amount rests on Baseten's FAQ/changelog (~$30) and third-party re-verification; minor model deprecations in Sep 2026 do not affect credit programs. |
| Better Stack Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes, none of which sunsetting the free plan: (1) 2026-10-06 — the plan previously named "Free" was renamed "Free for personal projects" and a new "Free responder access" ($0) entry appeared (PulseSignal change history, vendor page verified 2026-10-20). (2) 2026-09-11 — Responder monthly price rose from $29/mo to $34/mo (annual rate stayed $29/mo) per FrontDeskReview's correction log. (3) 2026-08-01 — telemetry pricing was restructured into per-region bundles (US / Europe / Singapore) with old "Bundle" plan names removed. (4) 2026-08-25 — a standalone "Transaction Monitoring" plan was removed; transaction (Playwright) monitoring moved to per-minute usage pricing, and "1 responder included in the starting offer" was added to Responder terms. (5) Macro pivot 2025-2026: after an $18.6M Series A (led by Creandum), Better Stack stopped selling monitor-count tiers (old "Freelancer/Small Team/Business" names seen in third-party articles are stale) and now prices per Responder seat plus telemetry bundles — so third-party pages still showing "$24 Basic / $45 Freelancer" pricing are outdated. (6) The free-tier telemetry allowances have grown over time: secondary 2026 early-year sources cite 1 GB logs free; the current official page lists 3 GB logs, 3 GB traces, 30 GB metrics — no limits were removed, only expanded. (7) Rebrand context: Better Uptime + Logtail were merged into the "Better Stack" platform (2022-2023 press post); pricing survived the merge unchanged. (8) An adjacent non-profit plan exists per the official docs FAQ but no student or formal startup program ever existed on betterstack.com (betterstack.com/education and /startups both 404 as of 2026-10-22). |
| BookStack | No BookStack-issued student, education, startup, nonprofit or trial-credit programme exists in the sources checked: homepage (with demo section), support page, project FAQ, donate page, contact page, and the 2024-2026 blog posts. Nothing was sunset in 2025-2026 because none existed in those sources. None of the seven findings has a student, education, startup or nonprofit condition, a .edu requirement, a startup age or funding cap, or a region limit. Findings 4-7 are third-party vendor offers, not BookStack's, and can change without notice.Changes in 2025-2026: the 2 Jan 2026 review says paid offerings saw 'little outward promotion or change/development'. The 14 Jul 2026 review reports average support revenue up 47%, the move from GitHub to Codeberg, a new Zulip-based community site, and Discord deprecated. Support prices (£450/yr, £4,500/yr) match the 12 Jul 2024 post, so no price change is visible. The support page now says VAT 'is not included in current pricing although may be chargeable in future' (a caveat, not yet a change). 2026 security releases include v26.05.1 to v26.05.5 and v26.09.2 (21 Oct 2026).Excluded as not verified or not BookStack-specific: Hostinger VPS page (generic 'free domain for 1 year' and limited-time deals); Node.uk managed hosting (from £25/mo, no trial found); other sponsor-linked hosts (Cloudabove, NETWAYS, BookHost, Practicali and others), not checked for offers and not vetted by the project; aggregator pages (costbench.com discounts page, inferse.com, apis.io, startupik.com), whose education, startup and nonprofit sections are generic templates (costbench says 'We don't have BookStack-specific education terms verified yet'), so they were not used as sources.Gaps: the HTTP Functions Ltd paid-support terms PDF (https://www.httpfunctions.com/docs/bookstack-support-terms.pdf) could not be read. WebFetch returned compressed bytes, and the Read tool needs poppler, which is not installed. Paid-support contract terms, renewal, and any trial or discount in them are therefore unverified. The AWS listing and the 2025-2026 blog posts were read from search excerpts, not full fetches, and the blog index fetch failed. |
| Caddy | No free student, education, academic, nonprofit, startup, trial or credit offer exists for Caddy as of 2026-10-22. The two findings above are the always-free open-source core and the volunteer forum; neither is targeted at students or startups. Checked today: caddyserver.com (home), /sponsor (with FAQ), /support, /download, the repo LICENSE, and the requested /pricing, /education and /startups pages. /pricing, /education and /startups all return HTTP 404. Pricing content now lives at /sponsor, but third-party pricing pages still cite /pricing.Paid startup offers (not free): Startup at $99/mo includes an onboarding call, occasional email support and no professional-services discount. Startup Pro at $249/mo adds a 10% professional-services discount, triage priority and optional publicity, plus the onboarding call. Official copy calls them 'perfect for bootstrapped startups' and 'bootstrapped, early-stage startups'. No age, funding or revenue cap is published. Startup-tier sponsorships already existed by Feb 2025 (Matt Holt forum post, 2025-02-05).Full official sponsorship ladder (read 2026-10-22): Indie $25/mo; Indie Pro $50/mo; Startup $99/mo; Startup Pro $249/mo; Business $999/mo (20% professional-services discount with a 6-month commitment); Business+ $2,999/mo (35% with a 6-month commitment); Enterprise $5,900/mo (limited stock); Enterprise+ $11,900/mo (limited availability). Billing is monthly. Subscriptions are managed through GitHub Sponsors, which requires a GitHub login. The FAQ says higher tiers can also pay by invoice, ACH, wire or check (which tiers is not stated). The FAQ does not state whether a credit card is required. Sponsorships are fulfilled by Dyanim, LLC (run by Matt Holt) and do not change the software license.Retired licensing (sunset): the 2017 commercial EULA made official binaries free for personal, academic and non-profit use, required paid per-instance commercial licenses for business use, and added a Caddy-Sponsors response header. The Oct 2019 proposal (caddyserver/caddy issue 2786) proposed dropping commercial binary licensing, startup packages, build-server subscriptions and private plugin hosting, and keeping Apache-2.0 for all binaries. A Sept 2020 forum post confirmed licensing unchanged. Today no EULA appears on the download page or in the repo LICENSE. The exact date the EULA lapsed was not verified. No academic or nonprofit free license exists now.2025-2026 changes: (a) Oct 15, 2025: Matt Holt said he would no longer personally see every comment, issue and PR, and a maintainer team was granted tag and release rights. PR 7341 (merged Nov 14, 2025) requires 2 maintainer approvals and signed tags for each release. This affects support expectations, not pricing. (b) Jan 29, 2026: Railway became a Caddy sponsor. Railway's promotions on the Caddy site are Railway's own offers, not Caddy's. (c) Feb 2026: ZeroSSL, the executive sponsor that owns the Caddy trademark, was acquired by HID Global (ASSA ABLOY), per Matt Holt's Feb 5, 2026 forum post. (d) Price snapshots disagree: an older search-index copy of the GitHub Sponsors page showed Business at $2,999 and Business+ at $5,900. The official site and today's GitHub Sponsors page show Business $999, Business+ $2,999, Enterprise $5,900 and Enterprise+ $11,900. The change date is unverified; the official site governs. (e) Aug 11, 2025: a forum announcement says Caddy took part in the GitHub Secure Open Source Program 2025. That is a project-level program, not a student or startup offer; details were not fetched.Not offers, or wrong: the hosted demo at caddydemo subdomains is 'intentionally restricted' and is not a trial. Sponsor logos on the home page (Railway, Tailscale, Stripe and others) are third-party promotions. Some third-party pages are wrong: Doolpa says sponsorships start at $5/mo (official lowest tier is $25/mo), and RottenWiFi lists 'Open source: No' (the repo is Apache-2.0). Pages also disagree on 'Free plan' (Yes or No) because the free software is not sold as a plan. A Japanese-language mirror of the sponsor page (caddy.dokyumento.jp) was not used as an official source.Dependencies: Caddy's automatic certificates for public names come from Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL (per README). Their free-tier terms and rate limits were not checked here. |
| Canva Pro for Students | The known '~50% off Canva Pro first year for verified students (~$49.99/yr vs $99.99 via .edu or national student verification)' does NOT appear on any official Canva page as of 2026-10-22: the students page offers only Canva Free (higher ed) or free K-12 Canva Education, the eligibility guidelines explicitly exclude college/university students from free Canva Education, and the pricing page lists no student price. The individual ~50% student Pro plan appears to have been sunset and replaced by two structural programs: (1) free Canva Education for K-12, and (2) Canva for Campus — where universities buy Enterprise-priced licenses and all premium student seats are free (e.g. UT Austin, free since 2025-10-17; Lehigh, March 2026; HKU student-union campaign HK$35/yr valid 2025-11-06 to 2026-11-05). US Pro's list price is also no longer $99.99: 2026 pages show US$120-180/yr (a transition-era A/B or recent increase; one third-party check recorded $144/yr on 2026-10-16). 2025-2026 material changes: Canva Pro trials now grant only the Free-tier AI allowance during the trial, plans auto-renew, Canva Teams was discontinued for new sign-ups, and new paid add-ons (AI Pass monthly add-on; 30-day AI top-ups for Business) were introduced. Note: canva.com blocks WebFetch (403); official pages were verified today via direct curl. Local university campaigns (HKU etc.) are institution-specific and expire on their own dates, not Canva policy. |
| Cerebras Inference Free Trial | 1) The old always-free tier ("1M free tokens/day", no card required — announced June 2025 when Cerebras opened the API without a waitlist) ended in July 2026: the official changelog shows the $5 Free Trial credit launching 2026-07-16 and a third-party tracker (pricepertoken.com) dates the old free tier's end to 2026-07-21. Cerebras now states plainly there is no permanently free or auto-renewing tier; a verified payment method is required for any access. 2) The earlier general "Cerebras for Startups" program (up to $22,500 GPU/inference credits, direct application, no partner required) is marked "No Longer Available" on third-party trackers; the surviving startup offer is the YC Startup Deal (YC startups any batch, up to $22.5K), recorded on the official site as of early Aug 2026. 3) Public shared-inference model menu shrunk through 2025-2026: Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 3 32B deprecated (Feb 2026), zai-glm-4.7 deprecated 2026-08-17, gemma-4-31b removed from public endpoints 2026-09-03 (dedicated only), qwen-3.8-27b added 2026-09-03; as of Oct 2026 the public catalog is just gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b. 4) Cerebras Code Pro ($50/mo, ~24M tokens/day) and Code Max ($200/mo, ~120M tokens/day) flat-rate coding plans were sold out / on waitlist at time of reporting — neither is free. 5) No region restrictions are stated on official pages; third-party trackers suggest access outside mainland China. |
| Chargebee | (1) Education/student license: NONE found — as of 2026-10-22, chargebee.com has no education page (/education/ and /for-education/ do not host a student program; the 'e-learning' section is a vertical marketing page FOR e-learning companies like Study.com), no .edu/email-verified student offer anywhere on the site, no footer or nav link to an academic program, and no trial credits of any kind. (2) Free-tier sunset: the pricing page now lists only two Billing plans — 'Flow' ($0 + 0.80% up to $500K/mo invoicing, $99 + 0.65% above $500K/mo, ~$66K breakeven, 100M usage events/mo included) and 'Enterprise' (custom) — so there is no free core-Billing tier for new users; the old-style free entry plan (Basic) is no longer offered. What remains free is: the $1M-cumulative startup program (with partner-network eligibility), the 50 free CPQ quotes and $0 Growth Starter (both gated behind an active paid Billing relationship), and the marketing trial whose terms are no longer published on-site. (3) Methodology caveat: the official pages (https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/, /startups/, /trial-signup/, homepage) were read directly on 2026-10-22 (high confidence for those); the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so 2025-2026 change history (e.g., prior startup-offer versions, trial-terms changes) could not be independently verified — statements about prior-plan lineup above rest on pre-existing knowledge and are medium confidence. |
| Checkly Hobby Plan | No Checkly free offer was sunset or materially changed as observable today (2026-10-22). Direct fetch of the live official pricing page confirms the Hobby plan still matches the known baseline exactly: 10 uptime monitors, 1,000 browser/Playwright runs + 10,000 API runs/month, 6 global locations, $0 forever, no credit card. Paid tier naming is now Starter ($24/mo) / Team ($64/mo) / Enterprise (custom); the earlier '$9 Basic' naming is no longer present on the page, suggesting a plan-name/structure change at some point (history unverified — WebSearch unavailable this session due to exhausted session search budget). Program pages checklyhq.com/startups/ and checklyhq.com/education/ both return HTTP 404 today — there is no dedicated education page at all and startup support is delivered only via the pricing-page FAQ + Google Form. No expiry dates or sunset clauses are published for any free offer; the Hobby plan has no end date. Confidence caveat: 'high' applies only to facts read on the live page today; startup-discount duration/renewal, trial length, and 2025-2026 historical changes remain unverified (medium/low) because search was unavailable and those details live in the app or the Google Form rather than public pages.</" |
| Chroma Cloud Starter | No official Chroma education/student licensing or Chroma-owned startup program exists on trychroma.com or docs.trychroma.com as of 2026-10-22 — no education or startup pages, and no such offers are mentioned on the pricing page, docs, or changelog. The free offer set is: (1) the $0/mo Starter plan with 10 databases / 10 team members, (2) one-time $5 new-user credits, (3) self-hosted open-source ChromaDB (Apache 2.0, fully free, unlimited), plus one unverified third-party-listed startup perk ($5,000 credits via PostHog for Startups). History/sunset: Chroma Cloud launched 2025-08-18 (changelog 'Introducing Chroma Cloud'), superseding the earlier Chroma Cloud trial; third-party tracker AgentDeals records a pricing-model change (discovered 2026-09-07, effective date unknown) from a legacy free tier (reported ~1M embeddings, 1 collection, 10K queries/day — unverified) to the current $0 Starter + $5 credits + metered pricing; the current metered terms were confirmed on the official pricing page today, so no free offer was sunsetting recently. Beware name confusion: 'Chroma Awards' (chromaawards.com), a film/music/games competition that recruited universities and students in 2025 with 'starter packs', internships and a $3M+ credit pool, is a separate organization, not the ChromaDB vendor. Course-sponsored credits (e.g., $250 Chroma Cloud credits for students of Hugo Bowne-Anderson's 'Building AI Applications' masterclass, Nov 2025 and Mar 2026 cohorts) are time-limited, sponsor-funded, cohort-specific — not a Chroma program. |
| CircleCI | 2025–2026 changes and absences: (1) No free trial credits on paid plans currently exist — the pricing page (read 2026-10-22) lists no trial duration, trial credit pool, or CC-for-trial offer, and an independent 2026-10-14 tracker (PulseSignal) records "Free trial: None listed"; the trial-circleci model has been superseded by the permanent 30,000-credit Free plan. (2) CircleCI Academy (free courses/certificate, formerly the closest thing to an education program) has been sunset — the support collection now says "CircleCI Academy is no longer available"; only SCORM downloads of the 17 former courses remain; no end date was published, but it was already gone by 2026-10-22. (3) Effective 2025-12-01, CircleCI changed unregistered-user billing: every unregistered user now counts individually toward the monthly active-user total (previously all unregistered users counted as one); the Free plan keeps 5 included active users at the same price, and OSS-enabled projects are exempt (unregistered OSS PR authors don't count as seats). (4) The Free plan's 30,000-credit monthly allowance has been stable through 2025–2026 (no observed change; PriceVersion shows $0/30,000 credits recorded as current from 2026-10-04); the 400k OSS Linux pool and 30k macOS/Windows OSS pool are also still live per the official open-source page, though the support doc (May 2026) still lists macOS OSS at 25,000 credits — a documentation inconsistency worth confirming with CircleCI support. (5) Related non-offer sunsets: Bitbucket Data Center support retired 2026-10-01 and Self-Hosted Runner Bitbucket Cloud retires 2026-11-12 (VCS deprecations, not pricing); Xcode image retention is rolling off older versions each month. |
| Clerk Hobby Plan | No education/student license exists for Clerk: clerk.com/education returns HTTP 404, and no student or .edu offer appears on the pricing page. No 2025-2026 sunset or deprecation of the Hobby free tier or the Startup Program was found on the changelog (which surfaces ~April 2026 through October 2026 entries). The only forward-dated change noted is Directory Sync connection billing beginning January 1, 2027 (first connection still included per app on paid plans). Verification was done by fetching the official clerk.com/pricing, clerk.com/startups, and clerk.com/changelog pages today (2026-10-22). Note: this session's shared WebSearch budget (limit ~200 calls) was already exhausted, so the requested standalone '2025-2026 changes' web searches were NOT run; findings above rely on official pages fetched today plus the changelog range available. |
| Cloudflare | Changes in 2025–2026: (1) The Cloudflare for Startups program was restructured from the April 2025 four-tier layout ($5k/$25k/$100k/$250k, per blog post 'Startup Program update') to the current three-tier layout ($10k/$100k/$350k) — Tier 3 raised $5k→$10k and top tier $250k→$350k; regional pages (e.g. cloudflare.com/en-in/forstartups) still display the outdated $250k/4-tier structure, so use the US .com page as authoritative. (2) Sept 22, 2025 (Birthday Week 2025): Students program launched (12 months free Workers Paid for US .edu 18+) and the program was extended to non-profits/civil-society orgs (up to $250k credits). (3) Sept 2025: 'Come build with us' hubs — program participants get office access in SF/Austin/London/Lisbon from Jan 2026. (4) Sept 28, 2026: 'The Cold Start' competition announced — 5 early-stage companies pitch at Cloudflare Connect; grand prize $500,000 in credits (competition, not a standing program). (5) Workers AI pricing page (last updated Oct 20, 2026) moved to per-model granular unit-based pricing display while backend billing remains Neuron-based; 8 frontier models are now gated behind a paid billing method. Sunset of 2022–2024 programs: the original $1.25B/$2B-pledge Workers Launchpad funding program (2022) evolved into the current cohort Launchpad; no free-offer sunsets this cycle — all five offers above remain active as of 2026-10-22. Note: one follow-up web search (non-profit program page URL) could not be executed because the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted; non-profit and Launchpad findings lean on blog/press summaries and cached page content, hence medium confidence. |
| Cloudflare | 2025–2026 program changes: (1) The Startup Program was restructured in 2025 from the April 2025 4-tier structure ($5,000 / $25,000 / $100,000 / $250,000, 'founded within last 5 years') to the current 3 tiers ($10k / $100k / $350k, founded within last 10 years) — entry tier doubled, top tier raised $250k->$350k, and the $25k tier was dropped. Members on the old caps can request a case-by-case upgrade that does not reset their 12-month expiry. (2) Sept 22, 2025: program expanded to non-profit, civil-society, and public-interest organizations (up to $250k credits; first application window ran until Dec 1, 2025). (3) Sept 22, 2025: Cloudflare for Students launched (12-month free paid developer features, US .edu only) — an education license/credit that did not exist before 2025. (4) 'The Cold Start' ($500k credit prize) closed with its Oct 19, 2026 Connect event; applications ended Oct 2, 2026. (5) Stale pages: some localized pages (e.g., cloudflare.com/en-in/forstartups/) still show the old '5 years / $5k-$250k' criteria — treat as outdated; the global /startups/ page is authoritative. (6) Community note: a global Cloudflare outage on Nov 18, 2025 (Workers KV, Access, Turnstile, dashboard, core CDN) is a recurring single-vendor risk with free tiers. The pre-launch claim 'WAF (1,000 rules) on all [startup] tiers' is confirmed — but the regular Free plan only gets 5 WAF custom rules; 1,000 is the Enterprise-plan limit that the startup program includes at no cost. |
| Cloudflare | As of 2026-10-22, Cloudflare has NO distinct free offers targeted at students or startups: (1) No startup program — the official partners page (cloudflare.com/partners, fetched 2026-10-22) lists only PowerUP channel program, technology alliances, global SIs, service providers, and the Cloudflare@OCI alliance; no startup track, no free credits, no age/funding-capped program. (2) No trial credits — paid Workers plans simply start at $5/mo with usage-based overage; no free-trial-of-paid credits are offered. (3) No education license/.edu discount for infrastructure — cloudflare.com/plans (fetched 2026-10-22) shows usage-based Free/Paid tiers only and mentions no education, student, or nonprofit discount; no .edu email is required for any tier; the free tiers are universally available to any account. Cloudflare's only education-adjacent offering is free learning content/certification programs (Learning Hub / CF-ICD), which is training, not hosting/PaaS — and its landing page (developers.cloudflare.com/learning-hub) was 404, so status is unverified. 2025–2026 material changes affecting the free tiers: Pages is not sunset but is being pushed into a migrate-to-Workers posture (a 'Migrate From Pages' guide and a Pages index note steering users to Workers static assets; Pages limits unchanged: 500 builds/mo, 100 projects, 20,000 files); Workers Logs free tier migrates to Cloudflare Observability pricing on 2026-12-01; Durable Objects SQLite storage billing begins January 2026; legacy KV API routes deprecated with 2026-10-15 migration deadline; R2 free tier (10 GB) unchanged, with new free sub-tiers added in 2026 for R2 SQL (10 GB scanned/mo) and R2 Data Catalog (1M ops + 10 GB compaction/mo), both billing-enabled 2026-08-03. Note: the WebSearch budget was exhausted for this session, so 2025-2026 change verification relied on official docs/changelog pages (fetched today) rather than press/news coverage; 'last updated' dates on the source pages are 2026, confirming the limits above are current. |
| Cloudflare | 2024-2026 changes: (1) Startup program was revamped Sep 2024 from a one-size $500k-era offer to a credits system capped at $250,000 (3 tiers). April 11, 2025: expanded to four tiers — $5,000 (bootstrapped/stealth, founded last 5 yrs), $25,000 (funded to $1M), $100,000 ($1M-$5M + approved VC/accelerator), $250,000 (Tier-1 VCs / AI / Workers Launchpad) — with a 5-year founding window and a 'BOOTSTRAPPED' promo-code path. The current 2026 page replaced this with three tiers ($10k/$100k/$350k), a 10-year founding window, 'funded up to Series B within the last 12 months', a hard payment-method-on-file requirement, and per-tier Workers AI caps. Old $250k/$5k-$250k four-tier copy still lingers on stale localized sub-pages (en-gb, en-ca) — treat cloudflare.com/startups as current. (2) Pages platform shift 2025-2026: Pages was consolidated into the Workers platform; docs now steer new projects to Workers ('Start new projects with Workers'; Pages Functions billed exactly as Workers), but Pages is not sunset — Free plan numbers stand as verified Sep 5, 2026 doc: $0, unlimited static requests/bandwidth, 500 builds/mo, 100 projects, 100 custom domains/project, 20,000 files (raised from the prior 10,000 cap; paid tiers unlock 100,000 via PAGES_WRANGLER_MAJOR_VERSION=4), 25 MiB max asset. (3) No student/education program was created or sunset in this window; 'Project Cybersafe Schools' (free K-12 email security + DNS filtering, US districts) remains the only education-facing free offer. No trial-credit program (e.g., a $500 API-credit trial) is currently advertised on the official pages I read. |
| Cloudflare | Material 2025–2026 changes: (1) Startup Program tier structure was revamped repeatedly: Sept 2024 revamp set the ceiling at $250k; April 2025 expanded to 4 tiers ($5k/$25k/$100k/$250k); by mid-2026 it was restructured into 3 tiers ($10k/$100k/$350k, per the current cloudflare.com/startups page and a May 2026 announcement). (2) Sep 2025: non-profit, civil-society, and public-interest organizations became eligible for the Startup program (up to $250k) — application window opened with a Dec 1 close for that cohort. (3) Eligibility window widened from 'founded within last 5 years' (2019–2024) to 'founded within last 10 years.' (4) Workers free-plan subrequest limit changed Feb 2026: now 50 external + 1,000 Cloudflare-service subrequests per invocation (previously a flat 1,000 total). (5) Workers Logs: effective Dec 1, 2026 it moves to Cloudflare Observability pricing (a near-term change affecting the free observability front). (6) Sep 2026: Free-account creation expanded so users can create up to 5 standalone Free accounts via dashboard or API. No traditional 'education license discount' or separate individual developer-credit grant exists at Cloudflare; the free value for students is the perpetual Free plan + free Academy + discretionary Ambassador/Community grants, and for startups the credits program. |
| Cloudflare | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) Startup program tiers were "recently updated" (undated on page, current as of 2026-10-22): Tier 3 raised $5,000→$10,000/yr and Tier 1 $250,000→$350,000/yr — older references to a "$5K credit" are stale; entry tier is now $10K. (2) No general-public time-boxed trial or one-off trial-credit offer exists; the only dollar-credit offer is the application-based startup program (perpetual free tiers are not trials and never expire). (3) New billable dimensions landed on the free platform in 2026: R2 SQL and R2 Data Catalog billing enabled 2026-08-03 for non-Enterprise accounts (free tier 10 GB scanned / 1M catalog ops / 10 GB compaction per month), AI Search billing begins 2026-11-01 (free: 5M ingestion tokens, 10 GB-month, 1K semantic + 1K full-text queries/month), and 2026-02-11 raised Workers subrequest limits (Free stays at 50 external/1,000 internal per invocation; Paid default 10,000, configurable to 10M) — free accounts can still accrue charges on metered add-ons, so set spend limits. (4) 2025-12-05 WAF max-payload change: Free zones already protected to 1 MB; paid plans need support ticket to enable. (5) Unbound/Bundled Workers plans are deprecated and unavailable to new accounts. (6) Education: no .edu-only program found and Cloudflare Academy's host (academy.cloudflare.com) did not resolve today — treat its current availability as unverified; if it was sunset in 2025-2026, no student/education free offer remains at Cloudflare. |
| CockroachDB Cloud trial | 1) Sep 15, 2026 cutover: Cockroach Labs moved new deployments to 'Cockroach Continuum' (Standard/Mission Critical editions, per-vCPU-hour pricing). The legacy RU plans (including the $0/month Basic free tier with 50M RUs + 10 GiB free monthly) are 'no longer available for purchase' for new orgs; existing customers stay on old pricing unless they opt in. Continuum lists no recurring free tier — only the one-time 30-day/$400 trial. 2) Nov 18, 2024 relicensing: CockroachDB server moved from MIT to the proprietary, key-gated CockroachDB Software License (v24.3+); free self-hosting is now limited to non-production use or single-node deployments, while pre-Nov-2024 releases remain MIT. 3) Sep 26, 2024: the old 'Serverless'/'Dedicated' product names (which carried the original 'free for everybody, scales to zero' serverless framing) were absorbed into CockroachDB Cloud, per a reader's note on the serverless blog post. 4) No startup program and no education license are publicly offered today; Cockroach University (free training) is still footer-linked but bot-blocked (403) and never included a free database license. 5) WebSearch was unavailable this session (shared budget exhausted), so verification was done against official pages fetched 2026-10-22 (marketing pricing, docs.cockroachlabs.com, GitHub LICENSE) rather than press/news coverage of 2025-2026 changes. |
| Cohere Trial API key | 1) Cohere Startup Program (2024: 25% off models for 12 months, no equity, up to ~$100K partner-VC API credits): CLOSED — Cohere's launch post (June 2024) notes 'Applications are now closed for 2024'; cohere.com/startup-program, /startup-program-application and /startups now redirect to the homepage or 404 (verified 2026-10-09 and 2026-10-22). No successor program announced; ignore third-party directories still listing it as active. 2) 2026 material change to the free tier itself: production keys now behave like trial keys for the newest Chat model variants (Command A+, Command A Reasoning/Translate/Vision) — 1,000 calls/month and 20 req/min — and commercial use of those models requires contacting sales@cohere.com, so free trial-key access is the only self-serve route to the newest models (per docs.cohere.com rate-limits page, read today). 3) Fine-tuning for legacy text models (command, command-light, command-r, classify, rerank) was retired 2025-09-15 (third-party reference; not a free offer per se). 4) No student/education license has ever existed at Cohere — the Sep 2025 'AI in Education' blog is Catalyst Grants content, and student-perk listings on aggregators are rebranded trial keys. 5) Trial-key Embed limit: current official docs say 2,000 inputs/min; an older third-party summary (Sep 2025) claimed 100/min — the official docs figure stands. |
| Contentful Free Plan | 2025–2026 changes: (1) The free plan was materially CUT in the 2025 "Platform" pricing restructure documented on the official page from Nov 2025: API calls 1M→100K/month, CDN 0.1TB platform + 0.75TB Intro Space→50GB/month, users 5→10, roles 4→2, content types 25 and 10K records retained in the included Starter Space. (2) "Basic" was renamed "Lite" (~$300/mo: 20 users, 3 roles, 3 locales, 1M API calls, 100GB CDN) and an explicit "Enterprise" custom tier plus "Personalization" tiers appeared in 2026 (Spyingbee, Jun–Aug 2026; dev.to, Jul/Oct 2026). (3) The "15-day trials of paid plans" from the baseline note are no longer advertised on the current pricing page (no trial text in the Nov 2025 snapshot; the permanent free plan is the entry point) — trial existence unconfirmed. (4) The baseline "20M content API requests/month, 10K assets, 3 authors" matches no documented 2024–2026 official configuration; the last documented free-plan API cap was 1M/month (2024–25 guides), and the current official cap is 100K/month. (5) No education license or public startup program was found; the only startup-credit lead (~$1,000) exists solely in third-party deal aggregators with no confirmed official application page. Caveat: contentful.com pages were not readable live on 2026-10-22 (Vercel security checkpoint returned HTTP 429 to all automated fetches; WebSearch budget exhausted), so confidence levels reflect search-indexed official-page snapshots plus independent 2026 trackers rather than a same-day read of the official pages. Sources: https://www.contentful.com/pricing/ , https://www.contentful.com/help/admin/billing-subscription/contentful-free-plan/ , https://www.contentful.com/get-started/ , https://dev.to/nayankyada/contentful-pricing-2026-free-tier-limits-the-300-cliff-and-enterprise-3gii , https://spyingbee.com/updates/contentful , https://saasoffers.tech/offers/contentful , https://startupflowai.com/directory/credits/contentful-for-startups , https://costbench.com/software/headless-cms/contentful/discounts/ , https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/contentful-pricing/ , https://www.spendflo.com/blog/contentful-pricing-guide |
| Countly | MATERIAL 2025-2026 CHANGE (the key sunset): Countly officially removed the free Flex tier. The June 17, 2026 Countly blog post 'Countly Flex Is Evolving' states explicitly: 'we are removing the free tier from Countly Flex' along with a faster engine, capability-bundle repackaging (Adaptivity/Intelligence), and new support tiers. The 'Flex Free' tier (previously ~free for up to 500 MAUs on the managed private cloud, launched around the 2024 Flex introduction) is gone from the live pricing page (fetched 2026-10-22: only Flex from $175/mo and Enterprise custom remain, plus the free non-commercial self-hosted Lite). NOTE: several third-party comparison/coupon sites (costbench.com, toolradar.com, comparetiers.com, affiliateweapons.com) still advertise 'Flex Free $0 up to 500 MAU' and 'Flex from $40/month' as of late 2026 — that data is stale/contradicted by the official site and blog; do not rely on it. No startup-program sunset was found (none ever published on official pages). The 14-day Flex trial remains, but the official Flex page confirms a credit card is now required to start it. |
| Coursera | Major 2025 sunset: Coursera retired the classic unlimited 'audit mode' (full free access to lectures of most courses, no certificate) around Aug 8, 2025, replacing it with the Preview experience — free access is now capped at the FIRST module of most courses; 'Full Course, No Certificate' survived only for a select subset (470+ courses per Class Central's Aug 2026 audit, ~2% of the 21,000+ catalog). Consequences: (1) free access shrank from 'whole course minus certificate' to 'first module only' for the majority of courses; (2) the free-trial period for subscriptions is 7 days (not the 30 days some older guides cite) with a card captured up front; (3) certificates are explicitly withheld during free trials; (4) localized/geographic (geo) pricing was introduced in 2025, so paid upgrade prices vary by region while the free tiers stay free; (5) a 'Free Community Impact Courses' program (mental health, refugee support, public health) was added in 2025 as a partner-supported free-access carve-out; (6) no .edu-only student tier and no startup program exist as of 2026-10-22 (verified 404s on /startups, /plus, /for-universities; free paths are Preview, Full-Course-No-Certificate, financial aid, 7-day trials, and institution-provided Campus access). No free offer was closed in 2026 that had existed in 2025 beyond the audit->preview shrinkage; financial aid remains offered. |
| Cronitor | No student or startup program was found on official cronitor.io pages as of 2026-10-22. Checked: /pricing (Hacker $0, Business pay-as-you-go with a 14-day trial, Enterprise from $6,000 per year; no education, startup, nonprofit, open-source or credit program; 'Volume-based discounts' with no thresholds); homepage ('Start for free' buttons, no program); /sign-up ('FREE PLAN' callout, no program); /terms (last updated 2022 per the fetched copy; no promotional, student, startup, nonprofit or open-source clauses); /blog (guides index, 'Last Updated: Oct 09, 2026', no pricing or program posts). /students, /startups, /education, /open-source and /changelog all returned HTTP 404. So no student or startup program appears to exist, and none has closed or changed in 2025-2026 as far as official pages show. NOT VERIFIED: 2025-2026 third-party coverage and the July 2026 free-for-dev listing. Both WebSearch calls were refused because this session's search budget was used up, and I did not route around that limit, so pricing changes beyond the official pages could not be checked. Other offer, not listed as a finding: the Business 14-day free trial, which requires card details and is a generic trial, not a student or startup offer. Unverified detail: the sign-up links carry 'plan=starter&billing_frequency=month', but no Starter plan appears on the pricing page, so this is likely an internal name. Overall recommendation: exclude Cronitor if the index is limited to student or startup programs; include the Hacker plan as a general free tier, labelled as open to everyone, if the index accepts general free tiers. |
| Cursor | No startup program found: cursor.com/startups returned only a page title with no program, credits or eligibility content, and neither the pricing page nor the models-and-pricing docs reference any startup offer, funding cap or startup-age criterion. No trial-credit offer is advertised: the current official pages list no free trial of paid plans and no starter credits (historical new-user trial/promo-credit offers from 2024–2025 are absent from the pricing/docs pages as of today; I could not run web searches this session to confirm sunset dates, so this is 'not listed on official pages today' rather than a verified end date). Material 2025–2026 structural changes observable on the current pages: tier lineup and pricing are now Plus $8/mo, Premium $30/mo, Super $100/mo, Ultra $200/mo (Teams $30/$100/$200 per seat; Enterprise custom), with pools expressed as multiples of Plus and a weekly refresh; the Free plan's exact request counts are unpublished ('Limited'); third-party models are billed at API list price with spending caps, and Teams/Enterprise add a $0.25/million-token 'Cursor Token Rate' on eligible third-party usage. A model promo (e.g., GPT-5.6 'Promotional pricing through November 21, 2026') appears in the docs, but it is a pricing promo, not a student/startup offer. |
| Data.gov | Changes verified 2025-2026 (read from official pages today; WebSearch budget was exhausted, so this reflects the official pages rather than news searches): (1) The catalog API was rebuilt: the new v4 API at api.gsa.gov/technology/datagov/v4 (keyed via api.data.gov) 'replaces the previous CKAN-based API' per resources.data.gov/catalog-api; the docs claim the older CKAN endpoint 'remains available in a read-only state for existing integrations', but probes to catalog.data.gov's former CKAN paths (/api/3/action/..., /api/3/, /api/2/, /dataset.json) all returned HTTP 404 today, so that read-only availability is uncertain or on a different host — low confidence, verify before relying on legacy CKAN integrations. (2) The legacy standalone Data.gov 'Developer Program' key portal keys.data.gov no longer resolves (DNS ENOTFOUND today), i.e. that older free-API-key program (zip codes, geographic names, transit routes style lookups) has been retired; equivalent agency APIs now live under api.data.gov. (3) No price changes: everything remains free; the OPEN Government Data Act remains the statutory basis. Caveat: the known-context line 'many datasets need no key' is confirmed for downloads/search, but API access to the v4 catalog API does require a (free) key; agency-specific egress/download costs never apply to data.gov itself. |
| data.gov.uk | 2025-2026 changes: (1) data.gov.uk was redesigned/rebranded as the National Data Library, published 25 March 2026 (new landing page, curated collections, data manual, public roadmap at /roadmap/, June 2026 version); the original ODI CKAN directory survives as the 'data.gov.uk directory', unchanged for now, with GDS fixing 'critical issues'. (2) The 'National Data Hub' named in the task's known-so-far is a misnomer — no such API product appears in official documents; the program is the National Data Library (>£100M of DSIT's £1.9B; progress update 26 Jan 2026; spring-2026 detail milestone). (3) Related UK open-data sunsets: ONS PublishMyData API fully decommissioned 31 March 2025 (outage from 3 March 2025; data moved to ONS portals and the new ONS Data API / api.beta.ons.gov.uk/v1/search), and ONS retired its aggregated-search /data endpoints in favour of the ONS Search API. (4) The old ODI terms-and-conditions URL (data.gov.uk/terms-and-conditions) now 404s, so documented rate limits are gone — access remains free and keyless. (5) No free-tier, trial-credit, startup-program, or education-license offer existed or changed on data.gov.uk in 2025-2026: it was and is unconditionally free under the Open Government Licence, so there is nothing student/startup-specific to sunset. |
| Databricks Lakebase | Community Edition sunset/rebrand (2025-2026): Databricks' legacy 'Community Edition' (the free, Spark-learning tier) has been replaced by the expanded 'Free Edition' — 'designed and extended to include full access to the Data + AI Platform'; the Free Edition page states 'Access to legacy CE accounts will continue to be available for the remainder of this year' (page footer © 2026), i.e., legacy CE is being sunset by end of 2026 and users are steered to Free Edition. Startup program now explicitly bundles Neon credits ('up to $200K in credits for Databricks and Neon') on the 2026 page — older program versions referenced Databricks credits alone. Lakebase positioning: no perpetual free Lakebase tier exists; the only free on-ramps are the 14-day trial (Lakebase explicitly listed among Free Edition's locked features) and startup credits. No other Lakebase-specific trial/free-offer changes were visible in 2025-2026 pages; Lakebase docs (last updated Oct 21, 2026) show no GA/preview badge on the core service, with 'store Postgres changes as Delta tables' still marked Public Preview. One caveat: WebSearch was unavailable this run (session budget), so the 2025-2026 change summary relies only on official pages fetched today plus the pages' own footers/dates. |
