Best offer on record: Hobby Free Plan (free tier). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Hobby Free Plan (free tier) high confidence
Genuinely free, no credit card required. Per app: 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU), unlimited apps, up to 3 dashboard seats, up to 5 user impersonations/month, custom domain, fixed 7-day session lifetime, 1-day application-log retention. Machine-auth caps: API Keys 1,000 creations + 100,000 verifications/month; M2M Tokens 2,500 creations + 100,000 verifications/month. Social connections: up to 3. B2B base: 100 MROs/app + 20 members/org included free. NOT included on Hobby: SMS auth, passkeys, MFA, SSO, Directory Sync, simultaneous sessions, satellite domains, removal of Clerk branding.
Eligibility
Open to everyone; no .edu email, no startup age/funding cap, no credit card required, no region limit stated. This is the default free plan.
How to claim
Sign up at clerk.com (GitHub/GitLab), pick the Hobby plan — it is the default free tier. No card. Create your app(s) immediately.
Expiry
No end date; free plan is permanent/ongoing.
Gotchas
Exceeding 50,000 MRU (or 100 MRO without the B2B add-on) triggers a one-month grace period after which you must upgrade. Log retention is only 1 day on Hobby. 'No card required' — but the dev-instance trick (below) is what unlocks Pro features for free in development, not the Hobby plan itself.
Clerk Startup Program (startup discount/credits) high confidence
Pre-negotiated discount on paid (Pro/Business) pricing for eligible startups. The 50,000 MRU + 100 MRO free allowance is already part of base pricing; the startup discount is what unlocks paid Pro features (SMS codes, allowlist/blocklist, RBAC, custom session duration, device tracking & revocation, etc.). Exact discount percentage and credit amount are NOT disclosed on the page — 'pre-negotiated' only. Partner dropdown covers Stripe Atlas, Y Combinator, Techstars, a16z, South Park Commons, Seedcamp, Pioneer, Mercury, Hub71, LaunchHouse, OnDeck, PWV, S28, Mucker Capital, Forum Ventures, and many others, or 'None/Other'.
Eligibility
Company must be up to 1 year post-launch AND up to $5M in total venture funding. No region restriction stated. Requires an existing Clerk account (you must be signed in to apply). Not a student offer.
How to claim
Sign in to Clerk, go to clerk.com/startups, fill Name / Company email / Company website / optional partner, and submit. You are prompted to 'create an application' if the account has none. The discount period starts only once your application is approved.
Expiry
Eligibility: up to 1 year post-launch and up to $5M venture funding; no explicit end-date for the discount itself.
Gotchas
This is a discount, not a flat free grant — no dollar/percentage credit figure is published. The discount does not activate immediately; it starts at approval. No credit-card requirement is stated. No hard sunset/expiry date for the discount period is published. Eligibility window (1 year post-launch, <=$5M) is the practical cutoff.
Free Dev-Instance Trial of Pro features high confidence
Clerk has no time-boxed paid trial. Instead, ALL Pro-tier features are available for free inside the development instance of your application, so you can test full functionality without a paid subscription. Dashboard tags which features require an upgrade to run in production. This is the effective free 'trial' of premium capability.
Eligibility
Any user with a Clerk account (Hobby or paid). No .edu or startup requirement. Free in the dev environment only.
How to claim
Create/use a dev instance via the SDK + dashboard, enable and exercise Pro features there. Switch to production requires a paid plan.
Expiry
Ongoing, tied to the dev instance; not a time-limited trial.
Gotchas
Dev-only: none of these Pro features are usable in a production app while on Hobby. Same pattern for Directory Sync — it is 'free in development instances' but production needs Pro/Business + the B2B Authentication add-on.
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.