| Decap CMS | As of 2026-10-22, Decap CMS/Decap Turbo has NO dedicated education/student license, no startup program, and no trial-credit offer for students or startups beyond what is listed: the permanent MIT-licensed free core, the Decap Turbo Free plan (1 site/1 seat, no CC), and the 14-day no-CC Pro trial. No education or startup discount appears anywhere on the official pages (checked decapcms.org and decapcms.org/turbo today). No student/startup free-offer sunset was found in 2025-2026 because none existed. Related context: Netlify Identity, the formerly recommended free auth backend, was deprecated around 2025 — pushing legacy Decap CMS users toward Decap Turbo (or third-party auth like DecapBridge). Decap Turbo (a 2025-era launch) is the only paid surface; note that third-party pricing references (Sitepins: "$37/mo Starter"; apis.io: unverified plan names) contradict the official €19/mo Pro price and should be treated as stale/unconfirmed. |
| DigitalOcean | 1) No student/education offer found: as of 2026-10-22 DigitalOcean has no public student, .edu, or education-license program. The URL requested in the task (digitalocean.com/community/solutions/digitalocean-for-startups) and a guessed .../digitalocean-for-students both return HTTP 404; the startup program now lives at digitalocean.com/startups. No .edu email requirement appears anywhere in official pages. 2) Program rebrand + duration change: 'Hatch' was rebranded 'DigitalOcean Startups' with a new 2025 benefits package announced Jan 22, 2025 (investors.digitalocean.com press release + BusinessWire). The previously referenced 'up to $100,000 over 24 months' is superseded: the official ToS (last updated May 11, 2026) sets a 12-month program term and a 1-year credit window, and the current page states amounts 'vary' per partner with a $10,000 monthly limit. 3) May 13, 2026 restriction expansion: core startup credits now explicitly exclude GPU Droplets, NVIDIA H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference, Serverless Inference/third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines and Cloudways (previously only GPU Droplets and H100 products were excluded); GPU support moved fully to the invite-only 'Early-Stage Boost' packages, and the Jan 2025 'up to 3 months free GPU usage' language is no longer published. 4) Support wording changed: 'Complimentary Premium Support' (Jan 2025 release) is now '15 months of free Standard-tier support'. 5) The older $200/60-day new-account trial no longer appears on the official pricing page or docs (docs.digitalocean.com/resources/free-trial/ 404s); the current trial is a $5/90-day credit automatically applied to a new account. 6) Oct 29, 2025: AI Startup Ecosystem launched with Techstars as founding partner — no published amounts, funnels into the Startups program. |
| DigitalOcean | Major 2025-2026 changes: (1) HATCH RETIRED — the Hatch brand was retired and replaced by the "DigitalOcean Startups" program; the Hatch ToS now only point to a prior version of the Startups ToS (Startups ToS last updated May 11, 2026; third-party guides place the brand retirement on May 11, 2026). The Jan 2025 Hatch offer of "up to $100,000 in compute credits + up to 3 months free GPU usage" (announced Jan 22, 2025) is no longer the current offer — the current page says credit amount 'varies' with a $10,000/month cap and unpublished totals. (2) STUDENT CREDIT ENDED — DigitalOcean exited the GitHub Student Developer Pack; students were told around July 1, 2026 that DO was "winding down the program" and "ending their participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack"; ALL Student Pack promotional credits, including ones already redeemed that had run a full year, expired universally on July 31, 2026 (retroactive cutoff). From June 8, 2026 the credit had already excluded GPU Droplets, H100 Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, DO Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace and Cloudways. There is no replacement DigitalOcean student/education license as of 2026-10-22. (3) CREDIT COVERAGE NARROWED — as of May 13, 2026 the Startups program credits explicitly exclude Dedicated/Serverless Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines, Cloudways and Bare Metal GPUs (in addition to the earlier GPU Droplet/H100 exclusions), and the page now states the $10,000/month cap. (4) A limit reduction was recorded around 2026-04-07 (narrowed signup-credit terms; low confidence, from a third-party changelog). (5) No free bare-metal or dedicated-server trial, no perpetual free VPS tier, and no no-credit-card offer exists as of 2026-10-22 — a payment card is required for every DO offer above. |
| DigitalOcean | Sunset/change notes for 2025–2026: (1) The former $200/60-day new-user trial is wound down — the old trial landing pages (/free-trial/ and /trial/) now 404 (verified today), and it has been replaced by the small automatic $5/90-day signup credit applied to the first team (docs page last verified 15 Jul 2026). (2) Startup Program: effective May 13 2026, credits were re-scoped to EXCLUDE GPU Droplets, NVIDIA H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference, Serverless Inference, third-party AI models (Anthropic/OpenAI), Paperspace and Cloudways — so startup credits no longer fund GPU/bare-metal AI hardware; program also explicitly grants no extensions and forfeits unused credits. (3) Wavemakers is DigitalOcean's current community-chapter program (replacing/continuing the older 'DigitalOcean Community Chapter' branding) with unpublished credit amounts. (4) No evidence of any education/student program in the 2025–2026 official site; the Promotional Credit & Discount Terms page is unchanged since June 7 2024. Method caveat: WebSearch was unavailable for this session (shared budget exhausted), so the '2025-2026 changes' cross-check relied solely on WebFetch of DigitalOcean's official pages; third-party press coverage was not verified. |
| DigitalOcean | GitHub Student Developer Pack $200 student credit: DigitalOcean is no longer listed as a perk in the current GitHub Student Developer Pack (checked 2026-10-22 via education.github.com/pack), and the dedicated DigitalOcean /github-students page now redirects to the generic homepage. Community reports (May 2026) say the credit stopped applying after GitHub authorization + adding a card. Treat the 'known so far' $200 GitHub-pack student credit as outdated/unavailable; the only live student-accessible path today is the general $200/60-day new-account trial.DO Startups credit framing changed materially: earlier 'known so far' cited 'up to $250K in credits.' The current official page (checked 2026-10-22) does NOT print a headline total; it frames the benefit as a pre-determined amount ('varies', via onboarding email) with a $10,000 monthly ceiling over 12 months (max ~$120K of core credits), and the eligible-service list was broadened effective May 13, 2026. The $250K figure is unsupported by the current official page.The official /free-trial/ landing page returns a 404 today, so the $200/60-day trial could not be read on a live official page; it remains corroborated by current (2026) third-party guides and first-party DigitalOcean community threads. No active .edu-only education license program was found. |
| Directus | Material 2025–2026 changes: (1) LICENSE CHANGE — Directus is no longer under the 'Apache 2.0' license recorded in prior notes; the OIG FAQ states the prior BSL (Business Source License) was replaced by the MSCL (Monospace Sustainable Core License, MSCL-1.0-GPL) to add enforcement mechanisms after 'documented persistent abuse ... by large enterprise organizations'; each release converts to GPL-3.0 after 4 years. (2) OIG PERPETUITY — the homepage announces 'We're Making the OIG Perpetual and Clearer'; grants now carry no expiration date and no renewal process, and the program is described as a standing program. (3) PROFESSIONAL TIER SUNSET — per the Cloud Policies page, 'as of June 1, 2026 the Professional tier is a legacy tier that is no longer available for new projects' (it remains available to existing projects; monthly plans grandfathered 6 months, annual until renewal; the legacy $5-per-unit overage rates likely apply only to grandfathered accounts). (4) TRIAL — the 'Directus Cloud trial available' note from prior knowledge is unsupported on any official page fetched today: no trial duration, no trial credit, and no credit-card language appears on /pricing/, /oig, /license, /cloud-policies, or /docs/cloud/getting-started/introduction; the free entry points are now the self-hosted Core tier and OIG. No student/education program exists, so nothing to sunset there. Data-quality caveats: web search was unavailable (shared session search budget exhausted), so 2025–2026 change verification relied on official pages fetched 2026-10-22; /blog and /cloud paths 404'd, and the per-tier technical-limits table on /cloud-policies did not render its Core-tier row in the fetched text (Core limits were instead confirmed on /pricing/). |
| Discord Nitro | No startup program or education license exists for Discord Nitro: I found no Nitro startup discount, startup credits, or school/university education license in the official promotions list (support.discord.com Promotions section, 2026 snapshot); discord.com/education returns 404 as of 2026-10-22 (the older 'Discord for Education' resource hub appears retired, with no replacement education-licensing program). The UNiDAYS campaign was refreshed for the 2026-2027 window (2026-07-09 to 2027-07-09) — earlier UNiDAYS iterations ran on shorter, earlier windows, so 2025-dated claim instructions may be stale. Other Nitro promos listed on Discord's official Promotions page in 2025-2026 are partner-driven (T-Mobile 3-month trial, Meta Quest, T-Mobile, Xbox, PlayStation, Twitch 2025, Best Buy, EGS Megasale 2026, Logitech/SteelSeries gear discounts, 'Free Nitro Trial for May 2025' — the May 2025 trial has lapsed) and are not student/startup offers, so they are out of scope. Caveat: WebFetch was blocked (403) on support.discord.com and discord.com/pricing (404) during this run; discord.com/nitro and the myunidays.com partner page were read live, and the UNiDAYS support article content came from a 2026-07-08 crawler snapshot. WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-run, so no additional 2025-2026 change checks were possible. |
| Docker | As of 2026-10-22, Docker has NO active student-specific program, education license, or startup program on its site. (1) 'Docker for Student Developers' (historically the .edu-verified student program, applied via docker.com/dsdev) now 404s and is not linked anywhere on docker.com — it appears sunseted/removed; the 404s are observed today, but no official end date was found (medium confidence it is dead, low confidence on when it ended). (2) The Y Combinator startup partnership (docker.com/ycombinator and /partners/y-combinator both 404 today) is not listed on the current /partners/ page, which now lists only Channel, Alliance, Extension, and Docker Trusted Content programs — so Docker's YC/startup deal is not publicly available (medium confidence). (3) Legacy 'Free Team' tier (up to 3 seats, 100 pulls/hr/user, no Build Cloud/Testcontainers Cloud) is referenced in the pricing FAQ with an upgrade path dated Dec 10, 2024; the current Personal plan is a 1-user $0 tier. (4) No trial credits in dollars, no funded startup accelerator benefits, and no classroom/educator license exist; Docker's free 'education' is limited to self-guided docs learning paths and free YouTube content (the LinkedIn Learning Docker Foundations Professional Certificate requires a paid LinkedIn subscription). Note: WebSearch was unavailable (session budget exhausted), so 2025-2026 change verification relied on official docker.com and testcontainers.com pages fetched today; confidence in sunset claims is therefore capped at medium. |
| Documenso | No official startup program, education or student license, nonprofit discount, free trial or trial credits was found. The official startup and education pages return HTTP 404 (documenso.com/startup/, /startups, /education and /education/). The pricing page (read today) lists none of these, and the OSS Friends page (documenso.com/oss-friends, read today) is a partner list with no offers. The only free offers are the hosted Free plan and the free AGPL self-hosted Community Edition; the staging sandbox is a test environment. Changes found: (1) The Early Adopters plan (first 100 signups, $30/mo, price guaranteed for life) was sunset on 2024-06-12 per the official blog post 'Sunsetting the Early Adopters Plan'; it cannot be claimed now. (2) Free-tier terms changed: the 2023-09-29 'Singleplayer' post promised a free account with unlimited recipients and '5 free signatures per month'. Current pricing and docs say '5 documents per month' and 'up to 10 recipients per document'. The change dates are not verified. (3) Paid prices changed: the June 2024 blog set Individual at $30/mo and Team at $50/mo (5 users, $10 per extra user). Current pricing is Individual $25/mo or $300/yr and Teams $40/mo or $480/yr (5 users, $8 per extra user). The change date is not verified. (4) The official blog index (read today) shows 2025-09-02 'Organizations: The Foundation of Documenso for Enterprise', 2025-09-18 'Introducing Self-Hosted Signing Infrastructure for Enterprise', 2026-01-30 'Introducing Documenso Business Edition for Self-Hosting' (paid production license with enterprise features and support, no public price), and 2026-06-10 'Splitting Our Email Sending Infrastructure' (free and individual accounts get separate email sending domains; no limit change stated). None of these adds a free offer. (5) Not re-verified for 2026: the 2024 blog's statements that free accounts may keep using the API for non-signing actions and that heavy API use on Individual can prompt an upgrade request; the Fair Use policy text (documenso.com/fair and /fair-use return 404, and the documen.so/fair link resolved to unrelated content); and whether the 2023 loginless single-signer free mode still exists (it is not on the pricing page). Third-party reviews (SignWith, ToolGPA, Doolpa, iTechGuides, Toolradar) match the current Free and paid prices. The WebSearch budget ran out mid-task and the changelog fetch failed, so some 2025-2026 changes may be missing. |
| Elastic Observability | 1) Elastic's own 'Elastic for Startups' program (announced ~2021–2022: Elastic Cloud credits + developer-advocate support, targeting seed/pre-Series A) no longer exists on elastic.co — /startups returns 404 and a 2026-10-07 check of elastic.co (StartupPerks) found no startup program in Elastic's sitemaps; the 'up to $5,000' figure surviving in aggregators traces to the AWS Activate channel, not to any Elastic-published program. The current official route for startup credits is AWS Activate (up to $5K funded / $1K self-founded, per AWS Startups' own 2026-09-01 announcement). 2) No perpetual free cloud tier ever existed for Elastic Cloud — the only standing free offers are the 14-day trial, marketplace 7-day trials, serverless free allowances (egress/executions), and the free self-hosted Basic license. 3) Pricing-page changes in the 2025–2026 window: Elastic Cloud Serverless is now GA (AWS/GCP/Azure) with pay-as-you-go or prepaid models, and new serverless metrics pricing took effect July 1, 2026; the classic 'Essentials' entry tier is no longer listed — current subscription tiers are Standard/Gold/Platinum/Enterprise. 4) Trial terms stable: still 14 days, no credit card required. 5) Gotcha for students specifically: Elastic does not publish any .edu verification, academic license, or student voucher program — students and startups get the same offers as general consumers plus the AWS Activate credit channel for startups. |
| ElevenLabs | Verdict: a genuine free offer exists for startups (Startup Grants Program, still listed on the official pricing page as of 2026-10-22; a May 2026 post also describes it as live). No student offer found: the pricing page compare table says 'Student program: Not mentioned', and https://elevenlabs.io/education has no discount or credits (education appears only in its mission statement). The Free plan is a real standing tier open to everyone, not a student or startup offer. Changes: the Startup Grant term was extended from 3 to 12 months on Aug 12, 2025 (official blog); older community posts describe earlier structures (a 3-month term, per-month minute allowances) that are not the current terms. No discontinued offer was found. Near-miss promos, not free and not targeted at students or startups: Starter first month shown at $1 ('83% off', 'Until Nov 1' per the pricing page, year not stated), Creator first month 50% off, and annual billing described as 'two months free' (annual price is ten times monthly). Limits of this check: the WebSearch budget ran out after one successful search, so a dedicated student-discount search and an independent free-tier attribution check could not run; those points rest on official pages only (pricing, terms, startup-grants, grants-application, education, quickstart). Unverified: card requirement for the Free API key; whether grant-to-Free conversion charges a card (a third-party site says no); whether badge or link and previous-recipient rules apply (third-party claims absent from the official pages checked). |
| Fauna | Verification could not be completed, so this is not a confirmed finding that no free offer exists as of 2026-10-22.What failed in this session:- WebFetch of https://docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/eol-faq/ returned "getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND docs.fauna.com" (DNS failure).- WebFetch of https://fauna.com/ returned "connect ECONNREFUSED" on port 443.- Both WebSearch queries (Cloud Community free plan shutdown 2025-2026; free tier for students/startups 2026) were refused because the session's shared search budget (200 calls) is used up. It refills at about 100 calls per hour. I did not work around the limit with curl, wget, a browser, or a third-party reader or archive.What is unverified: the task premise that Fauna's hosted service shut down on May 30, 2025, that new sign-ups stopped, and that accounts and data were deleted, with no free plan afterward. I have no primary-source citation for any of this in this session, so it stays unconfirmed. I also found no evidence of any genuine free student or startup offer, but that absence rests on failed fetches, not on checked sources.Recommended follow-up when the official pages are reachable or the search budget refills, or if CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION is raised:1. Fetch https://docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/eol-faq/ and quote the exact shutdown date, sign-up status, and treatment of accounts and data.2. Check Fauna's pricing and announcement pages for any startup, student, or credits program, and for any migration or partner offer.3. Only add a finding if a current official page documents a free offer with amounts, eligibility, claim steps, and expiry. Otherwise keep findings empty. |
| Fauna Cloud Community | No live free offers as of 2026-10-22: the entire Fauna service was sunset. Timeline: Fauna Inc. announced on 2025-03-19 that it would stop accepting new customers and wind down the service; the service ended Friday 2025-05-30 at 12:00pm PT, after which all Fauna accounts and their data were permanently deleted (official EOL FAQ, docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/eol-faq; announcement, fauna.com/blog/the-future-of-fauna). EVERY offer closed: (1) Free/Community plan ("Free Plan — For learning Fauna"): free shared managed DB, ~1 GB storage, ~1M requests/mo, no credit card required — ended with service; (2) Free trials on paid Startup (from $150/mo, US+EU region groups, 4k reads/s, 1k writes/s) and Pro (from $500/mo) tiers — new signups disallowed from 2025-03-19, and per the EOL FAQ existing trial customers could not upgrade to paid accounts; (3) No startup-credit program, trial-credit program, or .edu education license ever existed at Fauna. Continuity: Fauna committed in the same announcement to open-sourcing its core database engine (OSS Fauna + FQL + drivers + CLI), so self-hosted open-source Fauna is the only remaining free path. Live-site verification today: direct fetches of fauna.com fail at the edge (ECONNREFUSED, CloudFront 3.33.139.32) and docs.fauna.com no longer resolves (DNS ENOTFOUND), consistent with company dissolution; search-engine cached copies still show the banner "The Fauna service will be ending on May 30, 2025". The SaaSOffers "Fauna Free Tier" page is stale filler, not an active offer. Caveats: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before additional independent cross-checks; confidence is HIGH that the service closed on 2025-05-30 and that signups/trial upgrades were prohibited (official announcement + EOL FAQ text read today via search cache), and MEDIUM on the historical free-plan caps (~1 GB / ~1M requests/mo, carried from task context, not re-verified on a live page). |
| Figma Education | Figma for Startups: sunset/paused — figma.com/startups 404, no application form, no help-center article, confirmed unverified by multiple independent trackers Sept-Oct 2026; the program previously offered ~24 months of the free Organization plan (or ~$1,000 in credits) for VC/accelerator-referred startups and should not be counted as a live offer. Related 2025 sunset: Figma's affiliate program was deprecated in early 2025 (no new applications). Material 2025-2026 changes: paid plan pricing and seat structure changed (now Full/Dev/Collab seats: Professional $16/$12/$3 per month per seat, Organization $55/$25/$5, Enterprise $90/$35/$5 annual billing; Professional was ~$18/editor and Organization ~$35 pre-restructure) — do not quote old per-editor prices. AI credits are now built into every plan/seat (Starter 500/mo with 150/day cap; Pro Full 3,000/mo; Org Full 3,500/mo; Enterprise Full 4,250/mo; all other seats 500/mo) and Figma explicitly states there are no free trials of paid plans and no nonprofit discounts. New products included in seats (Figma Make, Motion, Sites, Buzz, Specs) are beta on paid seats. The Education program itself is live and current: free Professional for 13+ verified students/educators, free Enterprise for K-12 districts, 3,000 AI credits/month for higher-ed and bootcamp education seats, with 1-year (students) / 2-year (educators) / 6-month (bootcamp students) validity terms. |
| Figma for Education | 2025-2026 material changes: (1) September 5, 2025 — Figma Education plan update: Figma Make (AI) rolled out to the higher-ed Education plan; all higher-ed and high-school users were required to re-verify by Sept 29, 2025 or lose Professional features (teams downgraded to Starter: 3 files/1 project, 4+ files → view-only); bootcamp verification moved from self-verify to trusted-partner provider verification; bootcamp validity is 6 months with one 6-month extension. (2) Pricing restructure to a seat model (Full/Dev/Collab seats): Professional $16 full / $12 dev / $3 collab per month + 3,000/500/500 AI credits; Organization $55/$25/$5 annual; Enterprise $90/$35/$5 annual; Starter free with 500 AI credits/mo (150/day). This replaced the older flat per-editor pricing. (3) Time-boxed freebies being sunset: code layers free through November 4, 2026 (paid plans only; afterwards they consume AI credits); Figma Sites custom domains were free through 2025 with bandwidth/storage add-ons arriving 'in early 2026' — so education users' one-Site-allowance has no custom domain and paid tiers now face paid egress/domain extras. (4) Figma for Startups: ended/paused — figma.com/startups is a 404, no application form on any Figma-owned page as of Sep–Oct 2026 checks; third-party trackers mark it 'No Longer Available'/'Paused'; Figma's FAQ now explicitly excludes early-stage startups from free education teams. Legacy terms (for reference only): 24 months of the Organization plan free via accelerator partner referral, or up to $1,000 / 1 year Professional free / 50% off 6 months with <$10M funding caps. (5) GitHub Student Developer Pack no longer lists Figma among perks, so there is no third-party free Figma-Professional student channel. Not relevant but noted: a Figma for Government plan also exists (separate from education; not a student/startup offer). |
| Firebase Authentication | 2025-2026 changes: (1) The free auth allocation is now 50,000 MAUs (standard methods) and 50 MAUs (SAML/OIDC) on BOTH Spark and Blaze, replacing the older Blaze free tier of 10,000 free auth MAUs that applied for years; the Spark no-payment-method plan is the new default sign-up. (2) Phone Auth was removed from the free offerings: the current pricing page shows 'billed per SMS sent' on Blaze and 'N/A' on Spark, vs. the previously free ~10K phone sign-ins — a real cost trap for SMS-based apps. (3) Feature Flags: no live free offering found. All Firebase Feature Flags URLs checked today 404 (firebase.google.com/docs/feature-flags, /docs/feature-flags/overview, /docs/feature-flags/pricing, /product/feature-flags, /pricing/feature-flags) and 'Feature Flags' has no line on the official pricing page — the product/doc set appears to have been restructured or sunset out of developer preview; treat as not-free-until-verified. (4) The old startups portal launchcloud.withgoogle.com is gone (404); the program now runs at cloud.google.com/startups as 'Google for Startups Cloud Program' with the $2K Start / up-to-$350K Scale / Scale AI tiers described above — a materially different structure from the older $125K-$250K cohort-style GCP Startups program. (5) GCP free trial terms are stable ($300/90 days, CC required, last-updated 2026-10-20) but now explicitly exclude Gemini API (AI Studio) costs from trial credit. (6) No .edu-gated student offer exists for Firebase itself: the only education-licensed credits are GCP grants for faculty (teaching) and faculty/PhD/postdoc researchers (research, up to $5K); students have no dedicated free GCP/Firebase program beyond the general trial (CC required) and the no-CC Spark plan.</sunset_notes> |
| Firebase Cloud Messaging | No FCM free offer was sunset in 2025-2026. FCM remains 'no-cost' on the Spark and Blaze plans (always free, no per-message charge; the only limit is the 600,000 msg/min rate quota, which is a throttle, not a billing cap). The GCP/Firebase Free Trial remains $300 for 90 days — a '30-day' figure that surfaced during research was a fetch error, not a real change; the official T&Cs, GCP docs, and the Firebase blog all confirm 90 days. I could not verify the LIVE 2026 figures for the Google for Startups Cloud Program or the education-credits program (program URLs have moved, the pages would not render, edu.dev failed DNS, and the session WebSearch budget was exhausted), so findings 3 and 4 are reported as low-confidence, historical/approximate, and need re-verification on the live pages. One minor 2025 change observed (not FCM-related): the Blaze plan's App Hosting added a no-cost allowance of up to 10 GiB/month of outgoing bandwidth starting Aug 1, 2025. Note on scope: FCM is a push-only service and offers no free email or SMS tier; the 'Email/SMS front' in the task framing does not exist within FCM (Firebase Auth phone sign-in is billed per SMS, not free). |
| Flagsmith Free Plan | No formal Flagsmith startup program, student/education license, or trial-credit offer exists as of 2026-10-22 — dedicated pages /education, /startup-program, /faq all return 404; the only concessions are the permanent free tier, 14-day paid-plan trials, the free BSD-3 open-source self-hosted build, and the contact-gated open-source/non-profit/charity discount. Current published figures exactly match the known baseline (Free: 50,000 requests/mo, unlimited flags/environments, 1 team member; Start-Up: $45/mo monthly / $40/mo yearly, 1M requests, 3 members), indicating no material pricing change is visible on the official page today. Caveats: (1) the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so 2025-2026 change history could not be independently verified via search engines — I verified the live official pages only; (2) the Flagsmith blog page (Sep–Oct 2026 posts) shows no pricing-change announcements on its first page; (3) one possible 2025-2026 change: the core repository now advertises a permissive BSD-3-Clause license ('no restrictions on commercial use') where Flagsmith historically used a Business Source License — I could not verify the license-change date (history was not searchable); if the repo was BSL before, that re-licensing is a material, favorable change for commercial self-hosting. |
| Flutterwave | No distinct startup program, student/education license, or trial-credit offer exists on Flutterwave's official front pages as of 2026-10-22: /startups, /us/students, /us/programs, and /campus-tech all return 404, and the site navigation (Enterprise/SME/Personal/Developers/Resources/Company menus), footer, and blog category pages list no such programs. Historically Flutterwave ran 'Campus Tech' (Nigerian campus promoter program), but it has no current official page - treat as sunset/unavailable unless a new announcement appears. The previously known 'test data retained 30 days' detail and native 'webhook simulation' could not be re-verified: current docs describe webhook testing via external webhook.site and state no data-retention period, so those specifics may have changed or been removed. Trial-credit or education-discount offerings: none found. Verification method: all facts above come from official pages fetched today; the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so no third-party/news confirmation of 2025-2026 program sunsets was possible, and the JS-rendered /us/pricing fee table could not be extracted (US rates unverified; Nigeria and Ghana rates verified on server-rendered regional pages). |
| Fly.io | Legacy free tier (free shared-CPU machines, historically eligible for students/educators/researchers/artists) has been sunset: the old FAQ at fly.io/docs/reference/free-faq now 404s at docs.fly.io/reference/free-faq, fly.io/education and docs.fly.io/about/education 404, and today's pricing page shows no free compute tier — replaced by the 2-VM-hour / 7-day no-card trial plus pay-as-you-go from ~$2.19/mo. Free Postgres on the old free plan is also gone (Managed Postgres Basic starts at $38/mo). Web search was unavailable in this session (budget exhausted), so I could not pin the exact sunset date of the old free tier (my prior knowledge suggests the free tier was retired in 2024 and replaced by the trial); that date should be confirmed separately. The $15,000 startup-credit figure and the 1-year credit expiry come from the live fly.io/startups page (copyrighted 2026), so the program is current as of 2026-10-22; no material 2025-2026 change was visible on the official pages themselves. No evidence today of any current education license or student program. |
| Formbricks | Checked 2026-10-22 against formbricks.com pages read directly, plus one successful web search. (1) Free tier appears reduced in 2026: Formbricks' own blog posts dated Feb 3, 2026 (https://formbricks.com/blog/surveysparrow-pricing) and Feb 11, 2026 (https://formbricks.com/typeform-alternative) cite 1,000 responses/month for the free/Cloud plan. The pricing page read on 2026-10-22 lists Hobby at 250 responses/month and 1 workspace. A third-party StartupPerks listing (as of Sep 24, 2026) also shows 250. The GTM Directory (https://thegtmdirectory.com/tools/formbricks, third party) says the pricing page 'changed 2026-10-19'. The exact effective date of the cut was not found. Older context: formbricks/formbricks PR #3824 (Oct 2024, https://github.com/formbricks/formbricks/pull/3824) raised the FREE responses billing constant from 500 to 1,500. (2) Paid prices conflict across sources. Official page (read today, USD): Pro $74/month for 2,000 responses; Scale $325/month for 5,000 responses. Formbricks' Feb 2026 blog quotes $49/month for 5,000 responses (Startup). The GTM Directory says the page shows EUR 59 and EUR 199, and third-party listings (1launch.eu, digitalmarketingcommunity.com) show older free and Startup terms, one at $490/year. Treat the official page as authoritative but re-verify, because currency and plan details vary by source and date. (3) Startup program: none found. https://formbricks.com/startups returned HTTP 404 on 2026-10-22. The only startup-related listing is StartupPerks, a third-party aggregator that lists the Hobby plan as a 'perk' ('No funding needed'); it is not a Formbricks program. (4) Education license or student discount: none found. https://formbricks.com/education returned HTTP 404. The pricing FAQ asks 'Do you offer discounts for students, teachers, or NGOs?' but the answer is absent from the text returned by WebFetch, so this remains unverified. No .edu requirement is stated for Hobby. (5) Trials and credits: no trial length, trial credits, or trial terms appear for any plan. The FAQ 'Can I try Formbricks for free before committing?' has no answer text. The 'Start free' buttons on Pro and Scale state no terms. (6) Adjacent, not for students or startups: https://formbricks.com/industry/survey-tool-nonprofits says 'Formbricks offers up to 50% discounts to support nonprofits' (a ceiling; actual rate, duration, and eligibility not stated; 'Request discount' button). (7) OSS Friends (https://formbricks.com/oss-friends) is a directory of 38 open-source projects. Its 'Wanna join OSS Friends?' link (https://formbricks.com/join-oss-friends) redirects to a Formbricks page titled 'Backlink Squad'. No free plan, credits, or discount was found for OSS Friends. (8) Contributor program: https://formbricks.com/community (undated) says contributor levels 'Unlock benefits like cash bounties, limited merch and more'. Terms were not verified, and it is not a free-service offer. (9) Free-forever scope: the community FAQ (undated) says in-app surveys 'are not part of this Deal' and that Formbricks will 'keep full control over the pricing in the long run'. Do not assume the free-forever statements cover in-app survey pricing. (10) Search coverage gap: the session-wide WebSearch budget was exhausted after one successful search, so the education-license search and the 2026 pricing-change search did not run. This limit was not worked around. Coverage of 2025-2026 changes rests on the official pages fetched directly and the snippets from that one search. |
| free-for.dev | Scope: free-for.dev is a curated directory of as-a-Service offers, not a student or startup program, so it cannot itself be claimed. Its rules, as shown on the GitHub README (ripienaar/free-for-dev, about 139.9k stars): hosted services only; a free tier, not just a trial; time-bucketed free tiers must last at least a year; TLS restricted to paid tiers is rejected; entries are delisted when a free option is discontinued. The free-for.dev site itself returned only 'Loading...' to WebFetch, so the GitHub README was read instead. Cross-check: the 'Education and Career Development' section (21 entries, read from README characters 100,000 to 200,000) lists learning resources such as edX, freeCodeCamp, Khan Academy and Exercism, not student-perk bundles, so GitHub Student Developer Pack, Azure for Students, JetBrains and Heroku's student credit are absent from it. The 'Major Cloud Providers' Always-Free Limits' section lists Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Cloudflare and Zoho; IBM Cloud and Zoho were not checked. The table of contents has no startup-credit section; AWS Activate, Google for Startups and Microsoft for Startups were not checked. Changes and closures: Heroku's current pricing page lists no free dyno (cheapest Eco at $5/month); its free-dyno docs page returned HTTP 401, so the discontinuation date is unverified. AWS's current Free Tier is credit-based with a 6-month Free plan (change date unverified). Google may change or remove Free Tier limits on 30 days' notice. Render's free Postgres expires after 30 days. Vercel Hobby is non-commercial only. Excluded for lack of verification: JetBrains (three attempts returned only the page title and navigation), Netlify (its free plan shows a 300-credit cap, does not define credits, and states no explicit commercial restriction), IBM Cloud and Zoho. The Oracle A1 figure should be re-checked on the live page. Search: the session's shared WebSearch budget was already exhausted when this agent's one search returned a budget message, so no 2025-2026 news, changelog or press search was run. Status rests on official pages fetched through WebFetch on 2026-10-22. WebFetch returns model-written summaries, so exact figures should be re-checked on the live pages before publication. |
| freellmcredits.com | Programs closed or changed in 2025–2026 (per the directory's dated listings, cross-checked against primary pages on 2026-10-22): (1) Hugging Face Inference Providers: free accounts' recurring monthly inference allowance ENDED 7 Oct 2026 — free users now get $0 and must purchase credits or upgrade to PRO ($9/mo, which includes $2.00/month general-purpose compute credits; Team/Enterprise get $2.00/seat). Confirmed on the official pricing page ('Free Users: None'). (2) Mistral: the free API 'Free mode' allowance (roughly $10/month API credit through Sept 2026) was removed from the pricing page on 10 Oct 2026; the current page shows only a consumer 'Free plan' with 'limited access to Vibe' and paid tiers with $15/$25.50 monthly API credits — treat free API access as likely discontinued (medium confidence; no explicit 'free API' statement either way). Mistral's student offer is a discount (verified students $5.99/mo Pro, max 12 months), not a free tier. (3) Cerebras: September 2026 correction logged by the directory — trial now requires a verified payment method; the 'up to 1M tokens/day' figure is a trial rate limit, and Cerebras has no ongoing free tier. (4) Claude Startups (Anthropic): general cohort is closed/full; the earlier $1,000 credit deal is no longer available; the live route is the partner-VC path (up to $100K first-party API credits). (5) Groq: groq/compound and compound-mini models retired 21 Sep 2026; Llama chat models dropped off the free list by Sep 2026. (6) OpenAI: its pricing page returned HTTP 403 to automated fetching, so its trial-credit status was NOT re-verified in this pass — flag as unverified rather than assume. Process notes: WebSearch was unavailable for this pass (session budget exhausted), so all verification was done via direct WebFetch of the directory pages and the official provider sources; some directory pages hit a client-side output-token limit, worked around with constrained fetch prompts. The directory itself states 25 published unexpired offers in its 21 Oct 2026 dataset and is the right cross-check source for this front, but per its own methodology it is a secondary source — publish figures only against the linked official URLs. |
| Gemini API Free Tier | (1) Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (gemini-2.5-flash-image) is deprecated and shuts down October 2, 2026 per the official pricing page; migrate to Gemini 3.1 Flash Image or 3.1 Flash Lite Image. It was not on the free tier. (2) Third-party guides (apiyi, findskill, April and May 2026) say that from April 1, 2026 Pro models were removed from the free tier, mandatory spending caps applied, and prepaid billing applied to new accounts; and that free-tier quotas were cut 50 to 80 percent in December 2025. The official pricing page captured 2026-10-22 still lists Gemini 2.5 Pro as Free of charge and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview as not available on free, so the Pro-removal claim is only partly consistent with official data. The spend-cap idea matches the official rate-limit table's billing tier caps, but those caps are for paid tiers. (3) Vertex AI was folded into Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (official Vertex AI release notes); express-mode docs now use 'Agent Platform' naming. (4) The 2025 US student offer (Google AI Premium / AI Pro, .edu address required per The Verge, April 2025; sign-up deadline extended to October 6, 2025 per the August 6, 2025 Google blog) has expired. The 2026 US offer redeems until December 31, 2026. (5) Startup tier terms differ across third-party sites (Scale founding age 10 years vs official five years; AI-first Year 1 amounts). The official cloud.google.com/startup/benefits page was used throughout. (6) Unverified: a search snippet attributed to a Google AI Developers Forum thread said the Gemini API would stop accepting unrestricted API keys from June 19, 2026. The fetched copy of that thread did not contain this text, so it is unconfirmed; restricting keys to the Gemini API is still advisable. (7) The $300 / 90-day Google Cloud trial and the Start tier $2,000 / 1-year credits match the official pages captured today; no 2025 or 2026 change to them was found. (8) No country list was captured for the Gemini API free tier; the teaching credits, research grants, Gemini Academic Program and Google AI Plus offers each carry their own country lists. (9) No free offer was found that is specifically labeled as a Gemini API startup credit; startup credits can be spent on Gemini through the Cloud program. |
| Ghost | No student/education license or startup program was sunset or materially changed at Ghost in 2025–2026 because none are documented on the official site: /education/ is a 404 and /startups/ (the 'For Business' page) lists no program, credits, funding cap, or age limit. There is no record of a Ghost education or startup program that existed and was later removed. The only free paths available today are (1) self-hosted Ghost under the MIT license — free forever, no member limits, no hosting included (you pay for your own infra), and (2) the 14-day Ghost(Pro) free trial, after which the entry plan is Starter at $18/mo billed yearly. Both are general offers, not gated to students or startups. Verification limits: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-research, so findings rest on fetching the official Ghost pages (ghost.org main, /pricing/, /startups/, /education/, docs redirects) rather than a broad 2025–2026 search; any off-site startup/education program announcement could not be independently confirmed, and the trial's 'no credit card required' point was not confirmed on a page that loaded today. |
| Ghost | No free hosted tier, trial credits, startup program, or education license was found for Ghost. The trial is time-based only. ghost.org/education/ and ghost.org/students/ return 404; ghost.org/startups/ shows no startup offer; the official discount article says the annual 20% is the only discount, including for non-profits. Member free trials and complimentary plans are tools publishers give their readers, not offers to Ghost customers. Changes and conflicts: (1) Starter no longer includes paid subscriptions. Third-party sites date this to a July 2025 pricing update; the official page confirms the current limit, and no Ghost changelog was checked. (2) Starter price conflict: the official page on 2026-10-22 shows $18/mo billed yearly, while several 2026 third-party sites show $15/mo annual and $18/mo monthly. This may be a 2026 change and is unresolved. (3) The official page lists Business at 1,000 members in its feature list and 10,000 in its comparison table. (4) Historical sunset: a no-card 14-day trial existed in October 2015 (GitHub issue #6026), and card details were required by January 2018 per the same thread. (5) Ghost's hosting and newsletter docs cite a $15/mo Ghost(Pro) base and a Mailgun free tier of 600 emails/month; both conflict with the current pricing page and Mailgun's pricing page. Research limits: two WebSearch calls succeeded, and a third was refused because the session's search budget was used up. The 2025-2026 change checks therefore rely on WebFetch of official pages plus those search snippets. Unverified: the trial card requirement, the .link promotion terms (Entri and .link), and the Student Beans terms. |
| Gitea | try.gitea.io — the free hosted "try" instance listed in the known-so-far notes — no longer resolves (DNS getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND on two attempts as of 2026-10-22), indicating it has been retired or repurposed; no current official page or terms could be found. Treat it as defunct. gitea.com's root domain now 303-redirects to about.gitea.com (marketing site); the free first-party public instance still serves orgs/repos under gitea.com/<org>/<repo>, but gitea.com no longer offers free managed CI runners (confirmed by a Gitea maintainer on the forum, Nov 2025 — Gitea Actions on gitea.com needs a self-hosted runner or paid Gitea Cloud managed runners). No dedicated Gitea startup program with free credits exists as of 2026-10-22 (startups' free path = self-hosted OSS Gitea + the Gitea Cloud 30-day trial). Recurring 2024→2026 changes still in effect: Gitea Cloud added a Frankfurt (EU) region, add-on object storage, unlimited network traffic (incoming free, outgoing speed-capped past a high-speed quota), and a 50% recurring discount on most plans; Enterprise lists at $19/user/month with a 50% discount to $9.50/user/month on a 1-year commitment. The Education Program (free 12-month Enterprise license for non-profit institutions) is current and live on about.gitea.com/education. Note: WebSearch budget was exhausted, so verification relied on WebFetch of official Gitea pages (about.gitea.com products/pricing/education, gitea.com, docs.gitea.com/enterprise, cloud.gitea.com) plus one forum confirmation. |
| GitHub | Material 2025-2026 changes (all verified from official docs/pages today): (1) 2024-12: Copilot Free launched — 2,000 completions + 50 chat messages/month. (2) 2025-05-05: premium-request metering introduced; Pro 300 PRU/month, Pro+ 1,500, extra PRUs at $0.04 each; billing enforcement began 2025-06-18. (3) 2025-08: Free plan's chat allowance reduced from 200 to 50 premium requests/month. (4) 2026-03-12/13: existing student benefits were migrated to a dedicated 'Copilot Student plan' with auto model selection only; premium models (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus/Sonnet) removed from student self-selection — announced by GitHub Education in community discussion 189268; further model/limit adjustments were flagged as upcoming. (5) 2026-04-27: GPT-5.3-Codex removed from the Student model picker. (6) 2026-06-01: all plans moved to usage-based 'GitHub AI Credits' billing (1 credit = $0.01): Pro $15/1,500 cr, Pro+ $70/7,000 cr, Max $200/20,000 cr; student allowance is community-reported at ~200 credits/month; legacy per-request billing survives only for Pro/Pro+ annual-plan users who opted to stay. Sunset: the 'unlimited chat with premium models' framing of older student coverage is obsolete — the student plan is now credit-capped and auto-routing-only. No free offer was fully discontinued: Free, Student, and teacher/maintainer Pro all remain active as of 2026-10-22. |
| GitHub | Verification method / caveats: (1) WebSearch was UNAVAILABLE this session (the session's shared 200-call budget was exhausted), so 2025-2026 change-detection could NOT be done via dedicated searches; findings were verified by WebFetch of the LIVE official pages today: https://education.github.com/pack (all offers above), https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/ (Azure student + Azure for Startups), and https://github.com/features/copilot (Copilot free/student tiers and 2026 data-train/pricing changes). Confidence: 'high' = cross-verified on the specific official page today (GitHub Pro/Copilot/Codespaces/Pages/Desktop, Azure 18+, Azure for Startups); 'medium' = stated on the official pack page today but not re-verified on the partner's own page (partner terms may have drifted). Nothing was marked 'low'. (2) Observed 2025-2026 changes that are live: Azure for Students is now presented as a single flat tier ($100 credit within 12 months + free monthly amounts of 20+ services for 12 months + 65+ always-free) rather than the older 'monthly $-credit for 12 months' structure still cited in some third-party sources; Copilot pricing now includes a new 'Max' tier (2026 lineup), and from ~Apr 24 GitHub may use Free/Pro/Pro+ interaction data for model training unless you opt out, and from Jun 1, 2026 code-review workflows begin consuming GitHub Actions minutes. (3) No large-scale pack sunset was observed on the live page today - the full partner list is still present; however, individual partner offers (e.g. Travis CI, Heroku, 1Password 2-yr, BrowserStack/LambdaTest) have historically had unstable availability, so a 'medium' confidence partner entry may no longer be live when claimed - re-check the pack page link before relying on any single partner offer. The startup front is covered by Azure for Startups ($1k / up to $5k); GitHub's own startup programs are separate from the student pack and were not part of this provider scope. |
| GitHub | 2025-2026 material changes verified via changelog/docs: (1) 2026-03-12/13: the legacy free student entitlement (previously 'free Copilot Pro features for verified students') was replaced by a dedicated, deliberately more limited 'Copilot Student' plan — manual premium-model selection removed, auto-only routing; 200 AI credits/month added 2026-06-01; GPT-5.3-Codex dropped from student model picker 2026-04-27; auto-only model selection enforced 2026-06-24. (2) 2026-04-20: new signups for Student/Pro/Pro+/Max PAUSED and usage limits tightened (Opus removed from Pro, Pro+ >5x Pro limits; refund window closed 2026-05-20); signups gradually reopened from 2026-06-16/17 — as of 2026-10-22 open. (3) 'Premium requests' terminology is gone across pages fetched; plans now use GitHub AI Credits (1 credit = $0.01; overage $0.01/credit) after usage-based billing went live 2026-06-01 — so older docs citing e.g. '50 premium requests' on Free are outdated. (4) GitHub for Startups: the previous startup offer was explicitly 'discontinued and is no longer available'; current offer is the $10k Enterprise-cloud credit. (5) No region restrictions found on any fetched page; student offer is global via GitHub Education verification. One caveat: the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so verification relied on WebFetch of official pages; 'popular OSS project' threshold remains undocumented on official pages (medium confidence). |
| GitHub | 2025-2026 changes observed while verifying (as of 2026-10-22): (1) GitHub's 'Accelerate' marketing page (github.com/enterprise/accelerate) now 404s and github.com/accelerate is just an org profile — the startup program is now branded 'GitHub for Startups' and is credit-based ($10K/12 months) rather than the older free-Team-plan/accelerate structure; I could not re-read the pre-change Accelerate page, so historical free-Pro-for-founders details are not confirmed (low confidence on the prior shape). (2) Billing docs were restructured: docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/billing-plans-and-billing-limits-for-individuals and the old /billing/managing-billing-for-github-codespaces/pricing-for-codespaces URLs are 404; plan/usage data now lives under /en/billing/concepts/product-billing/* and /en/billing/reference/product-usage-included. (3) The product-usage-included table no longer lists a separate 'Free for students' row — students receive Pro-plan entitlements (180 core-hours/20 GB) instead, which is why student figures come from the Pro row. (4) Student Copilot benefit wording changed to 'unlimited completions + GitHub AI credits + limited chat/agent usage' (the pre-2025 '2,000 completions' framing is gone), and a new partner (Camber: 40 CPU hours, 5 GPU hours, 50 GB storage) joined the pack. No termination of the Free or student codespaces tiers was announced. |
| GitHub | MAJOR 2025-2026 RESTRUCTURE OF GITHUB'S FREE ALLOWANCES (current official docs, fetched 2026-10-22, disagree with the task's 'known so far'):- GitHub Pro now lists 3,000 GitHub Actions minutes/month, NOT the 5,000 the task assumed (docs.github.com product-usage reference).- GitHub Codespaces is now 180 core hours + 20 GB storage/month on Pro, NOT '2,000 premium hours / 50 GB'; the term 'premium hours' was renamed to 'core hours' and the free/Pro allowances were reworked (Free plan now 120 core hours + 15 GB).- GitHub Copilot billing changed from 'premium requests' to 'GitHub AI Credits' (1 credit = $0.01) with a 2025 plan restructure: Free / Pro ($10, 1,500 cr: 1,000 base + 500 flex) / Pro+ ($39, 7,000 cr) / Max ($100, 20,000 cr) / Business ($19/seat, 1,900 cr) / Enterprise ($39/seat, 3,900 cr). Students/teachers get Pro-equivalent free.- DigitalOcean's '$200' pack perk is no longer in the official 2026 pack catalog (~73 partners, no DigitalOcean); DO's own academia page 404s. Treat as sunset/removed from the pack (medium confidence).NOT SUNCET (still active, current): the core Student Developer Pack remains a live 2026 program (pack page footer is (c) 2026) — free GitHub Pro, free Codespaces Pro tier, free Copilot student plan, GitHub Pages/Classroom, ~73 partner offers, 2-year student re-validation, 13+ age floor, no credit card required on the GitHub side. Teachers get a separate free track: free GitHub Team + free Copilot Pro. GitHub's separate STARTUP program (if in scope for another front) was not verified here — this front is education/.edu-only.CAVEAT: I could not run new web searches (session web-search budget was exhausted), so corroboration rests on official GitHub pages fetched today (education.github.com/pack, docs.github.com product-usage/Copilot/education pages, github.com/pricing, github.com/features/copilot). Re-verify the exact current Actions (3,000) and Codespaces (180 core hours / 20 GB) figures and the DigitalOcean removal directly on those pages if exact currency matters. |
| GitHub | SUNSET (material, high confidence): GitHub Models is retired. docs.github.com/en/github-models (read 2026-10-22) says: 'As of July 30, 2026, GitHub Models has been fully retired.' The playground, model catalog, inference API and bring-your-own-key (BYOK) are no longer available to any customer. The page says GitHub Models was a separate service from GitHub Copilot. It states no grace period, refund, credit or migration guide, and points to Azure AI Foundry (https://ai.azure.com/) and GitHub Copilot as replacements. The task premise (free GitHub Models API and VS Code access with no paid key) is obsolete as of 2026-10-22, so no GitHub Models free-tier entry appears in findings. GitHub Models rate limits could not be retrieved: the rate-limit and marketplace URLs tried returned 404. github.com/features/models now describes Copilot plans, not GitHub Models.GAPS: WebSearch was unavailable (session search budget exhausted), so no 2025-2026 changelog or news search was done; changes were checked only on the official pages read. Not found: region limits; Copilot Student duration, cost terms and renewal; Campus Program application steps and seat limits; teacher access duration. Azure AI Foundry's own student and startup credits were not researched (outside GitHub scope); the Azure credit in the Student Developer Pack is the first lead to verify.EXCLUDED AS NOT FREE: Copilot Pro $10/month ($15 AI credits including $5 flex), Pro+ $39/month ($70), Max $100/month ($200), Business $19/user/month, Enterprise $39/user/month (summaries of github.com/features/models and github.com/features/copilot/plans).OPEN CONFLICTS: Copilot Free model access (see first finding); 'No credit card required' appears only in the github.com/features/models summary, not on the plans docs. |
| GitLab | Restructured/changed in 2025-2026 (per official pages read 2026-10-22): (1) Trial duration — the dedicated free-trial page states 30-day GitLab Ultimate trials for both hosted and self-managed, while JSON-LD schema metadata on the marketing /solutions/ pages still says "60-day free trial"; the 30-day figure is the current authoritative one. (2) GitLab for Startups is now a two-tier (Seed <=$5M / Early Series A-B <=$20M) structure capping benefits at 20 seats, with Seed = free Ultimate year one + 50% year two and Early = 50%/25% discounts; self-funded startups are excluded and the current page no longer lists 50,000 compute minutes or a storage allowance for the startup program (the pricing page's "50K compute minutes/month" sentence bundles open source, education, and startups without clarifying which still get it — verify with startups@gitlab.com). (3) Education: seats are unlimited with 50,000 compute minutes/month included, but the license is institution-only via full-time faculty/staff — GitLab explicitly cannot issue licenses directly to students, so there is no standalone "GitLab for Students" free program; students are routed to the Free tier or a faculty sponsor. (4) Duo AI features: no free credits are bundled on the Free plan (paid GitLab Credits add-on, $1/credit); the 12/user/mo (Premium) and 24/user/mo (Ultimate) included-credits lines are flagged as a limited-time promotional offer, so those "free" AI credits can sunset. (5) Trial is Ultimate-only; no standalone Premium trial offer appears on the current trial page. No program was announced as fully sunset as of this check; open-source program renewals lapse to the Free tier if not resubmitted annually. |
| Google Cloud | 2024-11-08 (AI Startups Summit, Bengaluru): Scale tier was restructured/raised — the prior program's 'up to $150,000 over 2 years' became $200,000 (or $350,000 for AI-first) with the Year-1 100% match / Year-2 20% structure; the pre-2024 tiered Grow/Scale legacy offers (which varied ~$5k-$150k by funding stage) were folded into the current Start ($2,000) / Scale ($200k/$350k) two-tier model — the earlier larger multi-stage tiers are gone. The standalone self-serve 'Google Cloud for Students' $300/12-month credit program is no longer advertised on current official pages (cloud.google.com/edu/students now lists faculty-applied course credits + free Google Skills access, 200 credits); it appears sunseted in favor of the faculty/course-based Education credits program (medium confidence — university IT pages still cite the old $300 offer). Historical note: GCP Free Trial was extended from 30 to 90 days back in Aug 2020 (unchanged since). Vertex AI's older '1M free GenAI units' promotional offer has not been re-announced in 2025-2026; AI free access now flows through the Gemini API Free tier and GCP Free Tier instead. 2026 changes worth flagging: Gemini API Free-tier rate limits moved to per-account dashboard (static per-model table removed from docs), unrestricted API keys blocked from June 19 2026, and paid tier now requires min $5 prepay. |
| Google Cloud | 2025-2026 changes observed today (2026-10-22) on live pages: (1) The startup program is now branded "Google for Startups Cloud Program" at cloud.google.com/startups; the task's "known so far: up to $200,000" equals the current non-AI "Scale" funded-tier cap, but the headline cap is now up to $350,000 over two years ("Scale AI" tier: Year 1 100% coverage up to $250,000; Year 2 20% up to an additional $100,000; non-AI "Scale": Year 1 up to $100,000 + Year 2 up to $100,000). Legacy partner-accelerator network (Y Combinator/500/Techstars-era "Accelerate" listings) is replaced on the page by generic "equity-free accelerators" cohorts plus a "Gemini Startup Forum." Old URL cloud.google.com/programs/startups now 404s. (2) The Always-Free tier was restructured on cloud.google.com/free: the legacy free allotments for Cloud SQL (micro instance 750h/mo + 20GB SSD/375GB HDD), Memorystore, Spanner, and Dataflow (9,600h/mo) are no longer listed, and BigQuery no longer lists the 10GB storage free allotment (only 1TB/mo queries); Cloud Storage was cut to "5 GB-months Standard" and Cloud Functions was replaced by "Cloud Run functions." GCP now pairs this with finite product-specific free trials (30-90 days) for managed databases/data platforms. Confidence in this "changed" comparison is medium - I read today's page (high) but could not archive-compare (web search budget exhausted this session). (3) The $300 trial page no longer states a day limit or "60 days" wording; it says "You won't be charged until you activate your full paid account" (activation-based; historical 60-day term not visible today). (4) "Cloud Skills Boost" is rebranded as "Google Skills" (student offer is "200 free Google Skills credits"). (5) New 2025-2026 offers not previously on GCP: Gemini Enterprise Plus edition 30-day trial, Agent Engine free allotment (180,000 vCPU-s/360,000 GiB-s per month), Datastream free 100 GiB CDC/month, GKE 90-day trial. No GCP free offer appears to have been fully closed in this window - the major move is shrinkage of the always-free tier plus product trials and a bigger AI-leaning startup program. All findings above were verified by reading the cited official pages directly on 2026-10-22. |
| Google Cloud | Corrections/sunsets vs. the 'known so far' baseline, all checked against official Google pages on 2026-10-22: (1) FREE TRIAL DURATION: the $300 credit is valid for 90 days, not 60 — the current docs (docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), signup FAQs, and the archived Jan-30-2025 Free Trial T&Cs all state 90 days/3 months; no 2025–2026 shortening found. (2) CLOUD SQL ALWAYS FREE: the old 'Cloud SQL Always Free plan' (free shared-core instance, 750 h/month, storage/backup/egress allowances in select regions) is NO LONGER on the Cloud SQL pricing page — the only official free Cloud SQL offer today is the 30-day free trial instance (Enterprise Plus, 8 vCPU/64 GB/100 GB) plus the $300 trial credit; treat the 750 h C2D claim as stale. (3) SPANNER FREE 96 GB NODE (us-west1): not present on the current Spanner pricing page; replaced by the 90-day free trial instance (10 GiB, Standard edition + Graph, regional-only) usable by both new and existing customers, with 30-day grace before data deletion. (4) BIGQUERY '100,000 slot-hours/month free': not published on the current BigQuery pricing page (which lists only 1 TiB free on-demand queries + 10 GiB free storage per month, plus free batch loads and first 2 TiB/mo of gRPC Storage Write API) — likely subsumed by the 2023–2024 move to Editions/slots pricing; treat the 100K slot-hour figure as superseded. (5) STARTUP PROGRAM REBRAND: 'Google Cloud Startups Accelerator' (cloud.google.com/startups, previously up to $150k single tier) is now 'Google for Startups Cloud Program' at cloud.google.com/startup — the old /startups URL serves the new program. Current structure: Start $2k tier (founded <2 years, MVP, pre-VC) + Scale (Y1 up to $100k + Y2 up to +$100k = $200k) + Scale AI (Y1 up to $250k + Y2 up to +$100k = $350k), with the $5,000-prior-credits gate and non-venture-funding exclusion for Scale tiers; marketing copy on cloud.google.com/free says 'up to $200,000 USD (up to $350,000 for AI startups)'. (6) EDUCATION: no general free GCP dollar credits for students; student offer is 200 Google Skills credits expiring after 1 year; the substantive education offers are faculty teaching credits ($100/faculty + $50/student) and GPAR research credits ($5,000, US-only). Note: no 2025–2026 sunset announcement changelogs were retrievable (web-search budget was exhausted mid-task), so items 2–4 'no longer listed' reflects absence from the live official pages today rather than a dated official announcement. |
| Google Cloud | Legacy "Cloud Startups" program materially changed: the long-standing terms of "up to $200,000 in GCP credits, typically 12-month terms, mostly US-based startups" (the prior known baseline) no longer appear on the current program pages. As read today (2026-10-22), cloud.google.com/startup and startup.google.com/cloud both present the restructured "Google for Startups Cloud Program": up to $350,000 over two years, split into AI (Year-1 $250K) and non-AI (Year-1 $100K) tiers, eligibility "Pre-Seed to Series A, founded within the last 3-5 years, <$5,000 previously received GCP credits", with no US-entity requirement stated on the page. Exact 2025/2026 transition dates could not be news-verified today (this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted; the session user may raise CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION to allow that), so the "replacement" characterization is based on the live pages rather than a dated announcement — medium confidence on timing, high confidence on the current terms. Also current-state notes: (1) the $300/90-day trial and Always Free quotas are unchanged on today's official pages; (2) GKE's permanent free cluster is now phrased as "one free Autopilot or zonal Standard cluster per month" with compute/networking explicitly excluded; (3) GCP offers no free bare-metal or dedicated-server capacity at any tier — the only free "server" is the e2-micro micro-VM (3 US regions) and Cloud Run; (4) the Skills Boost domain no longer resolves — the education-facing free offering is now bundled under "Google Skills". |
| Google Cloud | As of 2026-10-22, no core offer was sunset: the $300/90-day trial, the Always-Free e2-micro VM tier, and the startup + education programs are all live and verified on official pages today. Verified structural notes (no web-searchable 2025-2026 change history available because this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted - conclusions below rest on page reads only, not on diffed changelogs): (1) The startup program now presents a THREE-tier structure - 'Start $2K' for unfunded startups founded in the last 2 years, plus funded 'Scale' and 'Scale AI' tiers ($200K-$350K) - a new/expanded format vs. the older single 'GCP for Startups' ($1M, founded-within-5-years, up-to-50-FTE) model that was widely documented pre-2025; old URLs cloud.google.com/programs/startup and cloud.google.com/boost now 404, and the current page is cloud.google.com/startup (cloud.google.com/gcp-startups still serves, 200). The Scale AI tier + 'Build with Google DeepMind' AI-credits framing (AI startups 100% to $250K Y1 / 20% to $100K Y2) reflects a post-2025 AI-first program redesign. (2) Education credits are now routed through edu.google.com forms (teaching credits, $5,000 research credits, 200 student training credits) and the 'cloud.edu free trial warning' PDF, a current setup. (3) GPAR (researcher fast-track) is flagged 'Currently only available in the United States'. If you need a 2025-2026 changelog (exact dates the startup tiers were reshaped or the trial terms edited), that requires a fresh WebSearch - this session's 200-call budget was consumed before the change-history could be verified; all amounts/durations above were read directly from the live official pages on the date of the report. |
| Google Cloud | 1) Startup program renamed/restructured: the legacy 'Google Cloud Startup Program' (commonly cited as up to $200K/2-year funded track plus a YC-alumni track) is gone; cloud.google.com/startups/program and cloud.google.com/programs/startup-program now 404. The live offer (2026) is the 'Google for Startups Cloud Program': Start tier $2k; Scale/Scale AI $200K–$350K over 2 years, with AI startups capped at $250K Year 1 (100% match) + $100K Year 2 (20% match), other startups $100K Y1 + $100K Y2; new 12-month Google Workspace Business Plus benefit and monthly Google Maps Platform credits added. 2) Trial: current official terms are $300/90 days (not the 30/60-day figures seen in third-party summaries, including some of today's truncated page renders); a 30-day recovery grace period after expiry is now documented. 3) Trial restrictions are explicit and new-ish: GPUs/TPUs cannot be added on non-billable trial accounts; the $300 cannot pay Gemini API-in-AI-Studio or managed partner-model costs — so the 'GPU/ML-training' front on GCP trial means CPU (e2s) + free-tier e2-micro, with real GPU/TPU access requiring a paid account. 4) Docs domain moved: cloud.google.com/free/docs/* now 301-redirects to docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/*. 5) Method caveat: WebSearch was unavailable for this run (shared session search budget exhausted), so 2025–2026 change-detection relied on the live official pages themselves; items I could not re-verify (Colab free quotas, Google Skills credit prices, per-product trial renewal rules) are marked medium/low confidence rather than carried from memory. 6) No evidence found this session that the always-free e2-micro or the education faculty/research grants were sunset — all confirmed live on 2026-10-22. |
| Google Colab Free Tier | Sunset / materially changed (2025–2026): (1) COLAB PRO FOR EDUCATION — the formerly free 1-year Colab Pro subscription for US university students/faculty is now CLOSED to new signups (official FAQ, read 2026-10-22); only pre-verified users keep access until their 1-year anniversary, and upgrading to a paid personal plan terminates it permanently. (2) NO COLAB-STARTUP OFFER — there is no Colab-specific startup program or free Colab trial-credit; the only \"credits\" are Google Cloud Startup Program / new-account Free Trial, which do NOT apply to Colab. Method note: web-search budget was exhausted this session, so 2025–2026 change-detection relied on the official FAQ fetched today plus best-effort GCP fetches; GCP credit amounts/eligibility could not be re-verified live (target pages 404'd or truncated), so treat those figures as approximate. |
| Google Gemini API | WebSearch was unavailable for this agent (shared session budget exhausted); all findings above were read directly from official Google pages fetched 2026-10-22 (cloud.google.com/startups, cloud.google.com/free, cloud.google.com/edu, ai.google.dev pricing/billing/rate-limits/deprecations, edu.google.com credits pages), so 'high' confidence means the page was read today. Programs materially changed in 2025–2026: (1) The startup program was restructured into tiered 'Start ($2k) / Scale / Scale AI' with the headline raised from the old 'up to $200K' framing to 'up to $200K (up to $350K for AI startups) over two years', and large credits now REQUIRE verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A VENTURE funding — bootstrapped/self-funded startups are effectively capped at the $2,000 Start tier unless re-evaluated; non-VC money (PE, bank loans, grants, crowdfunding, friends & family) no longer qualifies for Scale. Year-2 credits are only 20% coverage up to +$100K. (2) Gemini API free-tier model lineup churn: official deprecation page (last updated 2026-10-20) — Gemini 2.0 Flash & 2.0 Flash-Lite shut down Jun 1, 2026; 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview May 25, 2026; 3 Pro Preview Mar 9, 2026; 2.5 Pro previews Dec 2, 2025; Imagen 4 Aug 17, 2026; Veo 3.1 & Omni Flash Preview shut down Oct 22, 2026 (today); 2.5 Flash Image stable Mar 15, 2027; 3.1 Flash-Lite stable May 7, 2027; text-embedding-004 Jan 14, 2026 (→ Gemini Embedding 2). 2.5-generation models are access-restricted to prior active users with no announced shutdown. (3) Docs no longer publish static free-tier RPM/TPM/RPD — quotas are per-project and shown live in the AI Studio dashboard only. (4) Paid-tier billing flow changed 2026: minimum $5 prepay to enter paid tiers; 'Postpay temporarily until Prepay system propagates, starting March 23, 2026'; upcoming paid price doublings Dec 1, 2026 (Gemini 4 Argon) and Jan 1, 2027 (3.8/3.6 Flash, TTS, robotics) — relevant when free-tier users upgrade. (5) GCP free trial marketing now leads with AI ($300 credit usable for Gemini/Vertex; new 30-day Gemini Enterprise Plus trial, GKE 90-day trial, Cloud SQL 30-day trial); the trial's exact day-count for the $300 credit is not printed on the public page. |
| Google Maps Platform | 1) SUNKEN: The legacy flat $200/month GMP credit ended 2025-03-01, replaced by per-SKU free usage caps (10K/5K/1K Essentials/Pro/Enterprise; 100K for 2D Map Tiles and Street View tiles; auto volume discounts up to 5M+ events). Any page still citing '$200/month' (including some third-party tutorials) is stale. 2) CHANGED 2025: GCP for Startups was restructured into Start/Scale tiers; the live benefits page now requires founding within 5 years (older program docs said 10), with the $600/month GMP usage credit offered to Scale tier only and requiring a separate application; AI-first startups capped at $350K. 3) EDUCATION: No Maps Platform education license or student-specific program found as of 2026-10-22 — Google publishes no .edu-gated GMP offer; educational institutions are explicitly EXCLUDED from the Google for Startups Cloud Program (and no GMP-education credit program was listed on cloud.google.com/edu, which did not render fully, so this is stated as absence-of-evidence rather than a verified program). Students' practical free paths are the general per-SKU caps, the no-CC Demo Key, and the $300 GCP trial (all open, no .edu). 4) REGIONAL: Since 2025-07-08, EEA-billed customers are on separate EEA GMP Terms of Service (post-German Bundeskartellamt proceeding) with different features and, per GMP docs, possibly different terms for features like Places UI Kit. 5) LEGACY: Places (legacy), Directions, and Distance Matrix APIs remain in 'Legacy' status with no announced decommission date; Google commits to 12+ months' notice — users must migrate to new SKUs to keep expanded volume discounts. 6) VERIFICATION CAVEAT: cloud.google.com pages (startup benefits, free trial) are JS-rendered and truncated for automated fetches; the $600/month GMP credit and trial figures were verified via full-text search snippets of the official pages today, not a complete page read, hence 'medium' confidence on the startup finding. |
| Google TPU Research Cloud | No closure or 2025-2026 change was found, but the About and FAQ pages are undated and say nothing about 2025 or 2026, so the program's current status is unconfirmed. WebSearch was unavailable (session search budget exhausted), so no third-party or news check of 2025-2026 status was possible. The 2026 TPU Research and Education Awards (unrestricted gift up to $100K plus TPU access, June 30, 2026 deadline) could not be verified: neither official page mentions it, and https://sites.research.google/trc/awards/ returned HTTP 404 (a guessed URL). It is not listed as a finding. Its deadline is before today (2026-10-22), so it cannot be claimed in any case. The TRC homepage (https://sites.research.google/trc/) returned only its title on fetch, so its content was not checked. The About page also says Cloud TPUs can be used free in Google Colab with no setup, framed for researchers and students; Colab's limits and terms were not verified, and it sits outside TRC, so it is not a finding here. Verdict: the TRC offer is genuine for accepted researchers, but it is not a student or startup offer as such, because no student or startup track is published. |
| GPUStack | No student, education, or startup program existed to sunset, and no trial-credit program was closed, in 2025-2026 — GPUStack has run exclusively as (a) a free Apache-2.0 self-hosted runtime and (b) a sales-led Enterprise product, with no published pricing pages (/pricing/ and /cloud/ are 404 as of 2026-10-22). Material 2025-2026 changes to note: (1) the task's 'known so far' claim of an MIT license is wrong — both the official site and the GitHub repo say Apache 2.0 today; (2) November 2025 'v2' and March 2026 'v2.1' releases added faster inference, Alibaba T-Head PPU support, a model gateway with routing, and a community backend marketplace (per https://gpustack.ai/blog/ listing; individual release details not fetched, so medium confidence on the specifics); (3) in June 2026 GPUStack repositioned as an 'enterprise AI infrastructure platform' marketing 'MaaS and GPUaaS under one control plane' (https://gpustack.ai/blog/introducing-gpustack/) — a hosted GPUaaS is signaled but had no public self-serve page, pricing, or free tier as of 2026-10-22. The original https://gpustack.co domain does not resolve; gpustack.ai is the live official domain. Caveat: the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so all 'no program exists' conclusions rest on official-page fetches done today only; an off-site program (e.g., a partner marketplace discount) could not be ruled out via search. |
| GroqCloud Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes to watch: (1) Groq for Startups ($10K credits, 90-day validity) was unpublished on 2026-08-05 — the program URL now serves a generic marketing page and the docs page 404s; no closure notice was published. (2) llama-3.1-8b-instant and llama-3.3-70b-versatile were shut down for Free and Developer tiers on 2026-08-16 (enterprise committed-spend customers kept them) — this killed the '~14,400 RPD llama-3.1-8b' free-tier figure that earlier trackers (including this task's 'known so far') still cite; today's official table's 14,400-RPD row is for llama-prompt-guard safety classifiers. (3) groq/compound and groq/compound-mini were deprecated and decommissioned on 2026-09-21. (4) qwen/qwen3.6-27b was deprecated on 2026-09-14 in favor of qwen/qwen3.8-27b. (5) Other 2026 deprecations per Groq's deprecations page: Llama Guard 4 12B (2026-03-05, replaced by gpt-oss-safeguard-20b), Llama 4 Maverick 17B (2026-03-09), Kimi K2 (2026-04-15), Qwen 3 32B and Llama 4 Scout 17B (2026-07-17). (6) No education/student program or trial-credit offer exists; only a generic promo-code redemption page in the console. Bottom line: one genuinely free, cardless, ongoing offer (the Free plan above) plus a sunset $10K startup program whose terms still circulate in stale third-party listings. |
| Hetzner Cloud Free Trial | As of 2026-10-22, no active official free offer (trial credit, free tier, education license, or startup program) for Hetzner Cloud / VPS / dedicated servers could be verified on any official page; the historically reported ~EUR 20 new-customer cloud trial (promo-code based, no credit card to start) appears to have been sunset: (1) https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/trial — the URL now serves the generic Hetzner Cloud landing page (SPA fallback), with zero mention of a trial, credit, or promo code; (2) https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/education, /cloud/startup, and /cloud/promo all render the same general landing page — no dedicated education or startup program pages exist; (3) https://www.hetzner.com/community/trial is a hard 404; (4) docs.hetzner.com (top-level and overview pages) contain no trial/credit/education/startup content. The landing page's only pricing statements today are catalog floors: Cost-Optimized from EUR 5.99/mo, Regular Performance from EUR 6.49/mo, General Purpose from EUR 43.49/mo (excl. VAT), locations Germany/Finland/Singapore/USA — i.e., no permanent free tier. The ~EUR 20 trial is likely discontinued (not just undocumented), since its canonical URL is dead; however, web search was unavailable in this session (shared 200-call budget exhausted by sibling agents), so any 2025-2026 sunset announcement date could not be pinned down — confidence in the exact end date is low, confidence that no active official free offer is currently advertised is high (read every candidate official page today). Caveat: Hetzner has run occasional time-boxed promo campaigns in the past (referral/affiliates, console banners); an ephemeral campaign could exist without a dedicated page, but none is advertised anywhere on hetzner.com today. |
| Hugging Face | Bottom line as of 2026-10-22: Hugging Face has NO live free offer specifically for students or startups on the Inference Providers front. (1) STARTUP PROGRAM — sunset: the former 'HF for Startups' program (widely reported as $1,000/mo of partner cloud credits for up to 12 months plus ~50% off the Enterprise Hub in year 1; original announcement page now 404) no longer appears on any HF-owned page — independently confirmed Sept 2026 (guptadeepak) and Oct 2026 (CloudRoute excluded HF from its verified program catalog). Third-party '6 months free PRO' claims are affiliate promo-code pages, unverified against official pages; huggingface.co/startups is an org profile, not a program page. (2) FREE ACCOUNT CREDIT — sunset: free accounts historically received a small monthly Inference Providers credit ($0.10/mo, 'subject to change'; TechCrunch 2025-01-28: 'all HF users get a small quota of credits'); the official pricing docs were updated 2026-10-07 to 'None' for free users, and only PRO ($9/mo, $2/mo credits) and Team/Enterprise ($2/seat/mo) receive included credits. (3) EDUCATION — no education license or student offer exists on any HF page today; an 'Academia Hub' org tier appears only in the rate-limits docs (no pricing, no application path, not free). (4) TRIAL CREDITS — HF publishes no trial-credit offer for Inference Providers (no signup bonus, no 30-day trial of PRO; a 2026 forum thread indicates paying for PRO with credits was also removed). Only genuinely free routes: the free Hub/Spaces tier (CPU Basic + ZeroGPU, 5 min/day, no card), the $0 custom-provider-key routing path (BYO provider key; provider's own free tiers apply), and 'community GPU grants for side projects' mentioned without a live application URL. No regional restrictions found; global. Sources: [Hugging Face Inference Providers pricing (official, read today)](https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/en/pricing) · [Hugging Face docs hub rate limits](https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/rate-limits) · [Hugging Face docs hub billing](https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/billing) · [Hugging Face PRO](https://huggingface.co/pro) · [Hugging Face pricing](https://huggingface.co/pricing) · [Hugging Face enterprise](https://huggingface.co/enterprise) · [guptadeepak: HF Startup Program discontinued (Sep 2026 check)](https://guptadeepak.com/startup-offers/programs/huggingface-startups) · [CloudRoute startup-credits changelog Oct 2026](https://www.cloudroutehq.com/startup-credits/changes) · [Free LLM Credits changelog (HF free credit ended Oct 2026)](https://freellmcredits.com/changes) · [PerkBook: HF for Startups 'No Longer Available'](https://perkbook.co/startup-programs/hugging-for-startups/) · [SaaSTweaks: 6 months free PRO claim (affiliate, unverified)](https://saastweaks.com/startup-credits/hugging-face-pro-credits) · [TechCrunch: Inference Providers launch, Jan 2025](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/hugging-face-makes-it-easier-for-devs-to-run-ai-models-on-third-party-clouds/) · [HF forum: paying for PRO with credits no longer possible](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/is-it-not-possible-to-pay-for-pro-with-credits-anymore/173037). Note: web-search budget was exhausted mid-task; all confidence labels above reflect pages I fetched directly today unless flagged as third-party/unverified." |
| Hugging Face | 2025-2026 material changes: (1) Mid-2026 (docs PR merged 2026-07-21; forum reports from 2026-07-09): creating compute Spaces — Gradio or Docker, including formerly-free CPU Basic — now requires a paid plan (PRO $9/mo personal, Team/Enterprise for orgs); free personal accounts were pushed to 'Static only, or up to 2 ZeroGPU Spaces'. This materially shrank the free tier that previously let anyone run a free CPU Gradio Space. (2) 2026-06-29: ZeroGPU hosting formalized a free tier — 'accounts in good standing' (verified email, >30 days old) host up to 2 ZeroGPU Spaces; PRO up to 10; paid orgs up to 50. Before this the free hosting cap/wording changed repeatedly. (3) December 2025: H100 / 8x H100 removed from the Spaces hardware lineup. (4) ZeroGPU hardware migrated from A100 (2024 launch) to NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell by 2026; post-migration some workloads silently fall back to xlarge, doubling quota consumption (forum reports May 2026). (5) No student plan has ever shipped; HF staff confirmed in Oct 2025 that Academia Hub is the only education path. (6) The $10M GPU pledge (May 2024, ZeroGPU launch, via A100s) was a one-off commitment — the durable free offer is the ZeroGPU daily quota, not a $ pool. (7) Payment gotcha: PRO is credit-card-only; India-issued cards are not yet supported (use AWS/Google Cloud Marketplace billing workaround). Free account and all free-tier usage require no card. No region limits on free usage found. |
| Hugging Face | No free education license or startup program: Hugging Face's education offering is Academia Hub, a PAID institutional plan ($10/seat/month, min 250 annual seats, incl. $2/seat/month compute credits and higher ZeroGPU priority) — institutions like ESCP (Aug 2025) pay for it; there is no self-serve .edu free program and no dedicated free startup program (no application form, no funding-cap criteria found; community GPU grants are the closest equivalent and accept 'Company project' cases). No free ML training/notebook compute exists: HF Jobs and Inference Endpoints are on-demand paid, and the only free inference-side compute is ZeroGPU's 5 min/day plus CPU Basic $0/hr. Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) new Gradio/Docker Spaces now require a paid plan (PRO personal / Team-Enterprise org) — previously CPU Spaces were free for all; free accounts retain only Static Spaces + up to 2 ZeroGPU Gradio Spaces (verified in the spaces-overview doc, 2026-10-22). (2) ZeroGPU hardware is now shared NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (48/96GB slices) replacing the earlier A100/A10G-based shared fleet; the original program (May 2024, ~$10M commitment, The Verge) survives in this form. (3) The former public community-grants application page (huggingface.co/community-grants) is reported 404 as of 2026-Q2; grants are now requested per-Space via the Settings tab link / Community discussion. (4) A May 2026 press item (CBW News) claims ~$5/month free GPU credits for all accounts; this does not appear on huggingface.co/pricing or the official docs and is unverified (low confidence). Free-account 100GB private storage, best-effort public storage, and 'protected' visibility gating to paid plans also confirmed 2026-10-22. WebSearch session budget was exhausted after 2 searches, so sunset/change claims rest on the official pages fetched today plus third-party changelogs (aifree.dev, perq.sh, The Verge, ESCP). |
| IBM Startup with IBM | - Startup with IBM (historically up to ~$120,000 in IBM Cloud credits via Builder ~$1,000/mo and Premium ~$10,000/mo, 12 months) appears wound down by late 2026: developer.ibm.com/startups/ and /startups/premium/ now 301-redirect to a generic 'IBM Build Partners Technical Group' community page with no program content, tiers, or application path; ibm.com/cloud/startups resolves to a generic products listing with no startup program. The live successor offers are the $200 new-account credit (30 days), the 40+ always-free Lite services, and the service-specific promo credits listed above. Exact sunset date not published on the pages checked today. - No student-specific cloud-credit program (e.g., .edu-gated credits) is publicly listed today; the education free offer is SkillsBuild's 100% free learning platform. - IBM developer learning portal paths such as developer.ibm.com/learn and ibm.com/education now 404; free learning content has consolidated around developer.ibm.com (courses/tutorials/learning paths, all free) and skillsbuild.org. |
| InfluxData InfluxDB Cloud | No student-specific or startup-specific program exists as of 2026-10-22: /education/ and /startups/ on influxdata.com both return 404, and the pricing, cloud-pricing, FAQ, and marketing pages contain zero mention of .edu eligibility, startup age/funding caps, or startup grants. For students and startups the only free offers are the general ones above (Cloud Free Plan, $250 new-account credit, Enterprise 30-day trial, OSS). 2025-2026 changes worth flagging: (1) The Free Plan's documentation and limits still describe InfluxDB Cloud TSM (the 2.x engine) — InfluxData's current marketing (influxdata.com/pricing) has been rebuilt around InfluxDB 3 (3 Core OSS, 3 Enterprise trial, Timestream on AWS, Cloud Serverless with $250 credit), so the TSM-centric docs may be superseded as 3-serverless matures; (2) InfluxDB 3 Core's original 72-hour write/query-range limitation was lifted on 2025-01-27 except the single-query span default (432 blocks = 72 h, configurable); (3) the InfluxDB 3 Enterprise at-home free tier announced 2025-01-27 was still alpha with unconfirmed rate limits as of its 2025-11-20 blog update and is absent from all pricing pages today; (4) InfluxDB 1.x/2.x OSS lines are effectively end-of-life, with InfluxDB 3 as the active OSS line; (5) an old InfluxDB Cloud test pricing page (influxdb-pricing-test-old, marked 'PAGE NOT IN USE') described the credit as '$250 credit for 30 days upon upgrade' — current copy frames it as a new-paid-account credit applied to the first 30 days. Caveat: the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted partway through, so program-level news (e.g., InfluxData joining Launchpad/CloudSparkle-style startup programs, or any 2026 credit changes) could not be independently re-verified; official pages fetched today are the basis for the high-confidence findings above. |
| Instatus | Verdict: genuine free offers exist, but none is student-specific. (1) Startups: a 1-year free Pro plan through StartGround's application, advertised by Instatus (finding 1). (2) Anyone: the Starter free-forever plan (finding 2). (3) Non-profits and open-source projects: free Pro on request (finding 3). No student or education offer was found. instatus.com/students returned 404, and StartGround mentions only unpublished 'extended offers' for education groups.Not counted as free offers: the annual billing discount ('25% off', and 'three months free' when paying a year up front, both on paid plans), and 'Start trial' on Pro and Business (length and terms not stated).Closures or changes in 2025-2026: none found on the pages fetched. The StartGround deal was last updated January 4, 2026. WebSearch was unavailable because the session search budget was used up, so no 2025-2026 news search was run and the July 2026 free-for-dev tracker claim is unchecked.Pages that failed: instatus.com/students, /open-source, /terms and /terms-of-service returned 404. RocketHub returned 403, so its catalog was not checked. Secret's catalog loaded only partly (36 of 613 results).Premise correction: the computed task describes the free plan as having unlimited subscribers. The official pricing summary caps Starter at 200 subscribers. Verify on the live pricing page before the index relies on either figure. |
| IONOS Free Trial | No verified sunset of the core free offers in 2025-2026: the VPS 30-day money-back trial, the $200/£200 cloud-server starting credit, and the IONOS CLOUD 30-day trial account (8 cores/20GB RAM/600GB storage, EUR 500 cap) were all present on official pages/docs as of 2026-10-22. Material 2025 changes found: (1) Windows Server license fees for IONOS Cloud cubes rose ~10% effective 2025-01-01 (announced on the free-cloud-server page). (2) The VPS lineup was refreshed: a new 'VPS+' generation (Dell enterprise hardware, S+ $2/mo, M+ $5/mo, L+ $8/mo for 3 months on 1-year terms) now fronts the .com VPS pages, while the older 'VPS' line (from $2-4/mo, 3-year terms, $4/mo anchor price) persists at cloud-vps.html; pricing pages show both, so renewals can land on higher list prices than the intro deal. (3) The rotating 'free 1-year VPS with purchase' promo was not visible on any fetched page today and may be between rotations - do not rely on it without a live coupon. (4) IONOS CLOUD startup-program details remain unpublished (404 on the likely URL); only the FAQ attests the program exists. WebSearch budget for this session was exhausted after ~4 searches, so 2025-2026 press on sunsets was not exhaustively covered; a startup-program URL returned 404 on fetch. |
| JetBrains Student Pack | 2025-2026 changes: (1) Aug 12, 2025 - JetBrains rebranded/relaunched the student program as the "JetBrains Student Pack" (blog.jetbrains.com post); license duration wording is now "completely free and remain valid as long as you're a student, but must be renewed annually" (replaces the old "1-year, renewable" framing). Promo: verify by Sep 12, 2025 to enter a prize draw (MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, reMarkable Paper Pro) - now expired. (2) Bootcamp student-coupon program is being retired: official sales FAQ (updated 30 Sep 2026) states "no new coupons are being issued after October 1, 2026"; short-term/bootcamp students were never eligible for free educational licenses (only long-term programs >1 year qualify). (3) Jul 18, 2025 - IntelliJ IDEA moved to a unified distribution starting with 2025.3: the separate Community Edition installer is gone; the single IDE keeps more free features than old Community for everyone, and an expired subscription degrades gracefully to the free feature set instead of locking out. Perpetual fallback license (last major version after a year of uninterrupted subscription) still applies. (4) The startup offer is now a 50% discount plan (caps over 5 years), not the older "up to 12 free licenses for 1 year" program that ran for years - free startup licenses survive only in the incubator/accelerator/VC partner track (6 months, up to 10 licenses). The 40% / 2-year graduation discount listed in the task's "known so far" could not be re-verified today: jetbrains.com student/estore pages are Cloudflare-gated to this fetcher and /shop/eform/students, /estore/graduates, /for-startups, /startup all 404'd; treat it as likely still real but unconfirmed (no official page read today). |
| Kamatera Free Trial | No Kamatera free offer found closed or materially changed in 2025-2026. The $100/30-day trial has been continuous: Kamatera's own Jan 2025 YouTube ad and the 2026 official page both carry the identical $100/30-day/1TB terms, and third-party 2026 roundups still list it. The RiseUP startup program (24 months of infrastructure credit, startup.kamatera.com, page copyright 2026) appears to be a NEW 2025-2026 program; the older generic 'Cloud Solutions for Tech Startups' marketing page (kamatera.com/solutions/use-cases/startups, last seen 2023) contained no concrete free credit. Could not independently date the RiseUP launch: the session's shared WebSearch budget was exhausted before verifying launch history. |
| Keycloak | No student/trial/startup program was ever found to have been sunset — Keycloak has had no such programs; the only free offer is self-hosting the Apache-2.0 community edition. Material 2025–2026 changes: (1) keycloak.org is now fully CNCF/Linux Foundation-branded ("Keycloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubation project," © The Linux Foundation 2026) — Red Hat branding and any enterprise/commercial offering have disappeared from the official site; CNCF lists Keycloak as Incubating (accepted 2023-04-10). (2) License is still single Apache-2.0 with no dual/enterprise clause (verified in the repo today), so the "enterprise features paid via Red Hat" framing from the snapshot now applies only to Red Hat's own commercial channels, not keycloak.org. (3) Node.js client adapter is deprecated; older server releases are archived/EOL. (4) Verification caveat: WebSearch budget exhausted mid-task, so these are from WebFetch of keycloak.org, GitHub raw LICENSE.txt, and the CNCF project page only. |
| Keystone | No free offer was sunset or materially changed in 2025–2026. License has remained MIT (no shift to BSL/EE gating unlike some peers). Historical changes still relevant: Keystone 5 entered active maintenance mode in 2021 (repo moved to keystonejs/keystone-5, feature-frozen; security fixes only) and Keystone 6 reached GA Dec 2021 and now ships under the @keystone-6 npm namespace with an 8.x core (2026 major release Jul 28, 2026). There is no official paid cloud tier, no trial-credit program, no startup program, and no education license to sunset — Thinkmill's enterprise support services are the sole paid (custom-quote) offering. |
| Kinto | No standing free offer for students or startups was found under the name Kinto, so findings is empty. Checked 2026-10-22 against official pages only. The WebSearch budget was exhausted, so no 2025-2026 news or secondary search was possible.Three products share the name:1. Kinto HTTP storage API (open source, self-hosted JSON storage server; https://kinto-storage.org/, https://docs.kinto-storage.org/en/stable/, https://github.com/Kinto/kinto). None of these pages mention a hosted service, free tier, student program, or startup credits. The example curl host kinto.dev.mozaws.net is a dev endpoint, not an offer.2. KINTO (Toyota car subscription service, Japan; https://kinto-jp.com/). The fetched homepage shows only corporate-contract and consultation links, with no student, startup, free, or trial terms. The seed called it car rental, but it is a subscription service.3. Kintone (Cybozu; https://www.kintone.com/pricing/, https://www.kintone.com/). The only free item is a 30-day free trial with all features, open to anyone and not student- or startup-specific. The trial data is erased 30 days after expiry. The single paid plan is $24/user/month with a 5-user minimum ($120/month). Education and nonprofit "special pricing" is discounted, not free, has no amount listed, and requires contacting the company. No free credits and no student or startup program appear. No pricing effective date is shown on the page. If generic trials are wanted in the index, the Kintone 30-day trial could be added with eligibility "anyone," expiry 30 days, and claim via the "Get a Free Trial" button on kintone.com. It was excluded here because it is not a student or startup offer.Unverified: https://www.kintone.com/education/ and https://www.kintone.com/templates/ returned HTTP 500, so the seed's claim that the To Do app template is free with a kintone account could not be checked. Even if true, it is not a student or startup offer.Confidence in the negative result is medium. Official pages were checked, but WebFetch summaries come from a small model, and 2025-2026 status checks through search were not possible. |
| Kit | No student/education license and no startup program exist for Kit as of 2026-10-22: kit.com/education and kit.com/startups return 404, the pricing page has no student/startup offer, and the help center's 14 collections (incl. 'Getting Started', 'Managing Your Account', 'Creator Network', 'Kit Studios') contain no education/students or startup-discount items. Kit's actual programs — Kit Expert program, Creator Network (5 free Smart Recommendation slots on every plan incl. Free), and Kit Studios (paid session-booking service) — are creator/consultant programs, not free student/startup offers. 2025-2026 material changes: (1) Kit executed its 'first price increase in 12 years' in 2025, effective after Oct 15, 2025, with 30-day notice (per help billing article) — paid plans became more expensive (Creator $39/mo monthly at the 1k tier; the Free plan's core offer — 10,000 subscribers, 1 user, no card — was not changed by this). (2) The '1,000 emails/mo' free-plan cap circulating in prior notes is NOT confirmed on any official page fetched today; the live pricing page says 'unlimited email broadcasts' for Free — treat 1,000/mo as unverified/outdated. (3) API/data policy: email-stats retention clamped to 5 years (2026-10-15); Webhooks 2.0 launched 2026-08-27 with legacy webhooks retained. (4) Historical: ConvertKit rebranded to Kit (2023) — older 'ConvertKit free plan' sources (300-subscriber cap era) do not apply to current offers. |
| Kitem | No verifiable free offer for students or startups was found for Kitem as of 2026-10-22, so findings is empty. Kitem's current status could not be confirmed.What was checked:1. https://kitem.io/ and https://kitem.io/pricing failed DNS resolution in the fetch tool (getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND). https://www.kitem.io/ failed the same way. No pricing, education or startup page could be read. Confidence the domain is not resolvable from this environment today: high. Confidence the product is inactive: low, because a transient or environment DNS failure is possible.2. https://kitem.com/ is a parked domain marked "This website is for sale!" (Sedo). It has no product content.3. https://kitem.app/ and https://kitem.ai/ also failed DNS resolution (ENOTFOUND).4. The session WebSearch budget (200 calls shared across agents) was exhausted before the 2025-2026 change search could run. No search results were obtained for Kitem, so changes or sunsets in 2025-2026 are unchecked. Searches were not worked around through other tools.5. A GitHub repository search for "kitem" found no Kitem project-management product and no self-hosted Kitem repository. The hits were unrelated (for example docker-archive-public/docker.kitematic, archived, and KDE/kitemmodels).Name-confusion risk: Kitemaker (https://kitemaker.co/pricing) is a different Linear-alternative project tool. A search snippet from that page (not fetched directly) states it was acquired by ClickUp and the service was discontinued on 2025-09-01. Its listed plans, a free plan with 100 active work items and a Standard tier at $8 per user per month, must not be attributed to Kitem.Recommended next steps: re-run the kitem.io DNS check later, or confirm the correct product name and domain with the requester. Then run the WebSearch 2025-2026 pass in a session with search budget. Do not treat Kitem as offering free student or startup access until an official page confirms it. |
| Kitem | No free student or startup offer from a provider named Kitem could be verified as of 2026-10-22, so findings is empty. Checks run: (1) One WebSearch for "Kitem free program students startups" returned nothing naming Kitem or any Kitem offer. The results were unrelated: KTH Innovation, KITI (Kenya), STARTERminsk, EIT Jumpstarter 2026, Boeing BUILD 2026 via KIIT, and Kiro student credits. (2) Official-domain fetches found no Kitem product. https://kitem.com resolves only to a parked for-sale page ("This website is for sale!", sedoparking). kitem.io, kitem.ai, kitem.dev and kitem.app do not resolve (DNS ENOTFOUND). Limitation: the session's WebSearch budget (200 calls shared by all agents) ran out after the first query, so the planned follow-ups (2026 startup credits; student discount or free plan) were not run. The limit was not worked around. Confidence that no genuine Kitem offer exists: medium. A Kitem offer under another domain, or only in a non-English market, could still exist and was not checked. Adjacent offers that are NOT Kitem and are not added as findings: Kiro student credits (https://kiro.dev/students/; search snippet only, not fetched: 1,000 credits per month free for one year for eligible university students) and EIT Jumpstarter 2026 (https://pioneerplus.eu/launch-your-startup-journey-with-eit-jumpstarter-2026/; application deadline 17 May 2026, closed before 2026-10-22). |
| Koyeb | 2025-2026 changes: (1) 2026-02-17: Koyeb entered a definitive agreement to join Mistral AI (Mistral's first acquisition, undisclosed price; Koyeb's 3 co-founders + 13 employees joined Mistral's engineering team in March 2026). The Koyeb platform continues operating and is transitioning to become a core component of 'Mistral Compute'. Material consequence: new users can only sign up for paid plans (Pro $29/mo + compute, Scale $299/mo, Enterprise $1,000/mo+) with a valid payment method; the free Starter plan was closed to new signups and Koyeb's FAQ says it will be removed 'soon / in the coming months' (no date published). Grandfathered free instances for existing orgs remain in effect as of 2026-10-22, but the official wording ('in the coming months') makes this a sunset-pending offer — export workloads. (2) 2025-03: free instances changed to automatically scale to zero after 1 hour of inactivity (cost-sustaining change). (3) The $30k Startup Program has NOT been publicly sunset; it was verified still advertised on the official pricing page on 2026-10-22, but its terms (partner accelerators, credit amounts, response SLAs) were set pre-acquisition and may change under Mistral AI — treat as at-risk. (4) Context from before 2025: the old $5.50/month free credit was removed from all accounts 2024-02-01 and replaced by the free instance type; GPU prices were cut up to 24% on Nov 7, 2025 (A100/H100/L40S). Sources: https://www.koyeb.com/blog/koyeb-is-joining-mistral-ai-to-build-the-future-of-ai-infrastructure , https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/mistral-ai-buys-koyeb-in-first-acquisition-to-back-its-cloud-ambitions/ , https://www.koyeb.com/changelog , https://www.koyeb.com/blog/koyeb-for-startups-accelerate-with-credits-for-high-performance-infrastructure , https://www.koyeb.com/pricing , https://www.koyeb.com/docs/faqs/pricing , https://www.koyeb.com/docs/reference/instances |
| Lambda Research Grant | As of 2026-10-22, the only standing free compute offer on lambda.ai is the Research Grant (up to $5,000 credits, rolling/competitive). No dedicated startup program, student/education program, or free tier is currently published: /startups, /education, and /labs all 404, and pricing/instances/homepage show no audience-specific discounts. \"Startups and Researchers\" is only a navigation label to /instances. One-off event credit giveaways exist (2025 Microsoft Ignite, 2026 GTC Berlin, AI Infra Summit 2026) but are contest/attendee events, not standing student/startup programs. Caveat: the web-search budget was exhausted during this run, so historical sunsets of any earlier Lambda startup or trial-credit programs in 2025-2026 could not be independently confirmed; the absence conclusion is based on live official pages read today plus the 404s. Per ToS, all Lambda credits (including grant credits) are non-cash, non-transferable, revocable, and default to a 12-month expiry from issuance unless stated earlier. |
| LaunchDarkly Developer Plan | As of 2026-10-22: (1) The free tier is named 'Developer' — renamed from the former 'Personal Use' plan; limits match the known list (unlimited flags, 1 project, 3 environments, 5 service connections, 1K client-side MAU, 100K experimentation MAU, 5K errors/replays) plus 10M logs/traces, 5K AI runs, 14-day retention. (2) No active public education license or startup credits program: launchdarkly.com/education and /startup 404, and the official plans/pricing/blog pages reference no such program — the historical Startup Program (if it existed) is not publicly available now; treat any such offer as sunset/unverifiable. (3) Trial auto-conversion behavior: post-trial, Enterprise/Guardian data is retained but locked; guarded-rollout creation blocked; custom roles revert — material change for anyone expecting 'free Enterprise after trial'. (4) 2025-09-08 terms overhaul (Catamorphic Co. DBA LaunchDarkly, usage-based pricing with 'service connection' as billing unit, no per-seat fees on paid tiers); Foundation is $10/SC/mo + $8.33/1K MAU with first 5 SCs included. (5) Web search budget was exhausted mid-research; high-confidence findings were verified against official pages fetched today, except the Academy FAQ (official support content surfaced via search today, direct fetch blocked 403 → medium confidence). |
| Lemon Squeezy | No free offer was sunset in 2025–2026; the $0/mo + 5%+50¢ model and both 0%-for-30-day promos (Buildspace, migration) were still live on the official site when fetched 2026-10-22. However, there is a material structural change to flag: Stripe completed its acquisition of Lemon Squeezy in July 2024 (entity now 'Sold through Link, LLC f/k/a Lemon Squeezy LLC'), and Lemon Squeezy's own 2026 update blog post (Jan 28, 2026, lemonsqueezy.com/blog/2026-update) states the team is building Stripe Managed Payments and that the entire Lemon Squeezy user base is expected to migrate to it, with a public (no-invite) sign-up 'very soon'. Consequences: (1) Merchant availability for Managed Payments is currently 35+ countries (vs 200+ payout countries today), so the effective footprint of any free offer may narrow by country over time; sellers outside Stripe-supported countries are being pointed to Stripe Atlas to incorporate a US entity. (2) Farr acknowledged 'slower support responses and less frequent product updates' during the transition, so expect promo pages (buildspace, migration) to lose maintenance. (3) No fee-schedule change, program sunset, or new discount was announced — 5% + 50¢ remains the published rate. Note on method: the shared session web-search budget was exhausted before finishing; verification was done by direct fetch of official Lemon Squeezy pages (pricing, buildspace, migration-offer, docs fees, 2026 blog, homepage) on 2026-10-22. |
| Lightning AI Studios | 1) The \"Known so far\" figure of \"up to 30 free credits/MONTH\" is no longer what the official pricing page says (checked 2026-10-22): credits are a one-time grant of 5 at registration + 25 after adding a card (up to 30 total), expiring in 12 months. The older \"15 monthly Lightning credits included\" free-plan model (visible in the Sept-2024 SaaSworthy snapshot and 2023 forum threads) was a monthly allowance; the billing FAQ now describes free credits only as \"promotional, non-transferable, and do not accumulate\" without a monthly amount, and some 2026 third-party write-ups (codeables.dev, a GitHub repo doc) still claim 15/month — that monthly figure is unconfirmed on any official page read today. 2) Storage: \"50 GB persistent storage\" (known-so-far and still the figure on aifree.dev, person-verified 2026-10-12, and AILookup) conflicts with today's official pricing table, which lists a 200 GB persistent-storage limit for the Free plan — possibly a 2025-2026 change or a limit-vs-included distinction; verify in-dashboard. 3) The dedicated education marketing page lightning.ai/academia now 404s; the academic offer was consolidated into the docs tree (lightning.ai/docs/platform/overview/setups/academia[/students]). 4) No region limits are published beyond \"Lightning AI is not available in every country\". 5) lightning.ai was showing a global-outage banner (status.lightning.ai) at read time; all pages above still returned content. No startup free-credit grant was found to have been sunset — Lightning has no public fixed-amount startup credit program to begin with; the closest offers (YC $5K + $30K seats contingent on a $20K contract; NVIDIA Inception 80% Enterprise discount) are partner deals, not free programs. |
| llama.cpp | llama.cpp (the named provider) has NOT sunset and is not a compute vendor: it remains free, MIT-licensed, with unlimited local use; there is no free tier, trial credits, student/education offer, or startup program to sunset — those categories simply do not apply to a self-hosted library. The 'free-compute' offers people associate with the 'Llama' name in 2025-2026 belong to Meta's Llama model and its cloud partners, NOT to llama.cpp: (1) Meta Llama Startup Program ($6,000/mo up to 6 months = $36K reimbursement) — initial cohort closed 2025-05-30; no official confirmation it reopened as of 2026-10-22 (third-party aggregators list it 'Active, check source'). (2) AWS + Meta 'Building with Llama' (up to $200K AWS credits, 6-month, ~30 US startups) — cohort applications due 2025-08-08, a cohort-specific offering. Both are startup (US, funded/<$10M or <10 yrs old) programs tied to the Llama model ecosystem, not llama.cpp; neither is a .edu student offer. Key disambiguation to carry forward: llama.cpp = local engine; the credit programs = Meta Llama model via cloud APIs/GPU, so they do not reimburse local llama.cpp runs. AWS 'Building with Llama' page was network-blocked today, so its current enrollment status is unconfirmed. |
| LM Studio | No LM Studio program was sunset or removed in 2025–2026; the opposite happened: on 2025-07-08 the paid commercial-license requirement for workplace use was REMOVED (previously: free personal use + separate commercial license for companies), making the app free for startups, schools, and companies. In 2025-07 the free public Hub organization and a paid Teams plan were added; the Bionic agent app launched 2026-07-16 with paid Bionic+ ($20/mo) and Pro ($100/mo) plans plus pay-as-you-go cloud credits, while keeping local inference free and unlimited. Note on task framing: LM Studio has never offered 'GPU / ML training & notebooks — free compute' fronts — it is a local-inference desktop app, not a GPU cloud; 'free compute' means the user's own hardware. The Teams plan is still not fully rolled out: the 2026-10 pricing page says team subscriptions are 'coming soon' with centralized org billing via paid inference credits. No student/education license or startup credit program exists (confirmed by third-party checks 2026-09/10); the free tier + free-for-work terms is the complete free offer. |
| LogRocket | LogRocket's one perpetual free offer is GONE. The Free plan — \"$0/mo free forever, 1,000 sessions/month, 1-month data retention, 3 seats, unlimited analytics/error/log events\" (plan history: Free/Team/Professional/Enterprise with Free + Team $69 + Professional $295, per trackers' captures through May 2026) — was removed when LogRocket repriced to session-based Core/Pro/Enterprise pricing. Removal window per independent trackers: PricingSaaS records the Free tier killed between its 2026-06-29 and 2026-07-06 captures (\"Logrocket kills free plan, quadruples Enterprise API credits to 2,000/mo\"); AgentDeals discovered it between 2026-06-08 and 2026-08-19 captures; stackwrite's 2026-10-03 re-check confirms \"LogRocket's free plan, which no longer exists at all.\" As of 2026-10-22 the official pricing page lists no free tier at all — only the 14-day trial. Trial packaging also churned in 2025-2026: Q1 2025 \"Free PoC\" became fixed \"21-Day Trial/Pilot\" for Professional/Enterprise; by the 2025-07-06 capture it was reworded to duration-less \"Free Trial/Free Pilot\"; the current page (verified today) says 14 days, no credit card required. Dedicated program URLs are dead: logrocket.com/startups = 404, logrocket.com/education = 404, logrocket.com/free-accounts = 404 (all checked 2026-10-22). Caveat: stale third-party listings still advertise the dead free tier — GitHub Marketplace shows \"Free 1,000 sessions/month\", G2 lists entry price \"Free, 1000 Sessions/Month\", and DriftingDesk lists a \"1,000 Free Sessions\" program \"Verified Active 2026\"; all contradict the official page and should be treated as outdated. Paid-plan perks that changed alongside: Pro API/MCP credits 200->500/mo and Enterprise 200->2,000/mo (July 2026). |
| Loops | URL correction: https://loops.com/pricing/ no longer belongs to the email provider - loops.com 301-redirects to Loopsbeauty.com (beauty retailer, verified 2026-10-22); the email API provider's pricing is at https://loops.so/pricing. Disambiguation: on 2026-10-12 Salesforce/Tableau announced a definitive agreement to acquire an UNRELATED analytics company also named "Loops" (loops.ai, AI KPI analytics, CEO Tom Laufer) - not this email provider (Astrodon Corp); do not conflate. No student/education offers, startup programs, or trial-credit programs exist for Loops (email) as of 2026-10-22; none were sunset either (none ever advertised). The only material free-offer change on record: 2024-12-10, when the free plan doubled from 2,000 to 4,000 sends/month and transactional email became free/included on all paid plans (previously metered at $1 per 2,000 transactional sends). No 2025-2026 changelog entry touched free-tier limits (2025-2026 entries - split testing, Guardian, double opt-in, Workflows, Goals, CLI/Skills, ChatGPT listing - were feature releases only). The permanent free tier above remains the only genuine free offer from this provider. |
| Mailchimp | Major 2025 change: the free email plan's limits were reduced from the previously-known 500 contacts / up to 1,000 emails per month to 250 contacts / max 500 sends per month (250/day) — the live pricing page (US and EU variants) confirms the 250/500 limits as of 2026-10-22, so the "known so far" figure is stale. The Customer Journey Builder was rebranded to Marketing Automation Flows effective June 2025. No student/education (.edu) license program and no startup program exist on official pages (/for/students/ and /startups/ both 404; no program mentions on pricing, developer, or nonprofit pages). No free SMS allowance, and no push-notification or chat API product exists to claim. Transactional Email's free offering is a one-time 500-send new-user allowance gated behind a paid Standard/Premium plan, not a standalone free API tier. One verification gap: this session's web-search budget was exhausted, so corroboration beyond official Mailchimp pages (press posts about the 2025 free-plan reduction, third-party comparisons) was not possible; all facts above come from live official pages fetched today, with the Premium sales trial and the 500-free-sends transactional allowance the only medium-confidence items. |
| MailerLite | The previously circulated free-tier numbers — 1,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails/month — are outdated. MailerLite restructured its plans (old Growth-plan era) so the current Free tier is 250 active subscribers / 2,500 emails/month / 3 active automations, confirmed on the official pricing page on 2026-10-22. No education license, startup program, or free API-send-credit program exists for MailerLite as of 2025-2026; /education and /startup URLs 404 and nothing is mentioned on the pricing or help-center pages. MailerLite has no SMS/Push/Chat front — email only. Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-research, so absence claims rest on direct inspection of official MailerLite pages (pricing, help index, 404 checks) rather than a full web sweep; a small third-party student-discount listing cannot be completely ruled out. |
| Mailgun | Branding/product sunset: Mailgun's site is now email-only (Send/Optimize/Validate/Inspect/Enterprise). The legacy Mailgun SMS offering has fully migrated to the Sinch brand - SMS/Push/Chat are sold as Sinch Conversation API channels ("Sinch Push", "Sinch Live Chat") plus the Sinch Engage SaaS (formerly MessageMedia). There is no longer a "Mailgun SMS free trial"; free SMS/Push/Chat access is only the unpublished-amount Sinch Build trial credit (no card required). No startup program or education license exists on either brand; those categories return negative findings. If any third-party-advertised "Mailgun for startups" offer once existed, it has no official home today. 2025-2026 change caveat: web search was unavailable for this session (budget exhausted), so the "changed in 2025-2026" check is based on today's official pages only - Sinch Build trial-credit amounts and the card policy for Foundation/Scale trials are not published and could differ in the signup flow. |
| Mapbox | Verdict: no genuine student or startup free offer found as of 2026-10-22, so findings is empty. The only free usage is Mapbox's standing pay-as-you-go monthly tier, which is not student- or startup-specific, plus lower card-free demo caps. The monthly tier resets each billing period and no expiry is stated. Full tiers come with standard pay-as-you-go billing, which requires a payment method (https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/faq/how-does-pay-as-you-go-billing-work/ ; https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/guides/signup/ says a card at sign-up "includes the generous Mapbox free tiers"). Monthly free amounts (https://www.mapbox.com/pricing): GL JS map loads 50,000; Maps SDKs for Mobile 25,000 MAU; Directions 100,000 requests; Temporary Geocoding 100,000 requests; Static Images 50,000; Vector Tiles 200,000; Raster Tiles 750,000. Permanent Geocoding has no free band. Overage: GL JS $5.00 per 1,000 loads (50,001-100,000); Directions $2.00 per 1,000 (100,001-500,000); Temporary Geocoding $0.75 per 1,000 (100,001-500,000). A GL JS map load is counted per map object initialized in a 12-hour session (signup guide), so recreating maps uses allowance faster. Card-free demo access (https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/guides/signup/ ; https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/guides/demo-access/) has much lower caps: GL JS 5,000 loads, Maps SDKs for Mobile 100 MAU, Directions 10,000, Temporary Geocoding 10,000, Static Images 5,000. It allows one token that cannot be created, rotated or deleted, blocks all APIs at a cap until a manual upgrade, cannot be switched back after upgrading, excludes Raster Tiles and Permanent Geocoding, and states no end date. Mapbox offers no monthly spending cap (https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/faq/can-i-set-up-a-cap-for-monthly-spending/). Usage past the free tier is invoiced to the card, and a failed charge risks deactivation. Student check: https://www.mapbox.com/education says sign-up is free and the free tiers "cover almost all student projects", with an educational-email sign-up instruction but no credits, bundles, verification rules or expiry. Startup check: https://www.mapbox.com/startups returns HTTP 404; the pricing page links only Nonprofit Support and Education; the account docs index (https://docs.mapbox.com/accounts/llms.txt) lists no student, startup, education or credit program. Adjacent, out of scope: https://www.mapbox.com/nonprofit offers donated or discounted services to nonprofits and positive-impact organizations, with no dollar figures; applications are reviewed in May and November, support starts in July or January, and renewal is annual. Conflict: freetier.wiki (https://freetier.wiki/services/mapbox/) lists "Card required: No"; the official pages above contradict that for the full tiers, so official pages were used. Confidence: high that no student or startup offer exists on the official Mapbox pages checked; medium overall, because only one of the two WebSearch calls ran (the other was refused by the budget) and its results showed no such program. If the index accepts general, eligibility-free tiers, the standing tier above is the entry to add, with eligibility "any account with a payment method on file"; that scoping is the orchestrator's call. |
| Meilisearch | No student/education program found: no education license or .edu-based offer exists for Meilisearch; the only public 'free' tracks are self-hosting (MIT, permanent) and the 14-day Cloud trial. No 2025–2026 sunset of a specific free offer was verifiable today: the 2026 blog listing (page 1) shows no pricing-change or program-sunset announcements, but WebSearch was unavailable this session (shared session search budget exhausted), so 2025 changes could not be searched across the web — treat the absence of a formal startup/education program as verified via the official pages fetched today, not as a searched conclusion. Known-so-far claims checked: MIT self-hosted = unlimited/free (confirmed, high confidence); Meilisearch Cloud 14-day trial, no card, no permanent free hosted tier (confirmed on the official pricing page today, 2026-10-22). Sources: https://www.meilisearch.com/pricing, https://www.meilisearch.com/solutions/startup, https://www.meilisearch.com/cloud. |
| Meilisearch Cloud trial | No 2025-2026 sunsets or material changes identified from the official pages read today (2026-10-22): the 14-day, no-credit-card trial and the paid-from-$20/month structure are live and match known-so-far. Caveat: the WebSearch budget for this session was exhausted, so I could not run a 2025-2026 changelog search; I rely on the live official pages (pricing, startup, llms.txt, /cloud) instead. Meilisearch has no education/student license and no public startup credit program at present — if either was ever offered, it is not advertised anywhere on the current site; absence on site ≠ confirmed historical sunset. 'Fronts: Managed Databases & Data Platforms' is a category mismatch: Meilisearch is a search engine, not a managed database. |
| Metabase Community Edition | No dedicated free Cloud tier with limited questions/users currently exists on the official site — the 'known so far' item (Metabase Cloud free tier, limited questions/users) appears to describe either the 14-day trial or a plan that was never a perpetual free tier; as of 2026-10-22 the free offerings are only (a) the unlimited self-hosted OSS/Community Edition and (b) the 14-day Cloud trial. No 2025-2026 sunset of a student or startup program was found: /education and /startups are 404 and no pricing-change or program-anniversary posts appear in the blog index (closest historical posts: 'Announcing Metabase Cloud' and 'An Enterprising Opening'). Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so third-party/press cross-checks of 2025-2026 changes (e.g., plan renames, tier limit tweaks) could not be done; confidence in absence-claims rests solely on the official pages fetched today. The OSS repo README describes the cloud offering strictly as a 'free trial', with no perpetual free tier. |
| Microsoft | SUNSET/CHANGES verified as of 2026-10-22: (1) The classic student software bundle storefront bundles.microsoft.com no longer resolves at all (DNS NXDOMAIN), and microsoft.com/en-us/education/bundles, /education/university, and store.office.com/en-us/bundles all 404 — the 'free 1-year bundle worth $199 (Office/Visio/Project/MATLAB)' and '$649 1-year bundle at a $99 student price (Windows 11 + Office + Visual Studio + Team)' cannot be confirmed on any live official page today; the current student hub (microsoft.com/en-us/education/students) no longer lists them and the bundle value proposition was absorbed into the 50%-off M365 Personal + 2026 college-PC promo (M365 Premium) + Azure Dev Tools for Teaching (which still carries free Visio Professional/Project Professional while enrolled). Treat the $199/$649 bundles as sunfetched/consolidated in 2025–2026; confidence medium (no live page to cite, negative evidence from dead domains). (2) The 2026 'Ultimate College Bundle' (M365 Premium + Game Pass + controller with a Windows PC) officially ended: validity 4/15/2026–8/31/2026, redemption through 9/30/2026 — page now says 'This promotion has ended' (a new back-to-school variant is likely to recur in 2027). (3) Azure for Startups has a new shape: the advertised tiers are $1,000 instant / up to $5,000 with 90-day and 180-day credit clocks (vs. the legacy Founders Program's application-based multi-month grants), and the startup entry point is now the Azure Portal startup home view; the marketing site still cites 'up to $150,000 in credits' as the ceiling. (4) The free 12-month M365 Personal-for-US-college-students offer (announced 2025-09-04, initial signup window through 10/31/2025, expanded to more markets in Oct 2025) — its 2026 availability could not be confirmed from the live page (JS-rendered/timeout); the standing, confirmed offer is the 50% student discount. (5) GitHub pack partner lineup churned: ~83 partner entries now; Gitpod, Replit, DigitalOcean, Codeship no longer appear; Copilot Student (free) and GitHub Pro (3,000 Actions minutes/mo, 180 Codespaces hrs/mo) are the core standing benefits. (6) store.office.com is 404 (Office bundles store discontinued); M365 deals now live under microsoft.com/microsoft-365/college-student-pricing. |
| Microsoft Azure | Material 2025-2026 changes vs 'known so far': (1) The Founders Hub is now a single-entry 'Microsoft for Startups' program (apply at startups.microsoft.com). The no-investor baseline is the self-serve Azure startup offer — $1,000 for 90 days, then up to $4,000 more (180 days) after business verification (= up to $5,000); the older '~$200 starter + $4,000' framing now appears only as the no-code 'Build your startup' entry in the application flow. Investor-referred startups now START at ~$100,000 and grow to up to $150,000 (previously 'up to $150k' was the headline). (2) 2025-2026 rebrand: 'Azure OpenAI' and 'Azure AI Services' are now 'Azure AI Foundry' / 'Microsoft Foundry' (sub-brands Foundry Tools / Foundry Control Plane / Foundry IQ); the Azure free-services list was refreshed to these names. (3) LLM frontier: there is NO free OpenAI/LLM tier — access is paid/application-based and is only covered 'free' via the $200/$100/$1,000-$5,000 credits. (4) Several Azure AI services' older 'Free (F0) resource tiers' were replaced by the current 'always-free' monthly allowances on the free-services page (e.g., Content Safety 5,000/mo, Speech 0.5M chars/mo); exact F0-retirement dates were NOT re-verified this session because the session's web-search budget was exhausted mid-task. Everything else above is confirmed from the official Microsoft pages read today (overview/application/FAQ dated 2026-05 to 2026-10; pricing + free-services + Azure for Students pages current as of 2026-10-22). No major offer has been fully sunset; the main shifts are the rebrand and the consolidation of the startup credit tiers into one program. |
| Microsoft Azure | 2025-2026 program changes (verified via press + official MS pages): (1) July 1, 2025 — Microsoft for Startups restructure: the Founders Hub four-tier model (up to $150,000 in Azure credits, applied for with a validated business plan) was RETIRED, as were the 'Founders Hub' label, the Expert Network, and the Champion Network. It was replaced by a two-track system: a self-service track ($1,000 instantly for 90 days → up to $5,000 total for 180 days after business verification, for new Azure customers, credit card required for identity verification only) and an Investor Network track (VC/accelerator/university referral code; press-stated $100,000+ Azure credits, dedicated Microsoft POC, co-sell/Marketplace support). Pegasus (invitation-only dedicated Cloud Solutions Architect) was explicitly unchanged. Existing activated legacy credits stayed valid until their expiry, then auto-converted to pay-as-you-go; a Microsoft Q&A answer (July 2025) confirms non-investor applicants apply via the new 'Microsoft for Startups Credit Portal.' (2) June 2, 2026 — second update (official blog 'Microsoft for Startups: Apply and get credits to grow on Azure'): single entry point at startups.microsoft.com; startups 'start building immediately with Startup credits'; the up-to-$150,000 ceiling was RESTORED but now unlocked incrementally 'over time based on service adoption and sustained Azure usage and verified progress' rather than as a one-time grant; Investor Network partners unlock 'additional Startup credits, expanded support, and third-party benefits' earlier; current eligibility caps: not more than $350,000 lifetime free Azure credits, no Series C funding or later, private for-profit, HQ in an Azure region, no crypto mining; applications reviewed in ~3 business days (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/microsoft-for-startups/overview, page updated 2026-08-05). (3) August 2025 — Azure Dev Tools for Teaching (successor to Microsoft Imagine) was DISCONTINUED: access disabled effective ~Aug 7-15, 2025; no new administrator signups after Aug 15, 2025; Microsoft provided NO direct replacement for educators — students' dev-tool benefits (incl. previously-bundled Visual Studio Pro) moved into the Azure for Students software-download list (now VS Community/Code-centric). Already-installed software keeps working. This is why the '12 months of Visual Studio Pro' line from the known-so-far notes no longer maps to any current Azure student offer (Pro/Enterprise IDE now comes via GitHub Student Developer Pack or Visual Studio Dev Essentials Premium). (4) The old 'Azure for College Students' offer ID (ms-azr-0170p) is still the legal offer terms page and matches today's $100/12-month/no-CC offer; no amount change in 2025-2026. (5) Not confirmed (could not re-verify today; pricing tables are JS-rendered and returned placeholders): exact Azure OpenAI free-trial token quotas and durations, and the Dev Essentials Premium $200/mo Azure-credit figure. |
| Microsoft Azure | Verified structural changes as of 2026-10-22 (from pages fetched today): (1) The legacy 'Azure for Startups' program/pricing URLs are dead — azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/startup/ and /en-us/pricing/education now 404; the program is consolidated under 'Microsoft for Startups' at microsoft.com/en-us/startups with docs on learn.microsoft.com/startups (doc dates May–Oct 2026). (2) The milestone ladder from 'known so far' ($200 → $5K → $25K → $50K → $150K) is confirmed current, with details: $5K after business verification, $25K at 5+ workloads (~60 days) plus a one-time 2-year credit-use extension, $50K at 7+ workloads, $150K at 10+ workloads AND ~$3,000/month usage; tiers can be skipped (auto-evaluated, not sequential). (3) New/increased caps: standard member cap remains $150K, but Investor Network-backed startups can now unlock up to $200K in credits with expanded support (benefits page updated 2026-06-15); with an investor code the immediate starter credit is $1,000 (vs $200 without) per the application doc updated 2026-10-08. (4) Program is now explicitly limited to B2B software startups pre-seed→Series B (no Series C+), ≤$350K lifetime free Azure credits, HQ-country locked at sign-up, and personal-consumer Microsoft account (no work/school email). (5) GitHub Student Developer Pack (page © 2026): older standalone partner deals (e.g., multiple TLD domain offers) no longer listed; new AI-oriented partners (Camber, Boot.dev, ToDiagram) added; Copilot student tier now framed around 'GitHub AI Credits' with limited agent/chat. (6) Azure free account page shows no 2025/2026 policy changes — $200/30-day + 12-month free + always-free structure unchanged on the page fetched today. (7) Azure-for-faculty details and the M365 Education office-online page could not be re-fetched today (404s/timeouts), so no faculty-credit or free-Office change is asserted. Method note: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so all verification is via direct WebFetch of official pages listed per finding. |
| Microsoft Azure | TWO program sunsets in 2025-2026: (1) Effective ~June 27/July 1, 2025, the pre-2025 multi-tier Microsoft for Startups program — 'up to $150,000 in Azure credits' via L1 $1,000 / L2 $5,000 / L3 $25,000 / L4 $150,000 tiers, open to non-investor startups with a validated business plan — was retired and replaced by a two-track system: Investor Network track (~$100,000 start + additional awards, by investor referral) and a self-service track capped at $5,000 ($1,000 valid 90 days + $4,000 valid 180 days after business verification). Existing activated credits remained valid until expiry; no notice window, per The Register/TechRadar (July 1-2, 2025). The invitation-only Pegasus Program (dedicated Cloud Solutions Architect + Microsoft sales linkage) was reported unchanged in July 2025 but is not advertised anywhere in the 2026 MfS docs — likely quietly discontinued; confirm with MfS program support. (2) As of ~June 2, 2026, Microsoft replaced the two-track system with the current unified milestone model (see findings): anyone applies; $200 starter credits immediately (no investor code) or $1,000 (with investor code); up to $150,000 unlocked through business verification + sustained usage milestones (5/7/10 workloads, ~$3K/month). So the task's 'known so far' both figures are historical states: '$150,000' matches the pre-2025 program AND is the 2026 milestone ceiling; '~$100,000' matches the 2025 Investor-track start, not the current model. Marketing pages are lagging the docs: azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students still advertises the retired 2025 self-service track ('$1,000 instantly, up to $5,000, 90/180-day validity'), and the Founders Hub sign-up page still cites the legacy '$150,000 + $2,500 OpenAI credits' pitch; the official Learn docs (application page ms.date 2026-10-08) are the authoritative current state. Stale-URL note: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/for-startups/ 404s today; the program now lives at microsoft.com/startups with docs under learn.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/. Note: the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so a few secondary items (MfS FAQ's exact URL, Azure for Students Starter per-service limits, Azure for Education page) were verified only indirectly and are marked medium/low confidence accordingly. Sources: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/microsoft-for-startups/application , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/microsoft-for-startups/getting-started-mfs , https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/blog/microsoft-for-startups-introduces-a-clearer-path-from-ai-development-to-enterprise-growth/ , https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/01/microsoft-changes-conditions-for-azure-startup-credits/101398 , https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-pulls-program-that-gave-generous-azure-boost-to-ai-startups , https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ , https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/ , https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/offers/ms-azr-0170p , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/education-hub/faq , https://education.github.com/pack , https://github.com/microsoft/AcademicContent/blob/main/offers-programs/README.md , https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups |
| Microsoft Azure | No free offer for this front was sunset as of 2026-10-22, but several were materially changed in 2025-2026: (1) Microsoft for Startups was restructured into the tiered 'Founders Hub' model; the current headline is 'up to $150,000 in credits' (replacing the older 'up to $300,000 in total benefits' framing), with level-ups gated by an automated engagement score. (2) The live Cosmos DB 'free tier' is now the provisioned 1,000 RU/s + 25 GB allowance (confirmed on the current pricing page today); the previously documented separate 12-month serverless allowance (400,000 RU + 32 GB) does not appear on the current page, so plan against 1,000 RU/s + 25 GB. (3) The legacy Azure SQL Database 'free' provisioned F0 SKU has been retired/replaced by the perpetual serverless allowance (100,000 vCore-seconds/month + 32 GB storage) — if any docs still reference F0, they are stale. (4) Azure free account ($200 credit / 30 days + 12-month allowances) and Azure for Students ($100 credit / 12 months, no credit card) were unchanged in 2025-2026; note the student credit is $100, not $200 — $200 is the general new-customer trial. (5) Housekeeping: the dedicated SQL Database serverless pricing-details URL (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/sql-database/serverless/) now returns 404 as of today; the free allowances are instead confirmed on the /free/ and /free/students pages, and Azure has rebranded much of its AI surface to 'Microsoft Foundry' (product-name changes only, no free-allowance changes observed). |
| Microsoft Azure | 2025–2026 changes to be aware of: (1) The legacy '12-month free services + $100 credit' structure in the STANDARD free account no longer appears on the current official pages — the trial is now $200 for 30 days plus 12-month free amounts; the '$100 12-month credit' noted in 'known so far' appears outdated (medium confidence on the removal; not visible on /free or /pricing/free-services read today). (2) Microsoft for Startups was restructured on July 1, 2025 (memo June 27, 2025): the old tiered program letting UNFUNDED startups reach $150,000 (L1 $1,000 / L2 $5,000 / L3 $25,000 / L4 $150,000) was pulled; replaced by a two-track system — Investor Network track (referral from affiliated VC/accelerator/university, credits starting at $100,000) and a self-service track capped at $5,000 ($1,000/90 days + $4,000/180 days post-verification). Activated legacy credits remained valid until expiry. (3) The program changed again: for anyone who joined Microsoft for Startups after May 29, 2026, the Azure Portal becomes the primary experience and credits are milestone-based ($200 → $5k → $25k → $50k → $150k based on workload count and ~$3,000/month usage over 60 days; docs updated 2026-08-05), effectively re-opening the $150k ceiling via usage milestones rather than investor referral. (4) 'Azure for Teachers' ($1,000 credit for educators) has no current offer page — it was sunset years ago; faculty now use the standard $200/30-day free account (card required) or institution-level Microsoft Learn for Educators (MSLE, which channels the $100 student credit). (5) The 'Azure 6 months free for Visual Studio subscribers' developer offer page (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/visual-studio) returns 404 — that offer appears discontinued as of today. (6) Azure Dev Tools for Teaching stopped accepting new administrator signups after August 15, 2025 (existing admins retain access). (7) Pegasus (invitation-only startup support) was explicitly unchanged by the 2025 restructure. (8) Many 'Foundry Tools' lines reflect the 2025–2026 Azure AI rebrand (Azure AI Services → Azure AI Foundry); amounts themselves are unchanged. |
| Microsoft Azure | 1) Microsoft Education Portal (education.microsoft.com/portal — formerly the K-12 teacher/student portal that listed Microsoft 365 and Azure credit allowances) now 301-redirects (observed today) to the Microsoft Learn Educator Center, which lists no Azure/M365 credits; educator value has shifted to the Microsoft Elevate Educator/School programs and Microsoft Learn for Educators (year-round, tiered 'Explorer'/'Pathfinder' entry). The old portal's specific credit figures could not be verified today (page gone), so treat any pre-2025 "$25,000 M365 + $500 Azure credits" numbers as retired/low-confidence. 2) Startup program consolidation: the legacy Azure Startups Program (historically up to $300K credits with a 5-year company-age and $30M funding cap) and the 'Microsoft for Startups Founders' tier structure are replaced by the current single-entry Microsoft for Startups — cap expressed as 'up to $150K unlocked over time', eligibility now framed as 'no Series C or later' + '<$350K lifetime free Azure credits' rather than age/funding caps. 3) The 12-month free VM list now documents B1S + B2pts v2 (ARM) + B2ats v2 (AMD) burstable VMs at 750 hrs/month each; older doc generations listed B1s/B1ms/B2s — the ARM/AMD v2 SKUs are the current official set (confirmed on the Learn page dated 2026-03-03). 4) The student offer page no longer advertises a fixed '12 months of 25 services' list — it now says '$100 credit + select free services, subject to change' (Microsoft may end/alter it at discretion). 5) Method note: WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so all verification used WebFetch of official pages; per-service always-free limit figures (Synapse 250h, Databricks 32 DBU, 100 GB egress) live in a JS-rendered table on the free-services page that could not be extracted and are marked medium confidence. |
| Microsoft Azure | 1) July 1, 2025 (announced June 27, 2025): the classic Founders Hub multi-tier program (apply-then-upgrade to $100 → $5,000 → $25,000 → $150,000 with business-plan validation) was RETIRED and replaced by a two-track system: Investor Network track ($100,000+ starting credits, referral from affiliated investors/accelerators) and a self-serve track ($1,000 for 90 days + $4,000 for 180 days after business verification, cap $5,000 without investor affiliation). Existing activated credits of old participants stayed valid until expiry; unfunded participants' accounts converted to pay-as-you-go after expiry. Pegasus (invitation-only, dedicated Cloud Solutions Architect) continued but out of the new funnel. 2) 2026 restructure (MFS 2.0, docs dated May 2026): the program was rebranded 'Microsoft for Startups' with a single entry and automatic milestone upgrades: $200 immediate → $5,000 → $25,000 → $50,000 → $150,000, with the $150K tier gated on 10+ concurrent workloads and ~$3,000/month sustained Azure spend. Eligibility also tightened: funding cap moved from 'not Series D or later' to 'not Series C or later', and a $350,000 lifetime-free-Azure-credits cap was added. So the oft-quoted 'no funding required, up to $150K' is now true only in the narrow sense that early stages need no funding, but Series C+ companies are excluded and $150K requires heavy sustained Azure spend. 3) Legacy partner credits from the old Founders Hub ($2,500 OpenAI, Databricks, Twilio $10,000, Atlassian, etc.) are no longer listed in the current FAQ (read today); the signup-page snapshot still showed 'up to $150,000 in Azure credits, plus $2,500 of OpenAI credits' — treat OpenAI/Databricks/Twilio partner credits as unconfirmed/sunset unless shown in-portal; current investor-track benefits are GitHub Enterprise, LinkedIn Premium Business, M365 Business Premium, Visual Studio Enterprise, Dynamics 365, Power Platform. 4) GitHub Student Developer Pack: DigitalOcean's $200 credit offer left the pack (credits expire 2026-08-01); Bump.sh offer ended 2025-12-09; Appwrite restructured to 6 months (2026-10-02); GitHub Foundations certification voucher was paused 2025-10-25 then resumed 2025-09-30. 5) The Azure Free page no longer advertises the old '6 months free AI services' window — only 12-month free amounts and always-free tiers. |
| Mistral AI Studio | 1) Mistralship startup program (up to €30K La Plateforme credits, 10 startups/6-month cohort): cohort-1 applications closed 2025-01-05; the program's public paths are dead — https://mistral.ai/startups and https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ship both return 404 as of 2026-10-22 (verified directly today); Mistral published no closure notice and no replacement offer; third-party trackers mark it discontinued. 2) On 2026-10-07 (no announcement), the pricing page dropped the '$10 /mo in API credits' line from the Free plan and reduced Pro's included API credits from $30 to $25.50/mo — the Free card now states no dollar figure; included monthly usage remains, visible only on the account's Limits page. 3) The legacy 'Experiment' free tier (published caps ~1 rps / 500K tokens/min / ~1B tokens/month) was retired and its pages now 404, replaced by Free mode with per-org unpublished limits. 4) Free-tier model lineup shifted during 2026 — e.g., mistral-medium was dropped from the free tier on 2026-08-14; mistral-large-4 (public preview 2026-10-06) reportedly rejects free-tier keys with 'not available in your subscription tier'. 5) Since 2026-08-05 (US) / 2026-08-07 (EU), consumer terms exclude Studio/API from individual use — API access is for business customers under the Commercial ToS, which quietly constrains who 'free mode' actually serves. 6) No free education license exists: the education offer is a paid $5.99/mo student discount (12-month cap), not a grant. |
| Mixpanel Free Plan | Jan 21, 2025: Mixpanel for Startups was REVAMPED — the legacy credit-based track (up to $50,000 in credits, with the card on file charged for renewal/overage) was replaced by 100%-free first year on the Startup Plan (1B events/yr). Docs still reference the legacy credit-based track's renewal-billing language. Feb 4, 2025: "Mixpanel Events 2.0" repricing — Growth restructured to a $0 floor with first 1M events/month free (~100x cheaper; old plans had per-MTU minimums that could DOWNGRADE an upgrader's included volume); docs rule: only Growth plans purchased after Feb 2025 get the 1M free events. No free-plan limit changes since Feb 2025 (1M events/mo, 10K replays/mo, 1K MEU experiments, 10 flags unchanged as of today's page). No education/student program exists to sunset. The 2018 nonprofit offer (10K MTU free + 80% discount, discover.mixpanel.com/nonprofit.html) is no longer advertised on mixpanel.com as of today and appears dormant. Nothing on mixpanel.com/startups or /pricing indicates a 2025–2026 sunset of the startup program; it is active with 11K+ claimed participants. |
| Modal | 2025–2026 changes (from PricingSaaS Pulse captures of modal.com): (1) Oct 5, 2025 — Modal restructured its credit grants: the single unified 'up to $50k for startups and academic researchers' grant was split into 'Credit grants for startups' (then up to $50k) and 'Credit grants for academics' (up to $10k); cloud marketplace committed-spend also expanded from AWS-only to AWS + GCP (+Azure/OCI in that capture). (2) Q4 2025 — Modal cut the early-stage (Seed–Series A) startup credit grant from $50k to $25k. (3) Q2 2025 — H200 GPU option added at $0.001261/sec; (4) Mar 2026 — RTX PRO 6000 added at $0.000842/sec; B300 now listed at $0.001972/sec (the task's known H200/B300 range is confirmed live). No offer was fully sunset: the $30/mo Starter free tier, the startup grants, and the academics grants all remain active as of Oct 22, 2026. Team plan is now $250/mo including $100/mo of compute credits. Sources: https://modal.com/pricing , https://modal.com/startups , https://modal.com/academics , https://modal.com/signup , https://pricingsaas.com/companies/modal/diffs/2025Q3 , https://sidehustletools.app/free-credits/modal-for-startups , https://perkbook.co/vendor-directory/modal/ , https://creditforstartups.com/companies/modal , https://grabaicredits.com/en/deals/modal-for-startups , https://aifree.dev/offer/modal-startup-program |
| Modal | As of 2026-10-22 no student/startup free program was found to be sunset: the $30/month Starter free credits, the up-to-$10k academic grant, the tiered startup credit program, and the AWS Activate add-on are all live on official pages read today. Changes found: (1) Shared Endpoints moved to per-token billing from the first request, effective 1 Sep 2026 (pricing page) — this removes a former free-token allowance and is the most material 2026 change for free-tier users; (2) 2025–2026 changelog page 1 (Sep–Oct 2026) shows no credit-tier, startup-program, or academic-program changes or sunsets. Not verified (could not rule out): a one-time signup/trial credit — no such credit appears on any official page today; a third-party guide's claim of '$1 at signup + $29 after adding a payment method, $0.50 one-time fee' is unverified and contradicts the official '$30/month' wording, treat as unreliable. Also unverifiable from fetched pages: exact academic grant cycle timing/expiry, per-tier startup credit dollar amounts, and whether .edu email is formally required for the academic grant (likely in practice, not stated on the official page). |
| Mollie | No Mollie free offer was sunset or removed in 2025–2026 that I could verify. Changes noted: (1) The Mollie Startup Program tiers currently read €75k/€500k/€1M waived fees — a third-party aggregator (StartupPerks, checked ~2026-08-27) notes a "measured 5x expansion" added on 2026-08-27, implying the tiers were previously much smaller (pre-expansion amounts not stated on the official page, so treat as unconfirmed). (2) The €1,000 new-customer promo exists in Mollie's campaign T&Cs with no stated end date; whether it is still being actively issued to new signups is unconfirmed (page live today, no calendar dates). (3) Mollie's general campaign terms state offers are "subject to change, withdrawal or cancellation at any time". No education/student program existed in 2025–2026 to sunset. Key facts verified today on official pages: no monthly fees / no lock-in, 35+ payment methods included, POS "Pay as you go" at €0/month, and test API keys free with no card required. |
| MongoDB Atlas Free Tier | 2025-2026 changes found: (1) Feb 2025 - Atlas Flex tier ($8 base, capped ~$30/mo, 5 GB, burst up to 500 ops/s) launched and replaced the older Atlas Serverless and Shared tiers, which are gone; the Free tier was kept 'free forever'. (2) The 'M0' tier is now officially called the 'Free' cluster in docs and UI; docs pin Free clusters to MongoDB 8.0 with no manual version upgrades. (3) Idle Free clusters auto-pause after 30 days of zero-connection inactivity (a Mar 2025 community post cites a 60-day window, so the pause window was tightened to 30 days) and may be deactivated per ToS - a material change for 'free forever' expectations. (4) 2 Jun 2025 - Atlas Charts pricing change: M0 clusters got a restricted free Charts tier (dashboard auto-refresh every 4 hours, one scheduled report/project/week). (5) Legacy student/educator self-hosted license pages (e.g. learn.mongodb.com/.../students/licenses, mongodb.com/education which now 308-redirects to MongoDB University) are gone/redirected - the classic 'student license' free self-managed server offer appears sunset; student value is now delivered through the GitHub Student Developer Pack ($50 Atlas credits + $150 certifications) plus MongoDB University. (6) Backup availability on Free clusters is now documented (daily snapshot, up to 4 retained) despite the pricing-page FAQ still saying 'backups not available for the Free tier' - treat the FAQ as stale and verify in the console. |
| n8n | As of 2026-10-22: no student/education product license or .edu-gated offer exists for n8n — only free open-access Academy courses (a learning platform, not a discount), the free unlimited self-hosted Community Edition, the card-free Cloud trial, and the paid 50% start-up discount. No permanent free cloud tier: cloud plans are paid (Starter 20€/mo annual, Pro 50€/mo annual; monthly 24€/60€ per Sept 2026 sources) and a free 14-day Business trial exists with card. Start-up Plan terms are current and unchanged (50% off, <20 employees, <€5M funding, 1-year renewable, self-hosted-only Business); the pricing page now shows Business 'Hosted by n8n?' as waitlist/self-hosted-only, so no hosted startup tier. The Cloud trial (1,000 executions, no card) is a trial, not a free tier — the known '14-day trial' duration is stated on the page only for the Business plan, not explicitly for the Starter/Pro Cloud trial. No 2025–2026 sunset of the Community Edition or start-up discount found; the main caveat everywhere is that 'free n8n' means self-hosting with self-paid infrastructure. Sources verified on official pages today: https://n8n.io/pricing/ , https://n8n.io/pricing/startup-plan/ , https://n8n.io/education/ . Corroborating third parties: CloudZero n8n pricing (Sept 2026), Opsily, SubDiscounts (verified 2026-10-15), SaaS Deal Radar (checked 2026-10-19), PerkBook. Note: WebSearch session budget was exhausted mid-task, so later verification relied on official pages fetched via WebFetch plus earlier search snippets rather than fresh searches. |
| Neon Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes (all from official changelogs/blogs): (1) Aug 15, 2025 — major pricing overhaul to usage-based paid plans with a then-$5/month minimum; Free plan storage moved from 0.5 GB total to 0.5 GB PER project; the $5 minimum was later removed (Dec 12, 2025, 'purely usage-based'). (2) Nov 7, 2025 — Free plan projects raised 20 -> 30; compute prices cut (Launch $0.14->$0.106/CU-hr, Scale $0.26->$0.222). (3) Nov 21, 2025 — Free plan projects 30 -> 50. (4) Dec 12, 2025 — Free plan projects raised to 70/80; branchable Neon Auth (Better Auth) added to all plans including Free. (5) Mar 6, 2026 — unlimited org members on Free plan. (6) Oct 2, 2026 — Free plan storage doubled 0.5 GB -> 1 GB per project (now 20 GB account-wide cap) and project count -> 100. (7) Neon is now a Databricks company: pages read 'part of the Databricks Platform / Built around Lakebase Postgres, by Databricks'; the startup program is applied for via a Databricks form and its VC track pays combined Neon + Databricks credits. Nothing was sunset: no free offer was closed in 2025-2026, only expanded. Watch item: the marketing 'up to $100k in credits' on the pricing page no longer matches the startup page's $1K self-funded / $200K VC-backed structure — likely stale copy. |
| Netlify | Big 2025-2026 change: the old usage-metered Free/Starter plan (100GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes, 125,000 function invocations, 1M edge invocations, 10GB storage, no card) is now a LEGACY plan. From 4 Sep 2025 all NEW accounts use credit-based plans (Free = 300 cr/mo). Existing legacy accounts keep their old plan but may switch to credit-based (irreversible). So the 'known' free tier was restructured from metered (100GB) to credit-based (300 credits ≈ ~15GB or ~20 deploys). Other timeline: 1 Oct 2025 credit-pack rebalance (Personal 500cr/$5, Pro 1500cr/$10; Pro monthly cut 5000→3000 credits); 17 Apr 2026 Pro = unlimited seats, form submissions made free on all credit plans, meter rates changed (bandwidth 10→20 cr/GB, compute 5→10 cr/GB-hr, web requests 3→2 cr/10k). No student/education program was launched or sunset; one never existed. Startup program is a VC-backed discount (referral-only) and is not a free-credit offer; its official /startups/ page returned 404 today, so specifics come from a third-party directory. |
| New Relic Free Tier | No New Relic free offer was sunset or materially changed in 2025-2026 per pages fetched today (2026-10-22): the perpetual free tier (100 GB/month, 1 full user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks) is still advertised on newrelic.com/pricing, the site navigation still shows '100GB/month free' / 'New Relic Free Tier', the students program (500 GB/mo, 3 users) is live at newrelic.com/students, and the startups program is live at newrelic.com/startups. No separate time-boxed 'free trial' is currently advertised — the perpetual free tier with no credit card is the entry point. Note: WebSearch could not be run this session (search budget exhausted), so 2025-2026 change-verification relied on fetching official pages and the blog index rather than searching; the blog index (Oct 2026 posts) shows no pricing/plan sunset announcements. Also: New Relic has no free CDN offer at all (CDN is not a New Relic product); the 'Uptime' front maps to the 500 free synthetic checks in the free tier. 'Observability for Good' (nonprofits) exists but is out of scope (not a student/startup program). |
| Nginx | 1) NGINX Plus for Development free annual license: NOT CONFIRMED. The nginx.com/developer-license URL now returns a 301 redirect to https://www.f5.com/products/nginx, which describes no free developer or development license. The F5 trials hub lists NGINX only as the NGINX One trial. A third-party reseller (WorldTech IT, not an official source) lists paid NGINX Plus non-production and WAF developer SKUs, priced per instance per month or per 5/10/25-user block per month. Drop the claim unless F5 confirms a current offer. Whether F5 removed the dedicated page is not confirmed.2) Changed or new in 2025-2026: NGINXaaS for Google Cloud free trial added June 1, 2026. NGINXaaS was renamed F5 Application Delivery Service, and the Google billing doc says the product has moved. NGINX Plus has published LTS and Continuous Release tracks since May 13, 2026 (a release-model change, not an offer change). Archived F5 article K40429408 (originally Oct 2020, updated Dec 2024) describes an older form-based 30-day NGINX Plus trial; it is superseded by the MyF5 NGINX One trial. NGINX Plus R33 (late 2024) introduced JWT licensing and usage reporting.3) Not found, student or education: no NGINX student or academic license was found. The F5 education portal homepage shows paid options only, for example Administering NGINX for Web Services self-directed training at $480 for 8 training units, and NGINX Learning Path bundles valid for 1 year with no automatic renewal and all sales final. The free-tagged course catalog page returned zero courses, so no free course list is verified. F5 Academic Alliance and other student programs were not checked because the WebSearch budget ran out.4) Not found, startup: no NGINX or F5 startup credits or discounts on nginx.org, the F5 trial pages, or the education portal. Cloud startup programs do not confirm NGINX coverage. AWS Activate (up to $200,000 in credits per its page) says credits are redeemable on third-party models on Amazon Bedrock and says nothing about Marketplace software. The Google for Startups Cloud Program perks page returned truncated content, and no NGINX or F5 entry was visible. Using Activate or Google credits to buy NGINX Marketplace listings is unverified.5) Not checked: Azure Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace NGINX Plus listings other than NGINXaaS; NGINX Ingress Controller and Gateway Fabric licensing; nonprofit or open-source-project discounts.6) Third-party only: itechguides (checked 20 Sep 2026) says NGINX Plus has no free plan, a 30-day trial, and pricing on request. This is not an official source.7) Method and limits: nginx.org, the NGINX license, F5 product and trial pages, the NGINXaaS changelog and billing docs, the AWS Marketplace listing, the AWS Activate page, Credly, and the F5 education portal were read directly with WebFetch on 2026-10-22. The WebSearch quota (200 calls per session, shared across agents) ran out after four searches, so search-based checks for student, startup, and academic programs were not possible. |
| Nominatim | No student, startup, trial-credit, or education program existed at OSMF/Nominatim, so none was sunset in 2025–2026. What DID materially change in 2025–2026: (1) the OSMF Nominatim Usage Policy was tightened — bulk scripts now hard-capped at 4 req/min (single machine, single thread, >1-day or recurring jobs), with repeated-identical-query clients classified 'faulty' and blockable; (2) a new 'Usage in LLMs' clause: LLMs may only suggest the service if they prominently surface the policy, and no-code/low-code/'vibe-coding' platforms are prohibited from embedding the public API as a generic geocoding feature — aimed squarely at AI-generated app stacks; (3) explicit ban on reselling/repackaging geocoding output, naming package/vehicle tracking and API resellers, and a warning that commercial users may have access revoked 'without notice'; (4) software releases: Nominatim 5.2.0 on 2025-10-29 (wiki, accessed 2026-09), and /search.php deprecated in favor of /search. Nothing was closed; the free public service remains live as of 2026-10-22 (policy page fetched today). |
| Northflank | As of 2026-10-22: (1) The official Student Developer Pack page (northflank.com/student-developer-pack) returns HTTP 404 — the program appears retired or URL-changed in 2025-2026 even though third-party directories still list 'free tier doubled for students' (4 services + student support via students@northflank.com); treat as unconfirmed pending email verification. (2) No Northflank-branded startup program or free trial-credit offer exists or was sunset — the startup route is BYOC with third-party credits (AWS Activate et al.). (3) 2025-2026 pricing changes: 11 Dec 2025 — network pricing cut 60% to $0.06/GB egress and new Tokyo + Melbourne regions (changelog); 2025-2026 releases added GPUs (B200, Granite Rapids), unified jobs, BYOC microVMs/sandboxes, object storage — none changed the free Sandbox quota of 2 services / 2 cron jobs / 1 database / 1 BYOC cluster, which has been stable since the Nov 2021 'Free Developer Projects' launch. No known sunset of the free tier itself; it remains always-on and free with card verification at signup. |
| Notion for Education | Changes 2025-2026: (1) K-12 students and K-12 educators are NOT eligible for Notion's free Education plan — only students/teachers at accredited higher-ed institutions in the World Higher Education Database; K-12 users fall back to the general Free plan. This narrows the historical "free for all educators" posture. (2) The GitHub Student Developer Pack Notion perk, historically "free Notion Pro (annual)", is now listed as "everything in the Notion Education plan with additional AI responses" — the underlying plan shifted from Pro to Education, and extra AI is now metered. (3) AI is now usage-metered via "Notion credits" ($10/1,000 monthly; $13/1,000 annual); Standard/Select AI credits are bundled only on Business/Enterprise, and the Free/Education plans list AI as a limited trial with no published fixed free-credit amount. No core free offer was fully sunset in 2025-2026 — the free Education plan (higher-ed), the free student-org plan, the individual Free plan, the Startup program, and the 30-day Business trial all remain active as of 2026-10-22. Method note: web search budget was exhausted this session, so all findings above were verified by WebFetch of official pages (notion.com pricing, education/startups/trials/block-usage/credits help articles, education.github.com/pack) today; not a search-based synthesis. |
| NVIDIA | Education/student-specific offers: as of 2026-10-22 I could NOT verify a dedicated NVIDIA education license or student program for inference/AI Enterprise (NVIDIA education-related URLs www.nvidia.com/en-us/education/ and /about-nvidia/education/ return 404; my web-search budget for this session was exhausted, so I could not confirm whether a GTC-era 'AI for Students' pilot at partner universities still exists). What is verifiably available to students is: the free Developer Program NIM tier (finding 1) and the free 16-GPU self-hosted NIM license (finding 2) — both open to individual students with no .edu requirement, plus free DLI courses if their startup is in Inception. A dedicated student free-offer line could not be confirmed and should not be cited. Sunset/changes 2025-2026: (a) The legacy '1,000 signup credits, expandable to 5,000 with work-email verification' mechanism reported on the NIM forum in 2024-2025 has effectively been replaced by the published 40 RPM + 10,000 requests/day rate-limit model — official model pages show no credit counter; 2026-08 forum threads still use the old framing, NVIDIA has not officially confirmed the credits pool was removed (disputed; check account panel). (b) The 2024 official NIM FAQ's framing ('160+ models', '90-day trial' linked off the dev-program page) is superseded by the 2026 catalog rotation (Nemotron 3.x/DeepSeek V4.x/GLM 5.3 generation) and by consolidation of Omniverse terms into 'NVIDIA AI Enterprise' (AI Product Terms last modified 2026-04-15). (c) DGX Cloud's old 'free trial' web page (nvidia.com/.../free-trial-nvidia-ai-enterprise) now 301-redirects to the corporate-email enterprise registration portal, meaning the self-serve free trial path has been tightened to organizations with corporate emails. (d) Rate limits are explicitly non-adjustable on the free tier; moderators direct all RPM-increase requests to paid AI Enterprise channels (2026 forum replies). Inception publishes no dollar figure for its cloud credits; widely-cited 'up to $100,000 DGX Cloud' number is third-party-sourced only. Regional note: the free tier is unavailable in Russia, Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and 6 other countries (NVIDIA's own otp-unsupported-countries config, read 2026-09-26). |
| NVIDIA | 2025-2026 changes/sunsets: (1) The task's entry URL https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai-catalog/inception/ now returns 404 — Inception's live official page moved to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/startups/ (verified today). (2) AWS Activate restructured: the member-reported Inception-ecosystem tiers ($10K base / $25K Grow / up to $100K Scale, per NVIDIA developer-forum threads 2024-2025) no longer appear on AWS's current official page; the official structure is now Activate Founders (self-funded, up to $5,000, start $1,000), Activate Portfolio (pre-Series B, up to $200,000, NVIDIA Org ID via Inception), and invite-only 'AWS Credits for AI Startups' ($200,000+), plus a new 'Kiro Startup Credits' track. Documented 3-15 month handoff delays (Org ID issues) persist in late-2025/2026 forum threads. (3) GCP for Startups is still up to $350K, now formally structured over 2 years (Year-1 100% / Year-2 20% footnotes, up to $250K Y1 AI / $100K Y1 others) with verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A funding required for most tiers — the older flat 'up to $200,000' marketing was effectively superseded by the $350K AI headline. The $300/90-day GCP free trial is unchanged. (4) Microsoft for Startups headline credits expanded from the legacy $1,200/yr Azure + $1,200 GitHub to 'up to $150,000 in credits' with Foundry/GitHub credit-aware usage (current official hub). (5) New since 2025: NVIDIA DGX Cloud H100 credit cap (up to $100,000, GTC 2025) and Nebius AI Lift (up to $150K + $10K inference, GTC April 2025). Nothing on the GCP $300 trial, GCP always-free tier, or build.nvidia.com free inference was sunset; Microsoft and AWS program details not published beyond the levels quoted. No confirmed full sunset of any offer in this stack as of 2026-10-22, though the $100K DGX Cloud offer's current operational availability is unconfirmable (still advertised on NVIDIA's Cloud Partners page but absent from the main Inception page). |
| Ollama | LICENSE CORRECTION: the 'known so far' note said Ollama is Apache-2.0 — the repo's LICENSE file is actually MIT (permissive open source; free and unrestricted). MATERIAL PRICING CHANGE: Ollama Cloud pricing was overhauled on Aug 31, 2026 to transparent monthly usage-credit pools. Legacy mechanics — 5-hour session limits + 7-day weekly caps, and the 'Pro = 50x Free / Max = 5x Pro' framing — are gone; new structure: Free (starter credits, 1 concurrent) / Pro $20/mo ($200/yr ≈ $16.67/mo, $60/mo credits, 3 concurrent) / Max $100/mo ($300/mo credits, 10 concurrent, early access to newest models) / Team $500/mo (early access, $1,000/mo shared credits, unlimited users) / Enterprise (custom, volume pricing). Cloud (hosted inference) models first launched in preview Sep 19, 2025; Team plan opened Aug 31, 2026. NOTHING FREE WAS SUNSET: the free local runtime and the Cloud Free tier remain $0 — only the free tier's usage-limit mechanism changed (session/weekly → monthly starter credits). ADJACENT / THIRD-PARTY 'free GPU + Ollama' offers that appear in search are NOT Ollama's own programs: UCloud CompShare (10 hours free RTX40-series GPU after signup + ID verification; 5% discount + compute subsidy for academic/enterprise certification; hosts Ollama images) and Brown CCV 'Oscar' HPC (800+ NVIDIA GPUs, Ollama preinstalled as a module, 100+ shared open models, free to Brown accounts). Ollama provides no free notebooks or free ML-training compute — its cloud is inference-only and the local runtime is for inference/serving; training/fine-tuning requires separate tooling. |
| OneSignal | 1) MATERIAL CHANGE 2026-09/10: the Free plan's mobile push and in-app channels got a hard <1,000 MAU per-organization cap — in effect for new customers 2026-09-01 and existing customers 2026-10-01, so fully in force as of 2026-10-22. The previously-recorded 'Free (Starter): up to 10,000 MAU, unlimited app messages' is now stale for mobile push/in-app (over the cap, mobile push/in-app pauses after a 24h upgrade grace; web push, email, SMS keep working). Web push and email limits (10,000 email sends/mo; max 10,000 web subscribers/send) were NOT changed by this revision. 2) SUNSET 2026-10-22: the Shipaton x RevenueCat coupon (3 months free Growth, ~$600/mo usage covered, CC required) had to be redeemed by 2026-09-30 and its code expired for all users on 2026-10-22 — effectively dead today. 3) No startup program or education license has ever been publicly offered by OneSignal; the Free plan is their startup/early-stage offer. 4) Method note: official pages (pricing, billing FAQ, /startups, /education 404s, Shipaton page via search-result content of the official page, pricing blog) were read 2026-10-22; the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted partway, so claims lean on the fetched/searched content above rather than additional live searches. |
| OpenAI | 1) One-time ~$5 API sign-up credit (legacy, ended ~2023) — no new accounts get it; confirmed dead by OpenAI staff replies throughout 2025. 2) Free-tokens-for-data-sharing program: launched Dec 2024, extended to Apr 30, 2025, SUNSET (no successor as of 2026-10). 3) Limited-time free previews (o1/o1-pro, mid-2024) long ended. 4) 2025-2026 expansions: OpenAI for Teachers/for Schools grew from educator Pro-access to a K-12/university push; ChatGPT Campus B2B deals scaled to 650+ institutions (free for students only via the school's license). 5) Consumer side shifts: GPT-5-family models moved to the Free plan (Aug 2025) with daily caps; Sora and DALL·E ride on Free with watermarked/limited generation caps that OpenAI has tightened during 2025 — so 'free' consumer access exists but is rate-limited, region-variable, and changeable without notice. 6) No 2025-2026 change reintroduced any standing free developer credits: as of 2026-10 the API remains pay-as-you-go from the first token, with the Researcher Access Program ($1,000, 12-month, quarterly review) as the only subsidized-credits program and it is scoped to academic/nonprofit researchers, not startups or students-as-builders. Caveat: openai.com and help.openai.com returned HTTP 403 to automated fetches on 2026-10-22, and the shared web-search budget was exhausted, so official pricing/education pages could not be re-read live today; confidence is high only where the page/form text itself surfaced in results (Researcher Access Program) or where OpenAI's official forum post was captured (free-tokens sunset); other findings carry medium confidence. |
| OpenObserve | SUNSET: OpenObserve Cloud's free tier was DISCONTINUED effective 2025-06-02 (announcement: https://openobserve.ai/blog/june-25-pricing-policy-updates/). Moving to fully usage-based Pay-As-You-Go with no minimums; existing free-tier cloud customers got a 30-day exemption (until ~2025-07-02) and then required a valid credit card on file for usage charges. New customers instead get the 14-day no-CC trial. PR #6922 (merged 2025-07-10) confirms the code: orgs default to a 14-day trial and the free plan was removed from the billing UI. So any 'OpenObserve Cloud free tier' seen in pre-June-2025 articles is stale. PRICING CHANGE: ingestion price moved from $0.30/GB (June 2025) to $0.50/GB on the current Professional plan (pricing.md, updated 2026-09-04) - trial/usage costs are higher than 2025 docs suggest. ALSO: uptime/CDN front - OpenObserve has no CDN; uptime/synthetic monitoring (HTTP/TCP/TLS/SSH + Playwright browser checks) is in BETA in Cloud as of Aug 2026 with no separate free tier found, and RUM/session replay on cloud carry per-unit pay-as-you-go fees; nothing in the current material is a permanent free monitoring/uptime/CDN offer - the permanent-free value is entirely in the self-hosted OSS build and the 50GB/day self-hosted Enterprise free tier. |
| OpenReplay | Verification note (checked 2026-10-22): the live pricing page today lists only Open-Source (Free, self-hosted), Dedicated (from $199/mo), and Enterprise (custom) — with the Dedicated card carrying the 7-day no-CC trial. No hosted free cloud tier appears in the live page's plan table, yet the vendor's llms.txt (same site, fetched today) still advertises 'Free cloud tier (1,000 sessions/mo, 2 users)' plus O2 $399/mo and O3 $799/mo tiers that also do not appear on the live page — indicating llms.txt is stale (likely written when a free cloud tier and published O2/O3 prices existed) or a free tier was recently sunset from the marketing table without updating llms.txt. OpenReplay's 2025 blog (blog.openreplay.com) describes the stack as: Open-Source free-forever, Serverless $5.95/1K sessions with 7-day free trial, Dedicated from $0.27/hr (~$199/mo). No evidence of any education or startup program ever having existed. Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so verification relied on direct fetches of openreplay.com pages (pricing page fetched 4x, llms.txt, blog) — no independent third-party corroboration of 2025 changes was possible. |
| OpenRouter Free Models | Major 2025-2026 changes: (1) April 9, 2025 policy shift (announced; widely reported): the daily free-model cap was cut from 200 to 50 requests/day and the '>= $10 lifetime credits -> 1,000 requests/day' incentive was introduced at that time — the 50/day figure has held through 2026. (2) Startup program terms were last updated August 22, 2026, and the public page now advertises 'up to $5,000' — third-party trackers (programscape.com) recorded the startups page at 'up to $3,000' earlier in 2026, indicating the credit ceiling was raised during 2026; the program's partner tiers (Mercury $1K/6mo, Stripe Atlas $500) are the older/lower amounts. (3) June 9, 2025: credit-purchase fee was simplified to a flat 5.5% ($0.80 min) on card / 5% on crypto (removed the old fixed $0.35 Stripe charge) — this affects the effective cost of the $10 unlock. (4) OpenRouter's FAQ reserves the right to expire unused credits after one year of purchase, contradicting common 'credits never expire' lore; confirm current treatment before banking on long-lived startup credits. No student/education license ever existed to sunset; no trial-credit program was found (the FAQ's 'small free allowance' line is unpublished/unverifiable). Free-model catalog size has grown to 25-29 rotating models under 4 free providers as of Oct 2026. |
| Oracle Cloud Always Free | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) ALWAYS FREE AMPERE A1 HALVED, SILENTLY — Oracle's docs changed without a public announcement so that the A1 pool went from 3,000 OCPU-hours + 18,000 GB-hours/month (equivalent to 4 OCPU / 24 GB, i.e., 'up to four Ampere instances' as the older MySQL-free page still claims) to 1,500 OCPU-hours + 9,000 GB-hours/month (= 2 OCPU / 12 GB total, 'one or two instances, 2 OCPUs total'). Per InfoQ (2026-07-03) the docs change took effect 2026-06-15 with no blog post or customer notice; hard enforcement (auto-termination of over-limit instances) began 2026-08-18 per a customer email quoted by CNELECAR. Ambiguity remains: Oracle support reportedly told PAYG tenancies the old 4/24 limits still apply free, while the docs say 'All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours...' — unconfirmed either way. Once an oversized A1 instance is terminated it likely cannot be recreated above the new limit. AMD micros, 200 GB block, object storage, 10 TB egress, and 2x20 GB ADB limits are unchanged. (2) $300/30-DAY TRIAL — unchanged through 2025-2026; card still required at signup. (3) STARTUP PROGRAM — not verifiable this pass (bot-blocked global page); no evidence it was sunset, but no official docs corroborate it either. (4) BARE-METAL / DEDICATED-SERVER FRONT — Oracle has no free bare-metal or dedicated-server offer at any tier; bare-metal/dedicated is paid-only (PAYG or Always-Free-exempt). (5) EDUCATION — no .edu-gated program currently advertised; free Foundations training/certifications remain available per the ©2026 Oracle University pages. |
| Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Always Free | Material 2025-2026 changes observed: (1) Oracle Cloud Academy (education.oracle.com/cloud-academy) — the last education-only free-credits front — now serves a '404 / Oracle University' error page as of 2026-10-22, i.e. it appears sunset; the education front is now just Oracle University (free training, no cloud credit). (2) Legacy startup program URL oracle.com/startupcloud/ returns 404; its successor oracle.com/startups/ is WAF/bot-gated (403) so live terms were unreadable today — treat startup-program figures as unverified. (3) The trial landing URL oracle.com/cloud/free/trial/ now 404s; the trial is folded into /cloud/free/. (4) Trial credit is US$300 for 30 days on the live page (older docs referenced a smaller credit). (5) ARM Always Free is ~2 OCPU/12 GB (up to 2 VMs), not '4 micro VMs' as in the task's known note (the 200 GB figure is the block-storage pool). Note: the oracle.com/cloud/free/ page carries a metadata 'Updated Date' of 2024-09-10, so the Always Free limits have not been re-edited since that date per the page metadata; values were re-fetched live on 2026-10-22. WebSearch was unavailable this session (budget exhausted), so all verifications were done by directly fetching official Oracle pages; the /startups/ and /startupcloud/ pages could not be read. |
| OVHcloud Free Trial | As of 2026-10-22: (1) The legacy offer in the task's 'known so far' — 'US$200 free trial on new dedicated servers & VPS, 2-month, no commitment (refundable)' — is GONE: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/free-trial/ returns 404; the only live trial is the Public Cloud US$200/1-month trial (and up to $300/90 days in the US). No dedicated-server or VPS trial credit is advertised anywhere on ovhcloud.com or us.ovhcloud.com. (2) 2026-04-01: third-party changelog (agentdeals.dev) records OVHcloud narrowing the free-trial terms; and on 2026-10-01 OVHcloud restructured Gen3 Public Cloud instance pricing — local storage and public IPv4 on B3/C3/R3 are now billed as separate lines (~€109/TB/mo storage, ~$1.97/mo IPv4), raising bills 1.4–21.9% (largest for small instances), which consumes trial credits faster. (3) VPS pricing: VPS 2026 list prices were raised 36–49% effective 2026-04-01 (e.g. VPS-1 €4.49→€6.49/mo); the new 'VPS 2027' range launched (VPS-1 2027 from ~$4.54/mo per www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/). No VPS free tier/trial exists. (4) Bare metal: Kimsufi budget range was discontinued and replaced by the 'Eco' range (~$30/mo, us.ovhcloud.com/deals); bare-metal prices rose 9–11% for new deployments post-April 2026. (5) The VCFTRIAL first-month-free VMware promo is a sunset-in-9-days offer (ends 31 Oct 2026 or after first 50 customers). (6) No dedicated .edu/students free tier and no 'education license' for VPS/dedicated servers was found; the only education-adjacent channels are the qualifying-student quantum notebook program (2024, low visibility now) and the OCRE 2024 GÉANT procurement framework (institutional, negotiated, not free). 7) Startup Program structure is unchanged in substance (€10k Start / up to €100k Scale, 12 months) but currency values differ by country site (US $12k/$120k, CA $14k). |
| Paddle | No student/startup/education program was found that closed or changed in 2025-2026 — because none is published. Observed structural changes instead: (1) Paddle's developer docs moved from docs.paddle.com to developer.paddle.com (301 redirect, current as of 2026-10-22); sandbox signup is at sandbox-vendors.paddle.com with sandbox-api.paddle.com as endpoint. (2) The free analytics product remains branded 'ProfitWell Metrics' under Paddle, with sign-up still on profitwell.com. (3) WebSearch for 2025-2026 news was unavailable in this session (shared session search budget exhausted), so this verification relied exclusively on the official pages read today: paddle.com/pricing, paddle.com (homepage nav), paddle.com/solutions/startups, paddle.com/profitwell-metrics, developer.paddle.com (llms.txt, get-started/quickstart.md, sdks/sandbox.md, and the sandbox-account page). All 'high' confidence items were read from official pages on 2026-10-22. Nothing on those pages indicates a sunset date for the free Metrics product, the sandbox, or the no-fixed-fee pricing model. |
| Paperspace | 2025-2026 changes: (1) No Paperspace-specific 2025/2026 program changes found — the public changelog (updates.paperspace.com) shows no 2025-2026 entries on the landing page (last visible 2023-12) and the docs are current as of 2026-07-13 with the Free-tier M4000/GPU+ offering still listed, so the Gradient Free plan appears still live. (2) DigitalOcean no longer markets a standalone 'free trial' page at www.digitalocean.com/free, /trial, or /free-trial (all 404 as of today; homepage has no trial-credits banner), so the classic DO new-account trial credit could not be verified on any official page today — if it still exists it is only discoverable at signup, and I do not list it as a finding. (3) DigitalOcean's Startups/Hatch program has repositioned to prioritize AI-native startups but continues to EXCLUDE Paperspace Machines from qualifying services — so even though the task frames 'startup program' for Paperspace free compute, the only startup-credit vehicle is generic DO credits that do not cover GPU/Paperspace usage. (4) The old Paperspace referral program (free GPU hours for friend referrals, linked in older page footers) has no live page — paperspace.com/referral is 404; treat as sunset. (5) Auto-shutdown for free machines is documented as a 6-hour max in the current DO docs, tighter than the 12-hour figure on the pricing page; treat 6h as the safe operational limit. Nothing on the free M4000 plan was formally sunsetting in the pages read today; it remains the entry free GPU offer. WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so verification relied on direct WebFetch of official pages; unverified-by-search claims are marked medium confidence. |
| Payload | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) Jun 17, 2025 — Payload blog post 'Payload is joining Figma!' (acquisition by Figma); the pricing-page FAQ confirms Figma is committed to keeping the open-source core and self-hosted model, so the free MIT offer survived the acquisition. (2) Oct 15, 2026 — Figma blog 'Create, ship, and manage data-backed websites with Payload in Figma': new native Figma-to-production integration (manage content/data inside Figma); a product change, not a pricing sunset. No student/education or startup free offers found to have been sunset, because none were found at all; the only 'offers' for students/startups are the general free self-hosted MIT core, host-provider free tiers via official templates, and the CC-possibly-required cloud/enterprise trial. Note: the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so verification beyond direct official-page fetches (today's reads of /get-started, /cloud-terms, /enterprise, /blog, and the GitHub repo) could not be done; provider free-tier numbers (Vercel/Cloudflare) were not re-verified today. |
| Payload | Checked 2026-10-22 on official Payload pages, the GitHub repo, and the GitHub Student Developer Pack page. WebSearch was exhausted after its first call, so the 2025-2026 changes below come only from payloadcms.com, not from press or third-party sources.- 2025-06-17: Payload joined Figma. The post says 'Payload remains open source', self-hosting is unchanged, and 'nothing is changing for users' in the immediate future. It does not mention pricing, free tiers, or Payload Cloud, so any later change to those is unverified.- Payload Cloud: left beta 2023-07-05. Its 2026 status is unconfirmed. The pricing page lists no Cloud plans, and the /cloud-feedback page is a feedback form with no status. Treat it as unverified, not as ended.- Personal plan: the post 'Our New Free Forever Personal Plan' (2021-03-02) gave a free plan to individual developers with one admin user. The post itself says 'This article is outdated.' It is not on the current pricing page, so treat it as superseded by the MIT self-host.- URLs: payloadcms.com/pricing returns 404; the pricing content is at /get-started. payload.com is a different company (payments infrastructure), so the start URL in the request led to the wrong product.- Not found (absence-based, medium confidence): no education or student license, no startup program, no startup credits, no trial credits, and no partner benefits. The sitemap has no education, student, startup, or credits pages. The partner page lists no benefits and calls the program highly selective. The GitHub Student Developer Pack offer list (83 offers visible on education.github.com/pack; one bundle showed 5 of 6) does not list Payload.- Y Combinator: Payload itself was accepted into YC S22 (2022-05-17). That is not a benefit to users.- 'Write for the Community program' appears in the sitemap, but the sitemap-listed page returned 404. Not verified; it does not look like a student or startup offer.- Titles only, not read: Payload 4.0 Beta (2026-10-19) and a security update for 3.x and 4.0 (2026-09-18). Neither is verified to change licensing or pricing.- Hosts that Payload names as deploy targets (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, AWS, Heroku) have their own free tiers and startup programs. Those belong to other providers and were not verified here. |
| Paystack | Verification limitation: could NOT read live primary sources today — paystack.com/pricing, paystack.com/, and paystack.com/faq/ all returned HTTP 403 (Cloudflare bot protection), developer.paystack.com failed DNS (ENOTFOUND), and this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted. No 2025-2026 change was therefore confirmed from primary sources; findings are from pre-2026 knowledge. No previously-existing Paystack student program, startup program, trial-credit offer, or education license was identified, and none was found to have been sunset. The only genuinely free offers are free-to-integrate (pay-per-transaction, no setup/monthly/minimum fees) and a free no-credit-card test-mode sandbox. Exact per-transaction fee figures were intentionally NOT asserted; reconfirm on paystack.com/pricing. |
| Pinecone | Result: a genuine startup offer exists (Pinecone for Startups, finding 1), and a general free plan exists (Pinecone Starter, finding 2) that is not student- or startup-specific. No genuine student-specific offer was found.Student checks: (a) the official pricing page names no student, education or academic program; (b) https://www.pinecone.io/students/ returned HTTP 404; (c) the GitHub Student Developer Pack (https://education.github.com/pack) does not list Pinecone; (d) the 2026 release notes (https://docs.pinecone.io/release-notes/2026) list no student or startup program. The only 'Pinecone Serverless Starter Tier Free Student Deal' found (https://www.themodelverse.in/perks/pinecone-serverless-starter-tier) is a third-party page that links only to pinecone.io/pricing, claims 1 index and 100K vectors (the official Starter plan has 5 indexes), and cites no Pinecone-issued student terms. It is excluded.Excluded as not student/startup-specific or no longer current: (1) Standard plan trial: $300 in credits over 21 days, no up-front payment, for any new organization (https://docs.pinecone.io/guides/organizations/manage-billing/standard-trial); time-limited and general. (2) Builder plan first-month-free promotion: upgrades before May 31, 2026 (https://www.pinecone.io/blog/builder-plan); expired. (3) $250 import credit for Standard and Enterprise accounts (2026-06-01 release note; Builder and Starter ineligible); per the 2026-09-01 note, new subscriptions no longer receive it and existing credits end by Nov 1, 2026. (4) Starter temporary input-token allowance rise to 1M per month (2026-05-05 release note); ended June 30, 2026.Recommendation: if the index covers startup offers, add Pinecone for Startups with its undisclosed-credit caveat. If it covers general free tiers, Starter is the qualifying entry.Confidence: the no-student-offer conclusion is medium. The WebSearch session budget ran out before a final targeted student search, so that conclusion rests on the official pages and the GitHub Student Pack check, not a broad search. Starter's card requirement is not stated on the official pages checked. |
| Plaid | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) 2026-04-15 cutover - Plaid split free live-data access by team creation date: teams created on/after Apr 15, 2026 get the new free Trial plan (10 Production Items, 8 bundled products, OAuth institutions) instead of Limited Production; Limited Production (free, 200 live calls per product) persists only for legacy teams created before that date, with no self-service switch between the two. (2) No student/education license found as of 2026-10-22 - plaid.com/education/ returns 404 and no .edu-gated program appears on official pages; students are covered only by the free Sandbox and, for US/CA teams, the free Trial plan. (3) Plaid Accelerate (2021-2022, founders-of-color seed cohort with free product access for ~5 months, last blog-announced cohort in 2022) appears to have ended and was superseded by the AI startup program announced around March 2026 (free credits + lower minimums for early-stage AI startups, US/UK/EU). (4) Plan lineup per the Help Center is now Trial (free), Pay-as-you-go, Growth, and Custom (also called Scale) - EU/UK customers are Custom-only and several products (Layer, Protect, Transfer, Signal Transaction Scores, Payment Initiation/Virtual Accounts, Plaid Check beyond Base Report/Income Insights) are unavailable on Pay-as-you-go. Note: the 'no credit card' part of the known-so-far claim for the Trial plan could not be confirmed on any official page I could reach - support.plaid.com blocked direct fetch (403), and the Trial terms came via the official Help Center article text; the pricing page states Pay-as-you-go requires a card on file, so treat CC-not-required as unverified for Trial specifically. |
| PlanetScale | NO ACTIVE FREE OFFER FOR STUDENTS OR STARTUPS AS OF 2026-10-22 (verified on official pricing page fetched today + official support KB). Full detail:1) FREE TIER — SUNSETTED. The free Hobby plan (5 free Vitess DBs, historically requiring a card since Aug 2023) was announced for retirement on 2024-03-06 ("PlanetScale forever" blog) and retired on 2024-04-08; non-upgraded Hobby databases were put to sleep (data archived, wakeable for 24h). It was never reinstated. Official KB "Does PlanetScale offer any free plans?" (last updated 2025-06-02) answers "Not at this time." Not restored by the September 2025 Postgres launch. Sources: https://planetscale.com/pricing (fetched 2026-10-22), https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever, https://planetscale.com/docs/plans/hobby-plan-deprecation-faq, https://support.planetscale.com/hc/en-us/articles/32303734121239-Does-PlanetScale-offer-any-free-plans2) TRIAL CREDITS — NONE OFFICIALLY. No trial, credit, or free-eval offer appears on the official pricing, plans, or billing pages. Third-party directories (creditforstartups "up to $5,000", saasoffers "$500 in credits, verified Oct 2026", cloudroutehq "free migration for YC companies") publish unverified/unofficial numbers with no application form, credit terms, or PlanetScale-backed page; a Sep-2026 directory check (guptadeepak.com) records the startup program as discontinued, noting planetscale.com/startups is generic marketing with no credits, eligibility, or application. A May-2026 third-party guide (solomonsignal.com) claims a 14-day card-required developer trial, but no official page confirms any trial duration. Treat all third-party "credit" listings as unverified. Sources: https://planetscale.com/startups (fetched via search, marketing only), https://guptadeepak.com/startup-offers/programs/planetscale-startups, https://creditforstartups.com/companies/planetscale, https://www.solomonsignal.com/launch-school/tutorials/learn-planetscale-free3) EDUCATION/STUDENT OFFER — NONE. No .edu-verified license, student plan, or education discount exists. The only student-relevant free thing is self-paced course content at https://planetscale.com/learn/courses (free MySQL/DB-scaling/Vitess videos) — not a service freebie.4) PAYMENT GATCHE: Even the cheapest paid plan cannot be used without a valid credit or debit card on file (prepaid cards rejected; Stripe checkout); "all plans require a valid payment method" per official billing docs. No CC-free evaluation path is documented. Source: https://planetscale.com/docs/billing5) PAID ENTRY POINT (for context): Base plan self-serve; Postgres single-node PS-5 from $5/mo, Postgres HA PS-5 from $15/mo, Vitess 3-node PS-10 from $39/mo, Metal from $50/mo; Base includes 10 GB storage + 100 GB bandwidth; egress $0.06/GB beyond included; Vitess NAS overage $0.50/GB (HA production storage $1.50/GB); Enterprise = BYO-cloud with infra pass-through + percentage platform fee. Pricing page generated 2026-09-03; prices vary by region/provider. Sources: https://planetscale.com/pricing, https://planetscale.com/docs/planetscale-plans6) 2025–2026 MATERIAL CHANGES: (a) Postgres went GA Sept 2025; Neki (sharded Postgres) now available (2026). (b) Pricing restructure 2026: old Unlimited/Advanced/Scale/Team tiers removed (2026-07), Scaler Pro renamed Base, new SKU plan set added 2026-10-19 (per getpulsesignal.com/changes/planetscale + docs). (c) Drizzle team joined PlanetScale March 2026. (d) No acquisition found in official sources (one low-reliability SaaSOffers entry falsely claims "acquired by Supabase in 2024" — disregard). (e) Support still offers case-by-case help via support@planetscale.com (e.g., sleeping Hobby DBs, student-without-card requests), but that is discretionary relief, not a published offer. |
| Plausible | No dedicated free "student tier," no free "startup program," and no individual-student "education license" exists at Plausible. The only genuinely free / discounted items are (a) the universal 30-day no-CC trial, (b) the 15% nonprofit/edu/open-source discount which is institutional and applies to a Business plan on annual billing only, and (c) the free self-hosted AGPL Community Edition. There is NO free hosted (Plausible Cloud) tier. Plausible is a self-funded, bootstrapped, investor-free company, so it runs no startup-accelerator-style free program for customers; startups are not a targeted free segment (at most reachable via the open-source arm of the 15% discount). Nothing was sunset in 2025-2026: the 30-day trial (no CC), the 15% edu/nonprofit/OSS discount, and the free Community Edition are all current as of this 2026-10-22 check. Caveat: the WebSearch budget was exhausted during this run, so all findings above are based on reading the official plausible.io documentation pages directly today; third-party price trackers (outmano/comparedge/canivibecodeit) corroborate the $9/mo Starter floor and no-free-tier claim but were not independently re-verified. |
| PostHog | As of 2026-10-22. Material 2026 change: from 14 Sep 2026 (already in force), startup and YC credits can no longer pay for AI tools (PostHog Desktop, PostHog Slack app, Replay Vision, PostHog AI, Inbox). Teams that joined before that date can still pay for pre-cutoff usage with credits (official handbook and startups page). The YC deal changed to an annual $50K that renews automatically while eligible; earlier YC registrations that expired must register again. Extensions of the 12-month expiry are exceptional. No trial credits were found. No education license was found: posthog.com/education returns HTTP 404, and PostHog is not listed on the GitHub Student Developer Pack page fetched today. PostHog gives no free credits to open-source projects (its open-source sponsorship page describes PostHog sponsoring other projects); only the startup program has a small-OSS expiry waiver. Sources and verification: posthog.com/startups and posthog.com/pricing render client-side, so their terms came from a search excerpt of the official page, the official handbook, and the public posthog.com repo source files (contents/ and src/). Unverified: per-product free-tier numbers; handbook sections Credit usage, Partners and Troubleshooting (fetch failed repeatedly); Founder Lab membership criteria; Lenny's and Every.to redemption steps. The WebSearch budget ran out during this run: one search succeeded and the students search was blocked, so no further third-party or news checks were made. |
| PostHog Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes that matter for the 'free offer' claims: (1) In 2025 PostHog raised several free-tier limits — a third-party (metacto, updated 2025-10-24) reports Surveys free allowance increased from 250 → 1,500 responses/month, and Data Pipelines free quota changed to 10K events + 1M rows (previously 1M events). These 'after' values match today's official pricing page (1,500 surveys; 10K destination trigger events + 1M rows); the 'before' values are third-party (medium confidence). (2) A new AI/LLM product launched in 2025 with 100K free events/month, initially named 'LLM Analytics' (per the 2025 metacto article) and now shown on the 2026 pricing page as 'AI Observability' — i.e., the 100K free-events figure is a 2025 addition / rebrand, not part of the original 2024 free tier. (3) Context from 2024: PostHog cut session-replay and analytics-event prices, and in 2025 cut data-pipeline and survey prices — so the free tier has generally been expanding, not shrinking. (4) Error Tracking went GA (out of beta) around April 2025 with its 100K free-exceptions tier; before that it was a beta. (5) No student/education program or startup/YC program was sunset in 2025-2026: the $50K startup program (<2yr, <$5M), the YC $50K/yr program (<$25M raised), and the 15% non-profit discount all remain live on the current pricing page. (6) Tangential: 2025 self-hosting guidance changed (support for new Kubernetes/Helm installs ended) — affects self-hosted users, not the cloud free tier. Net: every 'known so far' claim (free error tracking, session replay, logs, 1M events, no credit card) is CONFIRMED and current; nothing in the free-offer set was removed, only some limits were raised. |
| PostHog Free Tier | Verified against live official pages today (posthog.com/pricing, /startups, /students fetched and read in full; handbook/startups content from the official handbook via search snippet): (1) From September 14, 2026, both the PostHog for Startups and Y Combinator programs' credits can NO LONGER be applied to AI tools (PostHog Desktop, PostHog Slack app, Replay Vision, PostHog AI, Inbox); pre-cutoff teams can still burn credits for usage incurred before that date. (2) The free-tier allowances listed in the task baseline (1M events, 5,000 session recordings, 1M flag requests, 100K exceptions, 10GB logs) are confirmed unchanged and current on the pricing page; PostHog states no loss-leader products that will later be retired, and 'No credit card, not a trial' — there is no separate trial program (docs: 'no trial needed'). (3) PostHog notes price cuts in 2024 (session replay, analytics events) and 2025 (data pipelines, surveys) per its Feb 2026 comparison page — these were paid-rate cuts, not free-tier changes. (4) No student/education license or student credit program exists: the student offer is events-only; the YC deal is the more generous credits variant ($50k/yr auto-renewing vs $50k one-time). Sources: https://posthog.com/pricing · https://posthog.com/startups · https://posthog.com/students · https://posthog.com/handbook/marketing/startups · https://posthog.com/docs/billing/common-questions · https://github.com/PostHog/requests-for-comments-public/issues/503 · https://posthog.com/startups/stripe-atlas · https://posthog.com/compare/posthog-vs-pendo |
| Postman | 2025-2026 changes (verified on official pages 2026-10-22): (1) March 2026 plan consolidation - Postman rebuilt tiers to Free/Solo/Team/Enterprise with an AI-native feature set shipping March 1, 2026 (v11/v12); per pricing FAQ, 'Basic and Professional plans are no longer available for new customers', existing Basic customers migrate to Team over time, existing Professional customers stay on current plan/pricing (blog.postman.com/new-capabilities-march-2026, published Jan 31, 2026). This effectively retired the tier structure that older student education licenses were built on. (2) The dedicated student marketing page (postman.com/students) and /learn/education/ are no longer live (soft-404 to app SPA shell / hard 404) - the student program appears sunset or folded into the universal Free plan + Academy/LiftOff; no live offer page exists as of 2026-10-22. (3) No public startup program page exists (postman.com/startups soft-404s). (4) July 21, 2026: Postman Academy badges migrated from Badgr to Credly (existing Badgr badges retained, not revoked). (5) Free plan AI-credit figure is inconsistent on the live pricing page (100 on plan card vs 50/month in the table). Caveat: the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so confirmation of explicit sunset *announcements* (blog posts about the student program ending) was not possible; absence was verified by live fetch of official pages today. |
| Postmark | No student/education offer exists: no .edu discount, education license, or student plan anywhere on postmarkapp.com; /for/education returns 404. No SMS, Push, or Chat API front: Postmark's current product is email delivery only (SMTP + REST, transactional and broadcast streams, inbound email) — the pricing page and docs list no SMS/Push/Chat products, so no free offers on those fronts. Sunset/change notes for 2025-2026: (1) The legacy free 25,000 signup credits (credit-based plans) were retired 2023-07-05 — still a 'legacy' footnote in docs but no longer offered. (2) The time-boxed trial-server model previously known (~100k emails, no card) is no longer published; it has been replaced by the permanent free Developer plan (100 emails/month, no expiry, no card) — the exact old duration/limits of the trial server (3 months vs the ~6 months in our notes) could not be confirmed on current official pages. (3) Bootstrapper $75 credit is unchanged through the 2025-11-04 support-article publication and 2026-10-19 update. (4) Domain rebrand: postmark.com 301-redirects to postmarkapp.com. Caveats: web-search budget was exhausted mid-task, so absence-of-education-offer and absence-of-SMS/Push/Chat rest on the official pricing page, 404 check, and the home page's explicit 'email delivery via SMTP and REST' positioning rather than exhaustive site crawl; the Friend & Family finding was read from an official support FAQ snapshot, not fetched directly today. |
| public-apis/public-apis | No genuine free offer for students or startups exists under public-apis/public-apis, so findings is empty. The project is a free, MIT-licensed community list of public APIs (repo description: 'A collective list of free APIs'). It is a breadth reference, not a program: no eligibility gate, no sign-up or claim step, no amounts, no expiry. Evidence as of 2026-10-22: (1) Repo metadata via the GitHub REST API (https://api.github.com/repos/public-apis/public-apis; page https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis): about 491,352 stars, MIT license, not archived, not disabled, default branch master, last push 2026-10-21. (2) README (https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis/blob/master/README.md, read via the GitHub readme endpoint): a keyword scan for student, startup, education, academic, credit, discount, sponsor, promo, offer, free tier, program, grant, scholar, hackathon, coupon, voucher and eligib found only entries for individual listed APIs, section headings or contents links. None describes a program run by public-apis for students or startups. (3) No .github/FUNDING.yml exists, so the repo has no sponsorship configuration. (4) A scan of open issues and PRs for student, startup, sponsor, educat, offer, credit, discount, grant, scholar, free tier, partner and promo found only contributor PRs that add or update individual API entries, for example 'Add student learning notes', 'Add Hunter Education API', 'Update Currents API entry: free tier is now 250 requests/day', 'Remove Studio Ghibli API - Heroku free tier shutdown, link is dead', and 'SecurityTrails no longer offers free WHOIS information'. No open proposal for a student or startup program was found. Gotchas for the index: (a) free tiers belong to third-party APIs listed in the directory, change over time, and are not offers from public-apis; (b) the About-section homepage is a UTM-tagged APILayer referral link (utm_source=Github, utm_medium=Referral, utm_campaign=Public-apis-repo), which is a promotional link, not a student or startup program, and APILayer's own terms were not evaluated; (c) if the index wants a reference entry, it should be classed as a free open-source resource open to everyone, not as a student or startup offer. Limitation: WebSearch was unavailable (the session's search budget was used up), so 2025-2026 news or announcements outside GitHub were not searched. Confidence that public-apis runs no student or startup offer is high for what the repo shows; the residual gap is an off-GitHub announcement that could not be searched. Nothing is recorded as closed or changed in 2025-2026, because no such program was found. |
| Pusher | 1) The old Pusher Channels free plan (~5,000 channel pushes/month, ~100 concurrent connections — the figure in the 'known so far' note) was retired when Pusher introduced the quota-based Sandbox plan (announced 20 Jan 2023, https://pusher.com/blog/pushers-sandbox-plan/): 200,000 messages/day + 100 concurrent connections, free, no card. It is not the same as the old monthly-pushed figure (200k/day ≈ up to 6.2M/month). 2) The Channels pricing lineup changed on 2026-03-26 per PulseSignal's pricing history ('Plan removed / pricing unit changed'); the page as read today lists 8 fixed tiers (Sandbox, Startup $49, Pro $99, Business $299, Premium $499, Growth $699, Plus $899, Growth Plus $1,199) + Enterprise; the specific plan removed on that date could not be confirmed from official sources today. 3) No 2025-2026 sunset of any free offer was found: both Sandbox free tiers (Channels 200k msgs/day + 100 CC; Beams 1,000 subscribers) are live on the official pages as of 2026-10-22. 4) No dedicated Pusher education, student, or startup-credits program exists at the URLs checked; Pusher (a London company, part of MessageBird per its own footer) has no email/SMS product of its own — email/SMS would come from the MessageBird/Infobip side, outside Pusher's free offers. |
| Puter | No 2025-2026 sunset or material change of any specific offer could be confirmed: web search was unavailable for this agent (session budget exhausted), so I relied solely on official pages fetched 2026-10-22 (puter.com, puter.com/pricing/, developer.puter.com, docs.puter.com incl. llms.txt, user-pays-model, rate-limits-and-quotas). Site footer shows © 2026 Puter Technologies Inc., and model count marketing says 500+ models on the dev page vs '400+' in the task's known-so-far baseline (minor marketing revision, not an offer change). No student/education or startup program existed to be sunset; trial-credit style offers do not exist — the free tier is a standing $0 plan, and Puter.js's $0 developer cost is permanent under the user-pays architecture, not a trial. Key durable gotchas: free monthly usage credit has no rollover; purchased credits never expire; transactional email and public link-sharing are paid-only. |
| Railway | 2025–2026 changes to verify against: (1) Original launch-era free plan ("Unlimited Compute," ~2020, and later the 500-hour free tier) was deleted due to negative margins — Railway was "losing $16 per $1 of revenue" — and the starter/free tiers were gone by 2023 (only $5 Hobby minimum). (2) The free plan was formally brought back Aug 27, 2025 (blog "Bring Back the Free Plan"): new users get $5 for the first 30 days, then $1 of non-rollover credits per month in perpetuity. (3) The $5,000 Startup Program launched Apr 2024 (criteria: $2M–$25M funding, founded 2020+, <$100 lifetime spend) appears CLOSED: dedicated URLs 404 as of Aug 5, 2026 (startup.railway.app, per a status-code audit in sourcey/startup-credits#230; railway.com/startups 404s today), staff told users on the station in Nov 2025 and Dec 2025 that no startup program exists, and noizz (checked 2026-09-23) lists Railway as "no startup program". Exact sunset date unknown, between 2024-04 and 2025-11. (4) No education/.edu program ever existed; the student-ID-validation request was closed Mar 28, 2025 as moot (trial retooled to general access), and staff reaffirmed in Dec 2025 that no student credit program exists. (5) No OSS program either (staff, Dec 29, 2025). (6) The 2023–2025 "Limited Trial" restriction (unverified accounts couldn't deploy code) was relaxed with the March 2025 trial retool to general access; code deploys now work on both Full and Limited trials, but Limited trials keep restricted outbound networking/ports. (7) The Railway support station (forum) has been shut down — station.railway.com now 302-redirects to status.railway.com. (8) Company stability signal: Railway raised a $100M Series B in Jan 2026 (100k paid users, 25k businesses), so no imminent sunset of the free tier is indicated. (9) Third-party channel: a $240 Hobby-credit-for-1-year JoinSecret affiliate offer for "selected startups" was last seen 2026-10-01 — unconfirmed first-party. |
| RapidAPI | As of 2026-10-22 there is NO RapidAPI student, education, or startup program: no .edu licensing, no startup credit/trial-credit offer, no startup-age or funding-cap eligibility — the official docs/FAQ pages (updated through mid-2025) contain no mention of any such offer, and no 2025-2026 announcement of one was found. The only material 2025-2026 change is consumer-side: the December 2025 Bandwidth Platform Fee (10 GB free/cycle, then $1/GB charged to the consumer), which partially erodes the 'free' story for free plans. The core free offer stands: no-credit-card free API plans capped at 1,000 req/hour and 500K req/month (confirmed on the official monetization docs). Note: the session's web-search budget was exhausted partway through; findings above are based on official docs pages fetched today (high confidence), while the absence of student/startup programs is asserted from the official pages' silence (medium confidence that none exists on a dedicated marketing page that was not reachable). |
| Razorpay | No Razorpay startup/student program was sunset in 2025-2026; the changes were additive: (1) NEW as of 1 Jul 2026 - the 90-day new-merchant welcome offer (up to Rs 5 lakh of domestic payment value fee-free, new merchants only, one redemption per PAN/bank account, KYC fee of Rs 199 + tax may apply). (2) May 2025 - MeitY Startup Hub partnership added the MSH-credits track (PG zero fees up to Rs 1 lakh / 6 months, banking 3 months + 40% off, payroll free <5 employees). (3) 25 Mar 2026 - DPIIT MoU + 'Startup Sahayak' platform added zero-professional-fee incorporation and credits for DPIIT-recognised startups. (4) US promo - 'first year free up to $50,000 transaction volume' was in Razorpay's machine-readable US pricing reference (updated May 2026) but is absent from the live US pricing page as of 22 Oct 2026; treat as unverified or sunset unless confirmed with Razorpay US sales. (5) No student/education license or student free tier has ever existed at Razorpay - there is nothing to sunset on that front; the only student program is the recurring (September) AI Buildathon internship in Bangalore. (6) Baseline 'free' items (0 setup, 0 AMC, 0 integration/support fee, free REST API/SDKs/webhooks, pay-per-transaction 2% domestic + up to 3% international + 18% GST) remain unchanged in the current pricing page. All startup-perks credits are first-come-first-served and valid only 3 months from activation (or until the cap is hit), so the practical constraint is expiry, not sunset. |
| Redis Cloud Free tier | 1) Redis for Startups (redis.io/startups/): as of 2026-10-22 the English page serves the Redis homepage instead of the program. Two independent trackers confirm the removal (CreditBase 2026-10-02: "redis.io/startups redirects to the Redis home page... needs a check"; StartupPerks 2026-10: "Redis removed the English page in 2026; program page live in German/Spanish/French/Italian/Korean" per its last check, with 'Redis kostenlos fur 6 Monate'). The program was live as of June 2025 ("Free Redis for 6 months"). Treat as sunset/uncertain on the English site; no application form reachable today. 2) Education: no official Redis education license or .edu student program exists - redis.io/education/ is a 404, and nothing on the pricing/docs pages references an education offer; students simply use the always-free 30 MB tier. 3) Essentials restructure December 2025 (per third-party Layerbase/Upstash, not on official pages read today): Essentials is now published as 250 MB-12 GB RAM-only tiers plus "Redis Flex" SSD+RAM tiers up to 100 GB; the free 30 MB tier's shape (30 MB / 30 connections / single shared DB) was unchanged. 4) Free-plan inactivity: the agreement permits deletion of inactive free databases (~14 days per third-party), so "forever free" does not mean "forever data retention". 5) No general free-trial-credit scheme beyond the "first $200 free" on Pro (credit-card required) was found on official pages. Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task; redis.io facts above come from pages fetched today (pricing, docs) plus third-party trackers, cited per finding. |
| Render | No Render free offer was fully sunset in 2025-2026, but several were materially narrowed: (1) 2026-04-23 'Better pricing for fast-growing teams' (auto-migration completed 2026-08-01): Hobby bandwidth cut from 100 GB to 5 GB included/mo, overage now $0.15/GB, Hobby capped at 25 services (was unlimited) and 2 team-member environments became unlimited projects x 2 environments; Pro moved from $19/member to $25 flat; free-instance specs (512 MB web / 256 MB Postgres / 25 MB KV / 750 hours) were explicitly unchanged. (2) 2025-09-26: free web services block outbound SMTP ports 25/465/587 (changelog 2025-09-16). (3) 2025-08-01: bandwidth pricing halved ($30 -> $15 per 100 GB, now per-GB) and egress billing expanded to service-initiated outbound, WebSocket responses and Private Link traffic (changelog 2025-07-01). (4) 2026-02-24: free web services now stay awake while receiving WebSocket messages (previously only HTTP prevented spin-down). (5) Context: free Postgres expiry was cut from 90 to 30 days on 2024-05-20. Education: Render has never offered a standing student/education license or .edu pricing; the only student-facing free offers are the general free tier plus event-specific hackathon credits (e.g., Atria Summer of Code Hack Days, June 2026, $50/participant). Related but not student/startup: Render also advertises 'up to $10K migration credits' for production infrastructure migrations. Known-so-far claims verified: 750 instance-hours/mo, 512 MB free web instance, 30-day free Postgres expiry, no-card signup — all confirmed on the official pages today. |
| Replicate 'Try for Free' collection | As of 2026-10-22: (1) Replicate's official free offer is the 'Try for Free' collection — a limited number of free runs on select models with no credit card and no published dollar amount or exact run count; it is a one-time allowance, not a recurring free tier. (2) replicate.com/startups returns 404 — so a live, self-serve Replicate Startup Program is NOT verifiable today, even though aggregators advertise up to $10k; treat that offer as disputed/possibly-sunset and prefer contacting Replicate sales or using Modal/Together AI/Fireworks startup programs. (3) No dedicated Replicate education/.edu program was found (unlike Replit or Google, which do run .edu programs). (4) The YC Summer Fellows 2025 program (Replicate $10k student credits) was a 2025 cohort and is closed for that cycle; it may recur in a later year with different partners/amounts. (5) Recurring 'Wan 3.0 30% off this week' banners on Replicate pages are temporary discounts, not free offers. Net: the only clearly-live, self-serve, card-free offer is the 'Try for Free' free-runs collection; all student/startup credit offers are either YC-cohort-gated (students) or unverifiable (startups). |
| Replit | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) The free Starter plan was removed from the public replit.com/pricing page between ~Aug 28 and Sept 11, 2026; the page now opens on Core ($18 billed annually / $20 monthly), so new self-serve entry is paid. The free Starter tier still exists in Replit's docs (docs.replit.com/billing/plans/starter-plan) and remains $0/no-time-limit, but it is no longer the advertised entry point. (2) Agent modes were restructured on Aug 18, 2026 with the launch of Free Mode: paid modes renamed 'Economy'->'Power' and 'Power'->'Max'; free Agent work is now framed as a paid-plan allowance (Core: up to 30 hrs/month chat, 60 projects; resets every 5 hrs + weekly limit). (3) 'Replit for Startups' launched April 23, 2026 (up to $25K credits for Select-Partner-backed startups, free Pro for the broader Partner Network), superseding earlier ad-hoc startup perks. (4) 'Race to Revenue' pilot launched Dec 9, 2025 ($10K Replit credits per builder + $25K cash prize). (5) Plan-structure change per a third-party pricing tracker: Feb 2026 the Pro plan launched, Core dropped to $20, and the old 'Teams' plan was sunset; Aug 2026 Core's credit wallet was trimmed to $20 and Pro annual set to $90 (medium confidence - tracker, not Replit). Net: no generic free trial exists today; the genuinely free options are the Starter plan (unadvertised on the pricing page since late 2026) plus the grants in Replit for Startups and Race to Revenue. Data caveat: this run hit the session web-search budget, so education-page specifics and JS-rendered program bodies could not be fully read; confidence ratings reflect that. |
| Resend | No education/student offer: Resend's pricing FAQ explicitly states 'We do not offer education pricing' — no .edu-based license or student discount exists (as of 2026-10-22). No free trial either: the FAQ answers 'No, but we provide a free-forever plan.' Open startup program sunset: resend.com/startups returns 404 as of 2026-10-22; the only remaining startup offer is the YC deal at resend.com/yc (independently confirmed checked Oct 2026 by third-party directories). 2025-2026 structural changes: pricing was restructured around two tracks — transactional (3,000/mo Free) and marketing Broadcasts (free tier now includes 1,000 marketing contacts, unlimited sends to them); inboxes were added (3 free inboxes; extra inboxes $1/mo on paid plans). An earlier 2024 'New Free Tier' change had cut free domains to 1 and moved multi-region sending to Pro; the current Free plan lists 3 domains. Core limits (3,000/mo, 100/day; Pro $20/50k) were confirmed unchanged by May 28, 2025 price snapshots and today's page. No annual billing or annual discount exists for self-serve plans; a 50% nonprofit discount exists but is not a free offer and outside the students/startups scope. Third-party 'student discount' and 30% promo-code listings (hotdeals.com, paradox.engineer, costbench.com) are unverified and contradict the official FAQ — treat as noise. Fronts note: Resend is email-only (API, SMTP, SDKs, Broadcasts); it has no SMS, push-notification, or chat API, so the SMS/Push/Chat fronts of this task have no Resend offers. |
| RunPod Startup Program | No 2025-2026 sunset or material change of the RunPod Startup Program was found: the official page was live and verified on 2026-10-22 with the Starter $1,000 / Growth $25,000-match tiers matching prior public claims. No public sign-up bonus credits for regular users ever appeared on the pricing page, so there is nothing in that lane to sunset. Event-based free offers ($100 ARC-AGI-2 credits, Mar 2025; Santa Cruz Accelerates 2025 cohort; TreeHacks 2026 sponsorship) are time-boxed and effectively closed by 2026-10-22 unless re-announced. The second web-search on change-tracking hit the session search budget and did not complete, so pre-2026 history of the startup program's tiers is not independently cross-checked beyond the official page; re-verify tier amounts on the official page before relying on them. |
| ScyllaDB Cloud trials | No permanent free tier: the only recurring free offers are the two one-time trials (30-day dev trial, 48-hour production evaluation) and the 12-month Startup Program (licensing, under-$20M funded startups). 2025-2026 changes: (1) X Cloud (elastic, tablets-based) launched June 2025 with Flex Credit annual commitments — pricing model changes, but no free tier added; (2) Vector and Text Search became usable on free-trial clusters at no cost, with trial clusters limited to the smallest index node sizes (AWS t4g.medium, GCP e2-medium) and the trial capped at one cluster per account; (3) the 2022 trial definitions (t3.micro dev instance, i3.2xlarge prod evaluation) still appear in the pricing FAQ, while current docs no longer name the dev-trial instance type — the offer survived but its smallest-instance list now differs; (4) no student/education license program exists or was sunset — education/education-licensing offers were not found and scylladb.com/education/ returns 404; free education is via ScyllaDB University only. Note: session web-search budget was exhausted during this research, so instance-level details (current dev-trial instance types, any '50 vCPU / 10 TB' free-tier cap mentioned in a 2025 sales rep's LinkedIn post) are marked medium/unverified. |
| Sendbird | 2025–2026 changes: (1) Jan 2026 — Sendbird raised the free Developer plan's MAU cap 10x, from 100 to 1,000 (PCC now 20). Prior notes claiming "10K MAU" do not match the current published cap of 1,000 MAU. (2) Jan 2026 — Sendbird repositioned its main pricing page around an "AI Agent" flagship and a consumption/AI-chatbot pricing model, and added a promotional bundle to Starter/Pro/Enterprise (30K in-app messages + 1K AI chatbot credits). A pricing tracker flagged the "Developer plan (Free, 100 MAU)" as "removed" during a page restructure between AI-chatbot and Chat products, but the Chat free Developer plan (now 1,000 MAU) remains available on sendbird.com/pricing/chat. (3) No public education license found; if one existed it is no longer publicly documented. Research caveat: the WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so the $5,000 startup credit rests on third-party aggregators (official page 404'd) and the trial duration/MAU figures rely on the Sendbird blog + a third-party tracker; the free Developer plan numbers were read directly from the official pricing/chat page today. |
| Sentry Developer Plan | No Sentry-specific education, student (.edu), startup, or nonprofit discount program was found on any official page checked today: sentry.io/education/, sentry.io/startups/ and sentry.io/nonprofit/ are not real program pages (machine-UI 404s), and neither the current pricing docs (docs.sentry.io/pricing) nor the legacy pricing docs mention any such program. The free offers for students/startups are therefore the general-purpose ones above (Developer free plan + 14-day trials), which carry no special eligibility. 2025-2026 changes: (1) Legacy Seer pricing ($20/month + $25 event credits) stopped being offered as an add-on as of January 2026; current Seer is $40/active contributor/month — so the 'Seer free credits' offer is gone. (2) The entire pre-June-11-2024 pricing structure (including legacy 'Performance Units' for spans) was replaced by per-product quotas (errors/spans/replays/logs/metrics as separate lines) — a 2024 change, kept as context. No 2025-2026 changes to the Developer free plan or the 14-day trials were found on the current pages (verified 2026-10-22). Paid reference points: Team $29/mo monthly or $26/mo annual (50K errors/mo, 90-day retention, unlimited users); Business $89/mo monthly or $80/mo annual; Enterprise custom. Note: web search was unavailable this session (budget exhausted), so the 'no education/startup program' conclusion rests on direct page checks of sentry.io + docs.sentry.io rather than a full web sweep. |
| SGLang | No SGLang-specific free offer was sunset or materially changed in 2025-2026: there is no SGLang free tier, trial credit, startup program, or education license to sunset — the 'free offer' is the Apache-2.0 software itself, which is permanent. Material 2025-2026 context: (1) the commercial entity RadixArk launched May 2026 ($100M seed, $400M valuation) with managed-inference/managed-training services on top of the open core — at this date it has announced no startup or education program, so nothing free exists on that front to claim; (2) SGLang joined the PyTorch ecosystem during 2025; (3) a free-compute path via partner AMD Developer Cloud (MI300X, ~$100/~50 hrs) was highlighted by the SGLang project in March 2026, but AMD's official terms could not be read (JS-only pages) and web-search budget was exhausted, so treat that figure as unverified current. Third-party discount sites claiming SGLang 'education pricing' (e.g., aitoolsatlas.ai) are auto-generated generic text, not a real program. |
| SigNoz | 1) Teams price cut (May 2025): SigNoz cut the SigNoz Cloud Teams minimum from $199/month to $49/month, with $49 of usage now included at that price (blog: "Cloud Teams Plan Now at $49", with 2025/05 asset in page; per-unit rates unchanged at $0.30/GB logs/traces, $0.10/mn metric samples; the $19 startup price sits off this new baseline). 2) The previously cited free-trial figure of "~50 GB ingest" could NOT be found on any official page fetched today (signoz.io/pricing, /teams/, docs FAQs, cost-control docs); the only trial limit documented today is the ~100 RPS ingestion rate threshold - treat any "~50 GB" claim as unverified. 3) No student/education license or program exists on signoz.io as of 2026-10-22 (checked pricing, homepage, /startups/, docs FAQs, and the corporate sitemap, which lists no education/academic page). 4) No perpetual free SigNoz Cloud tier - "Get Started - Free" is the 30-day trial. 5) No standalone free Uptime/CDN offering found: uptime monitoring in SigNoz is a dashboard-template feature, not a separate free SaaS tier. 6) Method note: search-engine cross-checks were unavailable this session (shared WebSearch budget exhausted); verification was done directly against official signoz.io pages, docs .md endpoints, the corporate/product sitemaps, and SigNoz's own blog. GitHub (for the OSS license name) was unreachable from this environment and is the one claim left unverified. |
| Simple Analytics Free Plan | No 2025–2026 sunset of any student/startup/education program found: the Free plan is marketed as 'Free forever' and no such program page exists (/startups, /education both 404; no mention in pricing, pricing.md, docs or homepage). No plan-structure change announcements appear in the blog index page 1 fetched 2026-10-22 (its 2025 posts cover EU consent/GDPR topics, not pricing). The notable 2025–2026-era structure visible today is the usage-based self-serve tier ladder in pricing.md ($15–$160/mo by pageviews+events, yearly = 10× monthly) versus the HTML pricing page's €20/mo base display — a currency/display discrepancy rather than a confirmed price cut; if exact EUR numbers are needed, check the live pricing page in EUR locale. Verification caveat: live web search was unavailable for this run (session search budget exhausted), so all verification was done by fetching the official site's pages directly on 2026-10-22; no third-party or archive corroboration was possible. |
| Snowflake | No student or startup free-credit program was verified. The Snowflake startups URL (https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/startups/) returned a 404 when fetched. The pricing-options page (https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/pricing-options/) mentions no trial dollar amount and no student or startup program. All four WebSearch calls failed because the session's web search budget was used up, so the 2025-2026 status of any student or startup program is unverified and no search-based check was possible. A WebFetch of the full trial docs page failed on an output-size limit; a narrower fetch of the same page succeeded and gave the 30-day and no-payment facts. The $400 figure remains unconfirmed. Re-run with search budget available to check for Snowflake student or startup offers and to confirm the current dollar amount. |
| Square | No student- or startup-specific free offer exists for Square Developer as of 2026-10-22: no .edu education license, no startup credit pool, no trial credits, and no startup age/funding-capped program were found on developer.squareup.com, the Square pricing page, or the partnerships hub (us/en/partnerships lists only App Partner and Developer Platform tracks; no education, reseller, or startup programs). Square's free offers are model-based and open to everyone (free Sandbox; no developer subscription; $0 'Square Free' software plan; free app-marketplace base tier), so nothing appears to have been sunset in 2025-2026 under a student/startup name. Caveats: (1) WebSearch was unavailable for this session (budget exhausted), so 2025-2026 change announcements (e.g., news of rate changes like the 2.9%+30c figure, which the pricing page renders via JS and could not be numerically re-confirmed) could not be independently checked; rate-level claims are carried from task context, not re-verified today. (2) Square Plus carries a 'Try free for N days' trial button whose day count is a template variable and did not render — a trial, not a free tier, and not student/startup-scoped. |
| Startup Grad | 1) Startup Grad (Microsoft x YC, historical ~$50,000 Azure credits per YC company) is no longer offered: superseded by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub (up to $150K via milestones/Investor Network, verified on official docs dated May–Oct 2026) plus the 8 Nov 2023 YC/M12 free GPU-cluster preview (extended 11 Jan 2024 to other incubators). The ~$50K figure could not be re-verified on any official Microsoft page today (secondary sources only), so the historical detail is low-confidence. 2) Major 2025 change (reported 2 Feb 2026 by theainewsdigest; corroborated by the current official docs' milestone structure): on 2 Jul 2025 Microsoft restructured Microsoft for Startups — the old four-level grid ($1K/$5K/$25K/$100K-up-to-$150K, where Level 1 gave every approved startup $1,000) was replaced by the milestone ladder (self-serve $200 → $5K → $25K → $50K → $150K) plus an Investor Network referral-code track (most investor-backed startups start at $100K). Unfunded startups effectively dropped from up to $150K to $5K total. Eligibility also shifted: lifetime-free-credit cap raised from $10K to $350K, and the funding ceiling moved from pre-Series D to pre-Series C. 3) 'Visual Studio for Students' appears sunset: its URL now 404s and the free-developer-offers page (fetched 2026-10-22) lists no student program; VS Community/VS Code are the free path (consistent with MS's 2025 move to free individual IDE licensing). 4) YC's 'successor' claim in the brief — 'up to $150K + AI Foundry + GPUs' — verified: up to $150K milestones on MFS docs, Microsoft Foundry model access inside MFS benefits, and the YC-first GPU cluster program (status in 2026 unconfirmed). Web search budget was exhausted mid-task; all 2026 items above were read directly from official pages today, except the 2 Jul 2025 restructuring (secondary source, corroborated by current docs). |
| Statuspage Free Plan | 2025-2026 changes confirmed today: (1) statuspage.io and statuspage.io/pricing now 301-redirect to atlassian.com/software/statuspage — the standalone Statuspage domain, pricing page and legacy product site are retired; the product is fully absorbed into Atlassian's cloud offering (acquisition completed 2023). (2) docs.statuspage.io redirects to an /inactive page — the old documentation hub is sunset; docs now live at support.atlassian.com/statuspage. (3) atlassian.com/ondemand (the former OnDemand/monitoring marketing home) now redirects to /software. (4) atlassian.com/teams/education, /education and /training/teaching all 404 — the old education program pages are gone; only the sitemap-listed classroom-license-request form remains as the education offer. (5) Atlassian for Startups' covered product list has shifted over time (now Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket Premium, Loom Business+AI, JSM & Customer Service Management, Jira Product Discovery — Opsgenie no longer listed); the page (dateModified 2026-10-21) warns 'The list of products may be modified over time', and Statuspage has not been a covered product. |
| Strapi | 2025–2026 changes (verified 2026-10-22): (1) Strapi Cloud Free Plan launched 2025-05-13 at StrapiConf ($0, no credit card, 10,000 API req/mo, 10 GB storage/bandwidth, 500 DB entries, 100 emails/mo, 1 prod environment on sleeping containers) was CUT on 2025-12-22 (API requests 10,000→2,500/mo; Essential plan 100,000→50,000; yearly billing at ~20% off introduced) and fully REMOVED on 2026-07-01; all existing free projects were deleted 2026-09-01. Strapi's official editor's notes (Aug 2026) state Strapi Cloud 'no longer offers a free plan or a free trial' — the legacy 5×14-day/21-day free trials (still documented in docs-v4) are also no longer offered, and the current pricing page shows only paid tiers: Starter $35, Pro $90, Business $450 per project/month. Plan-name/pricing churn: May 2025 (Free/Essential $15/Pro $75/Scale $375/Scale+) → Dec 2025 yearly billing → 2026 Starter/Pro/Business. (2) NO education/student license exists: the official discounts page lists only Open Source and Non-Profit programs; no .edu-based student discount or academic program is published anywhere on strapi.io (corroborated by third-party Noizz check of 2026-09-04: 'no student or academic discount'; costbench education-discount sections are unverified boilerplate). (3) NO dedicated startup program exists (closest: OSS/non-profit discount and the agency-oriented Partner Program). As of 2026-10-22 the only genuinely free Strapi offer is self-hosting the MIT-licensed Community edition; every hosted/Cloud free offer (Free plan, trials) is sunseted. |
| Streamlit Community Cloud | Verdict: a genuine free offer exists, but it is general free hosting open to everyone, including students and startups (finding 1), not a student or startup program. The only official extra free benefit is the case-by-case resource increase for nonprofit or educational organizations (finding 2). No startup program was found on the Streamlit pages checked; Snowflake's own startup and student programs were not checked. Status 2025-2026: no closure or change announcement was found on the official pages checked. The 2026-footer docs still list the February 2024 limits, the 12-hour sleep rule and the one-private-app rule. Unverified leads, not carried as findings: (a) A March 2023 forum reply by Caroline (discuss.streamlit.io/t/more-private-projects/39717) said 'we do offer increased private apps through our education program if you're a student or educator, and we run contests a few times a year where you can win hosting for additional private apps.' No current official page checked mentions an education program or contests, and the official share-your-app page says 'You are only allowed one private app at a time', so treat this as probably inactive unless Streamlit confirms it. (b) A 2021 forum thread asked about a student benefit (discuss.streamlit.io/t/streamlit-cluld-for-student/18075); it was auto-closed with no confirmed answer. (c) Staff said in November and December 2022 that there are no paid Community Cloud plans. Streamlit in Snowflake is a separate Snowflake product; streamlit.io/cloud shows a Snowflake option labeled 'Pro' with 'Start the trial now!' but no price, trial length or terms, and it was not verified as a student or startup offer. Research limits: WebSearch returned a shared-session budget-exhausted notice on its 3rd and 4th searches, so 2025-2026 news and the education-program status were not searched, and I did not work around the limit. streamlit.io/terms-of-service returned 404, streamlit.io/pricing returned 404, and blog.streamlit.io returned 403. Context7 MCP was not among the available tools, so official docs were read with WebFetch. Quotes come from WebFetch summaries and should be spot-checked before publication. |
| Stripe | 1) Oct 16, 2025 - Atlas startup offer materially changed: companies incorporated before that date received 'waived payments processing fees on your first $100,000 USD in payments, for 1 year after incorporation' (limited to card + local payment method processing fees); companies incorporated on/after Oct 16, 2025 instead receive $2,500 in Stripe product fee credits (1 year from incorporation, broader product coverage). The prior waived-processing-fee offer remains active only for earlier incorporations. 2) Apr 13, 2026 - new 'Stripe Treasury refund offer for Atlas users' (full Atlas-fee refund up to $500 for $5,000 deposit + 30-day hold) - brand-new 2026 program with no published end date. 3) 2025 - general sandboxes launched as the recommended test environment for new integrations; the legacy test mode sandbox is retained for existing integrations (API V2 only supported in general sandboxes; Stripe CLI can create anonymous sandboxes with no account). 4) Stripe Startups FAQ: fee credits are 'replacing waived processing fees over time' by country, so more regions will shift from waived fees to credits; also note the FAQ's 'Stripe Treasury benefits' $1,000 USD offer is event-tied (sign up for a Stripe card within 7 days of the event), not a standing free program. 5) Pricing-page footnote: basic usage-based billing features are moving to Stripe's Meters API under Billing pricing with up to 100M events/month included (metronome remains a separately signed-up product). 6) No student/education program was sunset - no direct Stripe student program exists; the only student perk is via the GitHub Student Developer Pack ($25 in Stripe credits per GitHub's current listing; some aggregators still show older 'first $1,000 revenue fee waiver' wording). 7) Baseline card rates confirmed current: US domestic 2.9% + 30c; +1.5% international cards; +1% currency conversion (US page; some country pages show +2% conversion). |
| Stripe Atlas | Students/education: No student-specific or .edu-licensed Stripe offer was found (Atlas, Atlas credits, or Stripe Startups all use startup/VC-backed criteria, not educational status), so there is no 'education license' to list; .edu email is not required anywhere in the Atlas flow. Sunset/changes 2025-2026: (1) The legacy Atlas credit format — 'waived processing fees on the first US$100,000 of revenue for 1 year' — was replaced by the fixed US$2,500 product-credit format for companies incorporated on/after ~October 16, 2025 (date from third-party tracker CloudRoute; not re-stated on Stripe's marketing page, so medium confidence on the exact cutover date). (2) The Stripe Startups program launched May 13, 2025 and is growing, not sunsetting; its FAQ notes fee credits are progressively replacing the older waived-processing-fees format globally. (3) Stripe's older support FAQ 'Getting started with Stripe Atlas' still advertises 'US$100,000 USD in exclusive benefits', while all current pages say 'over US$50,000 in partner discounts' — a messaging/bundle revision, not a removal of perks. (4) Jan 2025 feature (third-party, medium confidence): Atlas now lets startups accept payments immediately after incorporation, even before receiving the EIN. Caveat: this session's WebSearch budget was exhausted after the searches noted; a dedicated student-program check (e.g., 'Stripe for students') was not completed, so absence of a .edu offer rests on the official pages read today plus training knowledge. |
| Supabase Auth | STUDENT/EDUCATION LICENSE: none exists. supabase.com/education returns HTTP 404, and Supabase runs no student or academic discount. Its own pricing page has no student/education tier; the founders' original goal (2020 blog) of keeping free projects available for students/hobbyists is served by the standard Free Plan, with no application process. Students should plan around the Free Plan and email support only if a course deployment needs more.\n\nSTARTUP CREDITS PROGRAM: not verifiable as an active public offer. The official startup page (supabase.com/startups, now serving /solutions/startups) is marketing-only with no application form, credit amount, eligibility, or duration. At least one source (guptadeepak.com, Sep 2026) reports supabase.com/startups now 404s and the program is discontinued. Aggregators still circulate contradictory, unverifiable figures ($2,500 credits / six months of the Team plan free / $3,000 over 12 months). Treat any startup offer as partner-gated (Y Combinator / Techstars / sales) or sunset rather than a public sign-up.\n\nTRIAL CREDITS: no native time-limited 'trial credits' program. The Free Plan is a perpetual free tier, not a trial. The only credit-style offers in the ecosystem are third-party partner perks, not Supabase's own — e.g., Mercury grants its business-account holders $300 in Supabase credits (new customers, separate conditions).\n\nNET: the only distinct, verifiable free offer for students and startups is the standard Free Plan itself (finding #1, high confidence). No separate education license or reliable public startup-credits program could be confirmed on official pages this session.\n\nNote on sourcing: the official pricing page was read directly this session (high confidence for Free Plan figures). The WebSearch budget was exhausted partway through the task, so current (2025-2026) change history for the startup program rests on aggregator claims (contradictory) plus a direct read of Supabase's own startup/partners pages showing no live program; those lower-confidence items are marked accordingly. |
| Supabase Free Plan | 1) SUPABASE STARTUP APPLICATION PAGE GONE: aggregator checks (Sep 2026) report supabase.com/startups 404s; today the URL serves only the generic /solutions/startups marketing page with no credit amounts, eligibility, or apply form. Supabase's direct startup-credit application (historically 'apply for credits') appears sunset as self-serve; credits now flow only through partner deal books (AWS, Mercury, YC, 80+ accelerators). Supabase hired a Startup Program Manager (job posted, removed 2025-06-17) and a 'Founder Advocate' (Aug 2025) to run the YC-focused program, so partner-channel credits are the live mechanism. 2) NO STUDENT/EDUCATION PROGRAM has ever shipped: /education is 404; the GitHub Student Developer Pack does not list Supabase; the only student-adjacent offer was YC's Summer Fellows grants (Mar–Aug 2025 cohort) which included a $10K Supabase credit from YC co-sponsors — that cohort ended 2025 and no 2026 equivalent is published (low confidence). 3) FREE-PLAN CHANGES IN 2025: third-party-auth MAU quota raised from 50 to 50,000 on Free (and 100K on Pro/Team) effective March 2025; Free Plan database limit formalized as 0.5 GB per ACTIVE project (paused/deleted projects no longer count); Edge Function count quota raised to 25 (no per-function billing). Core Free-tier numbers (500 MB DB, 1 GB storage, 5 GB egress, 50K MAU, 500K invocations, 2 projects) have been unchanged since the 2024 org-based-billing migration, which added +1 GB egress. 4) NO TRIAL CREDITS ever existed for paid plans; verify current partner terms inside the (login-gated) AWS Startups portal since the AWS offer page redirected to auth as of today. |
| Tailscale | Verdict: genuine free offers exist, but none is student-specific. Student route: the free Personal plan, open to any individual within 6 users. Startup route: the Startups Program (one free business-plan year, up to 30 users, selective, company domain required). Open-source route: Community on GitHub (free, apply through Support, OSI license, GitHub login). The 50% education and nonprofit discounts apply only to paid plans. No free student plan exists.Changes in 2025-2026: (1) The April 8, 2026 pricing update (Tailscale blog) retired Personal Plus and made the free Personal plan allow up to 6 users, the same limit Personal Plus had. (2) A third-party article (ITSecureOps, updated 2026-10-18) says business plan names changed (Starter became Standard) and that business plans moved from usage-based to seat-based billing on April 8, 2026. I did not confirm the rename or the billing change in Tailscale's own text. (3) The Tailscale free-plans docs page shows 'Last validated Apr 8, 2026'. The plan-discount Special Terms are effective 2024-11-29.Adjacent offer, not a student or startup offer and not listed as a finding: tailscale.com/switch (search snippet, undated) says a customer stuck in an annual contract with another VPN can send a copy of the contract to Tailscale and get Tailscale free until that contract expires, for up to 6 months.Naming: the 'GitHub open-source plan' here is Tailscale's Community on GitHub plan, not a GitHub Inc. product. GitHub's own programs are separate: GitHub for Nonprofits (free GitHub Team or 25% off Enterprise Cloud for verified 501(c)(3)-type organizations) and GitHub Education discounts for students and educators.Coverage gaps: the session's WebSearch budget ran out before I could search for Community on GitHub caps or any 2025-2026 change to it, so that plan's status and limits rest on the Tailscale docs excerpt alone. I did not work around the limit. Several WebFetch calls failed on output size (the first pricing fetch, and the docs page, which was read only through search snippets). The pricing page and the Startups Program page succeeded on shorter re-fetches. Whether the Startups Program is still accepting applications as of 2026-10-22 is not confirmed; the page showed no closure notice. |
| Tally | No Tally free offer was sunset or materially changed in 2025-2026 per official pages read 2026-10-22: the free tier (unlimited forms/submissions under fair use), the 1-year 30% education discount, and the permanent 30% non-profit discount are all live, and Tally still explicitly offers no free trials. Pricing pages now display EUR (Pro €20, Business €65) with USD shown as $29/$89; annual billing gives 2 months off (17%). Only caveat: third-party review sites publish stale or per-user pricing (e.g., TrustRadius lists Pro/Business as per-user) that contradicts Tally's flat team-wide pricing. Note: WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-research; findings are based on direct WebFetch of official Tally pages (pricing, fair-use-policy, plans-and-pricing, tally-for-education, tally-for-non-profit, billing-and-payment-info) plus search snippets captured earlier, so official-source confidence is high. |
| Techstars | Changes/sunsets in 2025-2026: (1) April 17, 2025 — Techstars replaced its $120K deal ($100K MFN SAFE + $20K/5%) with the $220K deal ($200K uncapped MFN SAFE + $20K post-money CEA/5%) for Fall 2025 cohorts onward, explicitly mirroring YC; the $120K structure now applies only to Asia-Pacific programs. (2) The ARM Labs Lagos Techstars accelerator (Techstars' Africa-specific program, launched Dec 2022, 2 cohorts) closed in late 2024 as part of a global restructuring; African founders can still apply to global programs. (3) No Techstars program was sunset in 2025-2026 that would reduce the credit stack — DigitalOcean Startups was upgraded to 2026 'Premier Partner' (announced March 2026), expanding rather than reducing access. (4) Verification gaps today (2026-10-22): the AWS Techstars partnership page (aws.amazon.com/startups/partnerships/techstars → startups.aws.com/...), DigitalOcean's partner/startup pages (digitalocean.com/partners/startups, /startup-cloud), and Google's startup program pages (cloud.google.com/launch, /application/startup-faqs) all return 404, so AWS/DO/GCP per-credit-line details above rely on Techstars' official /capital page (read today) plus partner-program public docs; treat exact $100K/24-month figures as Techstars-stated until re-confirmed against the partners' current portals. (5) There is no Techstars student free tier, trial-credit self-serve offer, or education license (no .edu requirement anywhere in the funnel); student access is via University Catalyst and the free AWS Impact Bootcamps. |
| Thunder Compute | As of 2026-10-22 Thunder Compute has no free tier, no trial credits, and no startup program: /startup and /changelog both 404; the pricing page lists only paid on-demand rates (A6000 $0.35/hr, L40 $0.79/hr, A100 80GB $1.09/hr, H100 SXM $3.20/hr; sandbox GPUs H100 $2.95/GPU-hr and A100 $1.95/GPU-hr; data egress $0.00/GB; disk $0.219/GB/mo) with a reserved/volume-pricing mention that is discounted committed spend, not free; the sign-up page (console.thundercompute.com/signup) mentions no promotional credit. The company's own 'Free Cloud GPU Credits in 2026' blog directory attributes to Thunder Compute only the $20 student credit and the 3% referral program — no startup-tier entry. So there is no evidence a startup program ever existed or was sunset; the only distinct free offers are the student credit and the referral credits above. Caveat: WebSearch's session budget was exhausted, so 2025-2026 change history was verified by reading official pages only, not by news search. |
| Tink | No student/education offer found: no .edu pricing, student license, or trial-credit program anywhere on tink.com pricing/FAQ/docs as of 2026-10-22, and the FAQ says pay-per-use is 'No' - the only free access is the self-serve Console sandbox + Demo Bank. Startup offer at Visa level: VIPE Nordics & Baltics Season 1 (applications opened 6 Oct 2025) is CONCLUDED - first cohort of 8 ran Dec 2025 - May 2026 with final showcase at Baltic Fintech Days Riga, May 2026; no Season 2 application window was announced on Tenity's page as of 22 Oct 2026, so the startup program is currently closed/unknown until a new season is announced. Historical change still in effect: the Demo Bank supported-provider list was reduced on 31 Oct 2023 to the fixed 18-market list published in Tink docs; providers not on that list are unsupported for testing. No 2025-2026 sunsets of developer tooling appear in Tink's press index (2025 releases: Adyen Pay-by-Bank x2, Paysend partnership, Gen Z study); pricing has stayed opaque/sales-gated. Caveat: consumer-side Tink products (e.g. the Tink consumer banking app) are outside the 'Payments & Fintech Dev Tools' front and were not assessed; no closure of any developer offering was found, so the free sandbox is presumed still live (console.tink.com is up and the FAQ still advertises it). |
| Together AI | A genuine (selection-based) free offer for startups is described on the official page, so one finding is returned instead of an empty list. It is not a student program. Unverified: 2025-2026 status, including whether applications are open, closed, or changed. WebSearch was unavailable because this session's search budget was exhausted. No searches were run for 2025-2026 news, announcements, or cohort dates, and the limit was not worked around. No closure or change was seen in the pages fetched, but that is not confirmation of continuity. Pages checked: (a) https://www.together.ai/pricing: no free trial, sign-up credits, student, startup, education, or accelerator offer. The metadata reads 'Start for free, scale on demand', and some serverless models are listed at $0 or with free output (Tev1 4B Experimental output 'Free'; Ternary Bonsai 27B at $0.00 per 1M tokens), but no credit grant is described. A B200 post-training promo ('PROMO', valid until 12/14/2026, $9.00 vs $11.00 per GPU-hour) is a discounted hourly rate, not credits, so it is excluded. No minimum credit purchase is stated. (b) https://www.together.ai/terms-of-service: 'Your account will be charged an initial prepaid balance' (no amount), and 'fees paid are non-refundable' subject to order forms. It has no promotional or free-credit terms, no credit expiry, and no transfer terms. Fees also reference pricing pages and order forms that were not in the fetch. (c) https://docs.together.ai/docs/faqs returned HTTP 404. (d) Guessed testimonial URLs /customers/corridor and /customers/playerzero returned HTTP 404, so cohort dates could not be checked. Premise check: 'no general free trial' is consistent with the pricing page. 'Access requires a credit purchase' is not stated on any page checked; the nearest evidence is the ToS prepaid-balance language. 'This accelerator is its only credit route' is not verified, since no other credit programs were searched for. No student or academic offer appeared on any page checked, and no search for one was run. |
| Twilio | Material 2025–2026 changes verified on official pages today (2026-10-22): (1) Twilio trial is now a hard 30-day window with product-specific free units (100 SMS / 100 WhatsApp / 3,000 emails / 75 voice minutes) instead of the older indefinite restrictions-only trial with no bundled units; accounts that don't upgrade inside 30 days expire, with a fresh post-upgrade free-unit bundle for eligible products. (2) No shared dollar trial credit exists anymore (the old 'trial credit' wording survives only as the vague 'small credit' on the startups page). (3) Twilio's Startups offering no longer includes startup credits or discounts — official FAQ: 'We do not offer additional credits to startups at this time'; it is now free educational resources + a sales-team channel. (4) SendGrid's permanent free email plan (400/day) has been gone since 2023; the current Email API 'free' offer is a 60-day trial (100 emails/day), with the ongoing free quota living on the Marketing Campaigns plan instead (2,000 contacts / 6,000 emails/month). (5) Twilio University (the former free student/educator bootcamp) is no longer reachable — /en-us/university returns 404 and the developer hub lists no student program; the education page is institution-sales-only, so no .edu-based free offer exists. (6) twilio.com/try-twilio now 307-redirects straight into the Auth0 signup flow (the trial marketing page was folded into signup); 'no credit card required' survives as pricing-page copy. Caveat: WebSearch was unavailable in this session (shared session search budget exhausted), so sunset claims rely on today's official-page fetches plus pre-existing knowledge; no 2025-26 press release or changelog entry could be independently re-searched. Ongoing paid costs after free units: SMS $0.0083–$0.014/msg, voice $0.0085/min inbound and $0.014/min outbound, Twilio Email $0.0013/email, Conversations $0.05/active user/month, TaskRouter $0.06/task, Functions $0.0001/invocation; phone-number rental and A2P 10DLC registration are paid-only. |
| Twilio SendGrid | Material 2025-2026 changes observed: (1) The Twilio trial was restructured from a shared dollar-credit model (historically the widely documented $10 trial balance) to per-product FREE UNITS (100 SMS / 100 WhatsApp / 3,000 emails / 75 voice minutes) — the current docs state units are given 'instead of a shared dollar balance' — and now has a hard 30-day expiry ('Trial accounts expire after 30 days'), replacing the previously open-ended trial-until-upgrade model. (2) SendGrid is rebranded under Twilio: sendgrid.com 301-redirects to twilio.com/en-us/sendgrid, and the master pricing page lists 'Twilio Email starts at $0.0013/email' (page marked current as of Aug 2026); SendGrid's 60-day trial and persistent free Marketing tier (2,000 contacts / 6,000 emails/mo) remain. (3) The Twilio startup program no longer grants startup-specific credits: official page states 'We do not offer additional credits to startups at this time' — the old standalone startup-credit program, if it ever stood as such, is materially reduced to resources + standard trial. (4) No education license found; if one existed previously, no trace on official pages. Note on method: WebSearch budget was exhausted for this session, so all facts above come from official Twilio/SendGrid pages fetched on 2026-10-22 (high-confidence items) rather than searches; exact sunset dates for the trial revamp are not published on the pages I could reach. |
| Typesense | As of 2026-10-22, verified by fetching the official pages today: (1) No student/education license or program exists — typesense.org/education/ is 404, the typesense.org sitemap (10 URLs) contains no education/student URL, the docs Guide + FAQ contain no education offer, and the blog index (latest post Apr 14, 2025) has none. (2) No named startup program/discount exists — cloud.typesense.org/startup is 404; the only startup-flavored content is marketing copy ('From Scrappy Startups to Household Names') and the spend-gated free Algolia-migration offers above. Typesense is explicitly bootstrapped ('lean customer-funded team of engineers'; 2022 blog 'To Raise VC, or Not'), which fits a no-VC startup-investment model rather than a funded startup program. (3) The previously-known claim 'open source (Apache 2.0) self-hosted = free' is partially wrong: the Typesense server is GPL-3.0 (verified against the raw LICENSE.txt and GitHub's license badge; client libraries are Apache). (4) Typesense Cloud pricing has been restructured from named tiers into a usage-based hourly configuration calculator (memory 0.5–1024 GB, 2-vCPU floor, 3–7 nodes, ~28 regions, GPU/disk/HA/SDN add-ons) with no visible named free plan; the free entry point is signup-based 'free cluster / free credits' whose dollar amount and duration are undisclosed on public pages. (5) No CMS front: Typesense offers no CMS product; 'fronts: APIs, Search & CMS' applies only to APIs and Search. (6) Methodology caveat: the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted, so 2025–2026 change checks were not done via search; all findings above come from pages fetched on 2026-10-22 (high confidence for what the pages state; the free-credit amount/duration could not be confirmed from any public page). |
| Unity Personal | As of 2026-10-22, no dedicated 'Unity Startup Program' exists on unity.com (no link in the products navigation; unity.com/startups and similar paths 404). Startups are covered by the free Unity Personal tier (<$200K revenue+funding/12 months) plus the expanded free DevOps cloud tier; paid Pro is $2,310/yr or $210/mo. Material 2024-2026 changes: (1) Sep 12, 2024: Unity canceled the controversial Runtime Fee for games; Personal's cap doubled from $100K to $200K USD at the same time, and the 'Made with Unity' splash screen became optional starting with Unity 6. (2) Jan 1, 2025: plan restructure — Unity Plus was absorbed/renamed to Unity Pro; Pro became mandatory above $200K and Enterprise above $25M total finances; Pro was $2,200/yr at that date. (3) Jan 12, 2026: 5% Pro/Enterprise price increase (Pro -> $2,310/yr, $210/mo); Havok Physics for Unity dropped from Pro/Enterprise/Industry on 6.0 LTS (and from Unity 6.3). (4) Mar 1, 2026: free DevOps cloud tier expansion (unlimited VCS seats, 25GB storage, 100GB egress, added Mac/Linux build minutes, 2 editor concurrency) — all free tiers above reflect this. (5) 31 Mar 2026: Unity Multiplay Game Server Hosting direct support ends; service licensed to Rocket Science Group, docs 308-redirect there, so its $800 startup credit is in transition. (6) Aug-Sep 2026: Unity Economy (Gaming Services) became free to use starting 25 Aug 2026 and stopped accepting new project signups 8 Sep 2026 — a de-facto free tier for existing configs but the product is sunsetting (no new signups; IAP/Live Content positioned as the successors). (7) Verification path: the legacy 'GitHub Student Developer Pack' route for Unity Student has been replaced by SheerID (plus optional SAML sign-in to school); .edu email is explicitly not required by Unity's current Student plan page. Older third-party university IT articles still cite the GitHub Pack requirement — outdated. No announced sunset of the Personal, Student, Educator, or Education Grant License offerings as of Oct 22, 2026. |
| Unleash | Changes in 2025–2026 vs the "known so far" baseline: (1) LICENSE CHANGE — Unleash moved the primary GitHub repo and unleash-server npm package from Apache-2.0 to AGPLv3 effective from v8.0.0, announced 2026-06-02 ("Evolving Our Open Source Commitment: Unleash is Moving to AGPLv3"); official OSS Docker images remain Apache-2.0 and client SDKs keep permissive licenses, so unmodified self-hosting stays friction-free. (2) The baseline claim that Unleash Cloud has a free "Personal Use" tier with paid tiers starting ~$99/mo is OUTDATED: the current getunleash.io pricing page lists only Open Source (free self-hosted), Pay-As-You-Go at $75/seat/month, and Custom Enterprise — no Personal Use or free hosted tier is offered or even mentioned; if a Personal Use tier existed it was retired/renamed in 2025–2026 with no public sunset announcement found in the blog index. (3) Pricing level: paid entry is now $75/seat/month (previously cited ~$99/mo). (4) Domain/site migration: www.unleash.io and unleash.io are unreachable from this environment (TLS/SSL errors on every path tried); the live official site is getunleash.io (docs.getunleash.io, app.getunleash.io, auth.app.getunleash.io). (5) $35M Series B (2026-03-04, led by One Peak; 500+ paying customers, doubled ARR 3 consecutive years) signals enterprise focus; no startup or education programs were announced with it. Note: WebSearch budget was exhausted in this session, so change-detection relied on the official site's blog index (titles) plus pricing/FAQ/upgrade/open-source/license pages read today (all high-confidence official reads). |
| UpCloud Free Trial | 1) The task's starting URL https://upcloud.com/try/ now serves a 404 'Page Not Found' (verified 2026-10-22) - UpCloud has sunset the dedicated trial landing page; trial info now lives in the docs (upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/free-trial/) and the signup flow. 2) The '500 EUR/USD for 30 days' signup promo chain (upcloud500 in 2025, then boost500 active into Sept 2026) is dead: the live signup page today shows boost500 as 'inactive' and defaults to the plain 7-day quota trial. So any listing advertising a standing $500/30-day free trial (e.g. 'UpCloud for Startups: $500' directory entries) is outdated as of 2026-10-22. 3) The previously circulated 'small ~$25 free trial credit' assumption is wrong for current terms - the baseline trial is quota-based with no dollar credit; 25 EUR only appears via the referral program. 4) The Startup Program is the main 2025-2026 structural change: it now runs a three-tier EUR system (up to 25k/5k/1k, 24/12/12-month validity) gated on VAT ID + 24-month company age + EU/EEA/UK/UA/CH registration, formalized in a March 2026 Maria 01 (Helsinki) partnership; third-party trackers restate tiers in USD - the official page prices in EUR. 5) Since June 2025, 'UpCloud Essentials' made zero-cost egress, Kubernetes control planes, load balancers, NAT/VPN gateways and a daily backup plan permanently free for all users - not a trial offer, but it removes the usual egress-cost gotcha. 6) Unverified third-party claim (notes.aflukasz.pl, May 2025): 5,000 EUR for European businesses with a VAT ID, usable over 3 months - not corroborated on the official site; treat as a lapsed enterprise promo. 7) Region limits: UpCloud does not serve sanctioned regions (RU, BY, Crimea, IR, KP, CU, SY) and validates payment origin/geo - all offers above are subject to that. |
| Upstash | Material 2025-2026 changes: (1) Upstash Postgres and Upstash Kafka (both previously free-to-start metered products) no longer exist on upstash.com — pricing, product pages, sitemap and docs all omit them as of 2026-10-22; messaging is now QStash/Workflow (docs only reference Kafka as the open-source broker). (2) The Upstash Open Source Program ($1,000/mo credits) is currently closed to new applications per the official page. (3) No official education/student program exists: /education 404s, the Redis FAQ has no education entry; third-party 'student deal' pages (Modelverse, ToolBridge) merely describe the general free tier and cite outdated figures (10,000 commands/day, 256 MB) vs today's official 500K commands/month, 250 MB. (4) A widely circulated 'Upstash $500 startup credits' claim (SaaSOffers) has no corresponding official page — no /startups, no startup section in pricing or FAQs. (5) Free Redis numbers changed from the old 10K/day+256MB form to 500K/month+250MB with 10 free databases; Vector is region-capped (N. Virginia, Ireland, Iowa) and Box runs only in AWS us-east-1. |
| Uptime Kuma | As of 2026-10-22, Uptime Kuma has no student-specific, education, or startup offers, and never has - it is MIT-licensed software with a $0 license for everyone, so no vendor cap, trial, or discount program exists to sunset. 2025-2026 changes: (1) v2.0.0 shipped 2025-10-20 as the project's biggest release - breaking changes (rootless Docker images, LiquidJS SMTP templates replacing regex-based ones, removed legacy JSON backup/restore, UI refresh); the 2.3.x line (through v2.3.2, 2026-05-03) added OracleDB monitor support and SQLite-locking fixes, and 2.5.x extends push-interval limits beyond ~24 days - still all free. (2) No first-party cloud/managed service launched; 'Uptime Kuma hosting' listings are third parties (Kuma Engine LLC since at least 2025 at $4/mo per-instance with no free tier; Stellar Hosted, DANIAN, Elestio, Enzonic, ElfHosted, DreamHost pre-installed VPS). (3) Project funding remains volunteer-based: GitHub Sponsors / Open Collective, with Atlas Cloud as a noted special sponsor (USD 400/month). (4) No free-hosting sunset in 2025-2026 detected; the oldest known host-side gotcha is Oracle Cloud's always-free idle-instance policy (2023), which still affects Kuma self-hosters on that tier. The official site (uptime.kuma.pet) blocks automated fetchers (403), so pricing/program verification relies on the GitHub repo plus third-party pages. Confidence: high on absence of official offers (read the official repo today); medium on third-party trial details (from host pages, not tested). |
| UptimeRobot Free Plan | 1) Commercial-use ban on the Free Plan (introduced in the Oct 2024 ToS update, enforced 2024-12-01) was REVERSED in the terms updated 2026-05-26 and re-confirmed by the 2026-06-15 help article: the free plan is again explicitly available for business/commercial use. Stale third-party content (e.g., Spork's 2026-03 and StillUp's 2026-05 write-ups) still claims the ban is in force. 2) Paid lineup was re-priced and restructured in 2026: earlier articles cite Solo $7-8/mo and Team $29-34/mo; current US pricing is Solo $13/mo ($12 annual), Team $46/mo ($39 annual), new 15-second Scale plan $98/mo ($79 annual) with 200/500-monitor tiers, Enterprise custom — EU visitors see euro pricing (e.g., Solo €10/mo). Team moved to 30-second checks. 3) No student/education or startup-specific program ever existed to sunset; the only cost-free non-standard offer (Sponsored Plan for non-profits/OSS) remains active with no announced change. 4) New 2026: AI-agent sign-up channel for free accounts (proof-of-work + email confirmation gates). Note: a session-wide web-search budget was exhausted partway through this research, so absence claims rest on the official pricing + help pages fetched today plus full-text search snippets. |
| Val Town | No education license and no startup program exist on Val Town as of 2026-10-22: /students, /education, and /startup on val.town all 404; docs.val.town's sitemap (fetched today) contains no pricing/education/student/credit pages; the FAQ and pricing page mention no student/startup discounts; the full blog archive (blog.val.town, fetched today) has zero education/student posts. Nothing was sunset in 2025-2026 that I could find. Material changes that did happen: (1) 2025-06-11 Townie switched to pay-per-use 'Townie Credits' at a 50% markup over raw LLM cost and was decoupled from the Pro plan (previously Townie access came with Pro); (2) 2026-07-02 changelog 'Townie 5x cheaper'; (3) 2026-01-22 Townie v5 (MCP + Claude 4.5) and 2026-01-23 every val gets its own database; (4) Plan pricing: Pro $25/mo ($21/mo yearly), Business $200/mo ($167/mo yearly). Caveat: the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so this absence check relied on the official site's own pages (sitemap, pricing, FAQ, limitations, townie guide, full blog archive) rather than a global search; a niche startup program announced only in social media would not have been caught. WebFetch of val.town/auth/signup was blocked (403), so the no-credit-card-for-free claim rests on the FAQ wording and the pricing page's free-column structure, not direct observation of the form. |
| Vaultwarden | Bottom line: Vaultwarden itself has no trial credits, startup program, education license, paid tier or official hosted service. The software is free for everyone under AGPL-3.0-only, so the only free offers that help students or startups are third-party hosting programs, listed above and labeled as such. No pricing, education or startup page was identified in the repository sources read.Corrections to the workflow notes: (1) The license is AGPL-3.0-only, not MIT (Cargo.toml license field; LICENSE.txt). The project moved from GPLv3 to AGPLv3 in release 1.28.0 on 2023-03-26, which is not a 2025-2026 change. (2) The start URL https://github.com/vaultwarden/server returned HTTP 404 when fetched today, and the raw README path also returned 404. The repository resolves at https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden (formerly bitwarden_rs). The Docker image is vaultwarden/server.Coverage limits: two WebSearch calls succeeded (license; 2026 release changelog). A third query was refused because this session's search budget ran out, so no broader 2025-2026 sweep for Vaultwarden offers was possible. The absence of student, education, startup, trial or hosted offers rests on the README, LICENSE and release pages read today (medium confidence).2025-2026 Vaultwarden release changes (from GitHub release notes read via search results and from release trackers; latest seen is 1.37.4): 1.34.0 (2025-05-26) added an email-verified registration flow and feature flags. 1.35.0 (2025-12-27) added OpenID Connect SSO and was the first immutable release with release attestation. 1.36.0 (2026-05-03) fixed SSO security advisories and added item archiving. 1.37.0 (2026-07-24) fixed eight security advisories, requires clients 2026.7.0 or later, added trusted-proxy support, and now rejects an unrecognized DATABASE_URL instead of silently falling back to SQLite. 1.37.2 (2026-08-22) is required for clients 2026.8.0 or later. 1.37.3 (2026-09-13) added SSO_SIGNUPS_ALLOWED, revoked 2FA remember tokens on credential change, and added rate limiting. 1.37.4 (2026-10-05) fixed seven security advisories, one rated High (8.1, organization member revocation); changed the IP_HEADER rule to use the rightmost non-trusted address; removed several feature flags and legacy endpoints; and made bw send receive stop working on CLI 2026.4.2 and older. Upgrade promptly and keep the server version aligned with the Bitwarden client version.Hosting-offer changes: Oracle's trial terms (30-day window; deletion of A1 capacity over the Always Free allowance) and idle-instance reclamation are in Oracle's current docs. AWS's Free plan closes the account after up to 6 months or when credits run out; the page gives no effective date, so this cannot be confirmed as a 2025 or 2026 change. Google's Free Tier limits can be changed with 30 days' notice.Not verified or excluded: Google for Startups Cloud Program (cloud.google.com/startup returned only a title, twice; the /startup/apply alias redirected to a Google sign-in page, which was not followed). oracle.com/cloud/free returned HTTP 403, so trial details come from docs.oracle.com. AWS's legacy 12-month Free Tier is not on the current page. Cloudflare, Hetzner and other hosts were not checked. Bitwarden's own pricing and student offers are out of scope. |
| Vercel | No free offer was sunset in 2025-2026, but several materially changed: (1) Pro plan was restructured in 2025 ('Simpler Pricing' / Fluid compute era): it now carries a $20 included usage credit and plan limits are expressed in Fluid Active CPU hours / Provisioned Memory GB-hrs rather than old per-function allowances; Hobby's core limits (100 GB transfer, 1M CDN requests, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU-hrs, 360 GB-hrs memory, 200 projects) are unchanged from previously known values as verified on the official pages today. (2) Vercel for Startups: new 'Flexible Commitment' credit terms apply to startups accepted on/after August 6, 2026 - the credit amount became partner-negotiated (up to a $30,000 max) rather than a fixed amount, with a 50%-of-monthly-credit cap on AI Gateway usage. (3) v0 plan lineup was rebranded - the '$20 Premium' plan referenced by older student-program marketing no longer exists; v0 is now Free / Plus ($30/user/mo, $30 monthly credits) / Business ($100/user/mo), so the exact value of the 1-year free v0 for Students offer is unpublished. (4) AI Accelerator credit pools scaled up between cohorts: $4M+ (2025) -> $6M+ (Feb 2026 cohort, apps due 2026-02-16) -> $8M+ on the current page. (5) v0 for Students launched Oct 2025 with 5 schools (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley) and has since expanded to 15; the .edu-only verification has not been loosened as of Jan 2026. (6) Vercel Remote Cache became free (changelog item, 2025-2026 era), adding to the Hobby free offering. |
| Vercel | Verdict: a genuine, active offer exists for startups (Vercel for Startups, now on Flex Commit terms for startups accepted on or after 6 Aug 2026). It is gated by an approved Vercel Startup Partner, so it is not open to every startup. It was changed, not sunset. The CloudRoute change note (6 Aug 2026, Flex Commit, 50% AI Gateway limit) matches Vercel's own FAQ text. Size: Vercel's text says 'up to $30,000', a partner-dependent ceiling; no per-startup amount was verified. Student offers: none verified. The official startups credits FAQ lists general educational perks but no student offer (fetched 2026-10-22). A dedicated web search for a Vercel student offer could not run because the session's web search budget was used up, so a student-specific Vercel offer remains unverified. Vercel's standard Hobby plan is free per SaaSTweaks, but it is a general plan, not a student or startup program. Vercel Open Source Program (not a student or startup program): Startup Perk List (reviewed 2026-10-16) says new applications are closed, and sources conflict on the amount ($3,600 over three years vs over 12 months). Verification method: the official FAQ was read via a narrower WebFetch after the first full fetch failed on output size. The legal terms page (vercel.com/legal/startup-program-terms), cited by East Bridge Global, returned 404, so the legal terms were not checked directly. |
| Vonage | Nexmo branding is effectively sunset: the developer portal still carries legacy Nexmo tracking strings (e.g. signup link 'icid=tryitfree_api-developer-adp_nexmodashbdfreetrialsignup'), but Nexmo products/pricing no longer exist separately — everything is now 'Vonage Communications APIs' (messages, programmable voice, verify, email, conversations/chat, RCS, WhatsApp). The historical 'Nexmo free trial' (Nexmo dashboard trial without CC) survives only as the current 'Try it free / free credit, no credit card required' CTA; the public credit amount is no longer published (legacy sources cited $500 trial credit — unverified today, confidence low on any specific figure). Caveat on research completeness: the session WebSearch budget was exhausted and help.vonage.com was unreachable, so I could not independently confirm 2025-2026 changes to the trial credit amount/duration; all page-level claims above were read directly from official Vonage pages fetched today. |
| Vultr Free Trial | 1) No official dollar figure: Vultr's docs (updated Nov 18, 2025) say only 'free credits for up to 30 days'; the $100 base is a promo-link convention, and 2025-2026 official coupon listings swung to $200/$250/$300 — the exact amount always tracks the specific signup link/coupon, not a standing program. 2) The .edu $5 student credit appears to be a legacy/sunset offer: it is cited by third-party coupon sites (2019-2023) but absent from all current official Vultr promo/coupons/docs pages; treat as unverified for 2026. 3) VULTRMATCH and 50off both carry explicit 'limited time' disclaimers — these rotating coupons can end without notice; VULTRMATCH credit expires 12 months after issuance. 4) The Free Tier Program (1vCPU/512MB/10GB in Miami/Seattle/Frankfurt) is a phased, randomized-access rollout with 'no hard dates' — it can be adjusted or closed at Vultr's discretion. 5) No student-specific program, education license, or university discount page exists on official Vultr property in 2025-2026 (historically a 2014 'College Students can try us Free!' blog post and ad-hoc academic class partnerships, e.g. Stony Brook CSE 356). 6) No material 2025-2026 sunset of the trial itself was found; the main 2025-2026 changes are coupon rotation ($100 -> $200/$250/$300), the new Open Source Credits listing (Sep 30, 2026), and expansion of India partner-hub startup programs. |
| Weaviate Cloud Free Tier | 2025-2026 changes: (1) 2026-06-17: Weaviate sunsetted its time-limited sandbox model for managed Weaviate Cloud and launched the permanent free tier spanning the whole product suite (managed Database + Query Agent + Engram), free without credit card or time expiration (blog: "Weaviate Cloud is now free to start"). (2) Price-book revision effective 1 September 2026 (noted on the pricing page): RQ-4 compression added as its own rate tier between RQ-1 and RQ-8, and backup rates restructured to a common base with regional adjustments - affects paid Flex/Premium plans only, Free plan unchanged. (3) Data transfer is free on all plans only for a "promotional period"; Weaviate reserves the right to charge for egress in the future with advance notice. No evidence was found of any sunset of a startup program or education license (none appear to exist; /startup-program is a 404). Caveat: verification was done by fetching official pages directly on 2026-10-22 (weaviate.io/pricing, /blog, /blog/page/2, /blog/weaviate-free-tier, /community, homepage; docs subpages now 404 - docs moved to docs.weaviate.io/cloud/quickstart); the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so third-party/press corroboration and deeper blog archive pages were not checked. |
| Windsurf | EDUCATION: No active student/education license found as of 2026-10-22. Official checks today: devin.ai/education returns 404, cognition.ai/education redirects to cognition.com/education which returns 404, and the full docs.devin.ai index (llms.txt) contains no education/student page; no student or classroom offer appears on devin.ai/pricing. Any earlier Devin/Windsurf/Codeium student pilot therefore appears to have been sunsetting-era or simply not published as a current program — I could not independently confirm its history because the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so treat the historical student-pilot detail as unverified (medium-low confidence). RENAME: 'Windsurf' the IDE was rebranded to 'Devin Desktop' by Cognition; docs.windsurf.com now 307-redirects to docs.devin.ai/desktop, the 'Cascade' agent name is gone from current docs/release notes (2025 and 2026 releases), and the historically quoted ~$10/month free credit allowance is not stated on any current official page. TRIALS: docs explicitly state 'Free trials of paid plans are not currently offered' — so the only free offers are the perpetual $0 Free tier, the Devin Startup Program, and free Flex seats inside a paid Teams plan. Note: official pages do not publish exact Free-tier quota numbers; 'Light quota' is all that is stated. |
| WorkOS AuthKit | No student/education license exists at WorkOS: workos.com/education returns 404, no education/student/trial URL appears in the official sitemap (sitemap_website.xml), and the footer only offers /startups and /pricing. No free trial credits or sign-up credit pool are documented on any official WorkOS page; the 'startup program' is not a formal program with an application — it is the permanent 1M-MAU free tier marketed to startups. No 2025-2026 sunset of a student/education or startup-credit offer was found: the official changelog (entries Aug 2025 - Oct 2026) contains no pricing/free-tier/trial changes. Caveat: third-party web search was exhausted mid-task in this session, so I could not search for historical/sunset announcements (e.g., a past YC or academic partnership); verification relied on today's official pages (pricing, startups, radar, sitemap, changelog) plus third-party directories corroborating the current state (startups.ws checked 2026-10-21; guptadeepak.com Oct 2026). |
| xAI Grok API | 1) xAI API beta free tier: the old API beta granted free usage ($25/month-class credits, tied to data sharing when the API was in beta, launched Nov 2024) ended December 2024 when the API went GA on pure pay-as-you-go; that offer is closed and was not revived in 2025-2026 — no release-notes entry since Dec 2024 re-introduces credits or free tiers. 2) The widely-circulated '$150/month free for data-sharing' claim is not on any current xAI billing page — treat as unsubstantiated. 3) Unrelated sunsets noted: grok-voice-transcribe-1.0 EOL Oct 2, 2026 (routed to v2 at same price), grok-imagine-image-quality retired Nov 2, 2026, Grok Voice 2.0 deprecated (Voice 3.0 same price) — these are pricing continuity changes, not free-offer closures. 4) No startup program or education license was found in 2025-2026; the only free thing xAI ships today is the Grok Build product tier (and the consumer X-app free tier), neither of which is free API quota. 5) Method caveat: session WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so verification relied on direct WebFetch of official xAI docs (docs.x.ai accessible; x.ai, grok.com, help.x.com, console.x.ai all 403-bot-blocked) plus official release notes. |
| Xata | Major 2025–2026 sunset/change: the permanent free hosted tier that students/startups relied on is GONE. Xata's original product was a hosted 'serverless data platform' (spreadsheet-style UI, REST/TypeScript data API, full-text search, file attachments over Postgres) that shipped a permanent free tier with 15 GB of storage, no cold starts and no pausing. Sunset timeline: (1) On January 10, 2025 Xata pulled the search and files APIs out of the free plan; (2) in May 2025 Xata announced a rebuilt product centered on vanilla, unmodified Postgres with copy-on-write branching and data anonymization (pgstream) — the old platform was briefly renamed 'Xata Lite' and now returns HTTP 410 Gone at lite.xata.io; (3) in late 2025 Xata open-sourced its core under Apache 2.0, and the permanent free hosted tier was replaced by 'self-host the open-source version' plus a 14-day Xata Cloud trial (with a reported $100 signup credit) and no permanent free cloud plan. Consequence: if you used the old Xata free tier for a managed database, it no longer exists — the only permanent-free option is self-hosted open source; the managed path is the 14-day trial then pay-as-you-go ($0.012/hr + $0.28/GB/mo) or BYOC (quote-based). Note: WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so verification relied on the official pricing page + pricing.md + n8n docs read today plus multiple corroborating 2026 third-party trackers; the $100 credit could not be confirmed on the live official page. |
| Y Combinator | 2025: YC reportedly REMOVED the public "YC Startup School Deals & Offers" page (per startcamp.com, Feb 2025). Startup deals moved behind sign-in at deals.ycombinator.com, so YC Startup School members no longer automatically get the old public AWS $5K (non-China) / $1,500+3K rebate (China) tier; that older startup-school AWS deal is effectively retired. 2025-2026 partner CREDITS CHANGES (all EXPANSIONS, no partner program was sunset): (a) Anthropic raised its YC offer from $30K to $500K, no equity; (b) OpenAI overhauled to $500K no-equity + optional $1.5M equity tranche, and offered $2M via uncapped SAFE to the entire Spring 2026 batch (May 2026); (c) Google Cloud up to $500K + early Gemini access; (d) YC's apply-page headline raised to "$12M+ in free credits"; (e) as of 11 May 2026 AWS extended Activate credits to be redeemable for third-party models on Amazon Bedrock (previously credits could not cover third-party AI model usage). Student PROGRAM CHANGES: the YC AI Student Starter Pack was rebranded the "YC AI Stack" and is being 'rolled out' to more students in 2026; the live deals page's named credit amounts have rotated down from the Jan 2026 blog headline ($20K+ cloud / $5K+ GPT-Claude-Grok to currently ~$10K AWS + $1K OpenAI + $500 Anthropic + devtools), so the per-provider figures are moving. No genuine YC-branded free-tier or education-LICENSE program (in the software sense) exists — YC is a VC/accelerator, so all 'offers' are partner credit bundles delivered through YC. |
| Zoho Catalyst & Zoho Classes | No 2025–2026 sunset of the core free offers; the changes were additive or model-level: (1) Zoho Catalyst Student Program ($250/6 months, no CC) is NEW — announced Sept 2, 2026, blogged Sept 6, 2026; nothing before it was retired. (2) Zoho for Startups: the old 'free Zoho One subscription for a year' was replaced by the wallet-credit model (FAQ explicitly calls Zoho One 'our old offering'); Stage 1/Stage 2 structure and 360-day validity are the current model. (3) Zoho Classes 2.0 relaunched July 15, 2026: pricing model flipped from per-student-per-year ($4/₹250, 2020 model) to per-instructor-per-month (Standard ~$7, Pro ~$20, press-reported) for private institutions; the 100-student free edition and the India government free-license offer were kept/strengthened — the government offer expanded explicitly to all Central & State government schools, colleges and universities at no licensing cost. (4) Catalyst historical price-change notice (effective Jan 1, 2024 / Apr 1, 2024 for pre-existing users) ended the free sandbox on Mar 31, 2024, introduced the monthly-renewing free tier and $5/project/month minimum billing on Apr 1, 2024 — still in force today, relevant gotcha for the free tier. Method note: final web-search budget was exhausted after six searches; all findings above were read today via WebFetch or same-day official-page search snapshots (zoho.com direct fetches returned 403 to the fetcher, so zoho.com pages were read via search snapshots of the live pages). |
| Zoho CRM Free Edition | No offers found to be sunset on the pages read today. (1) No public student/.edu education-license program found: https://www.zoho.com/education/, /students/, /academic/ all 404, and the CRM pricing page carries no student offer — Zoho's education angle today is Zoho University (free courses/exams, open to all, not a .edu license), whose site (zohouniversity.com) was unreadable today due to a TLS cert mismatch, so its current details are unverified. (2) Zoho for Startups is active but region-gated (incl. India, UK, US-adjacent list; no US on the list as fetched today) and enabler-gated; credit amounts are not published on the page. (3) Verification caveat: WebSearch budget was exhausted mid-task, so 2025-2026 change checks relied on today's official pages only; the CRM paid-trial duration is not stated on zoho.com/crm/pricing.html (sibling Zoho pages confirm 14-15 day, no-CC trial pattern). |