Best offer on record: Azure for Students. 15 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Azure for Students high confidence
$100 Azure credit usable within 12 months. No credit card required. The page also lists free monthly allowances for popular services (labelled 12 months for new customers, or Always).
Eligibility
Full-time university students (per the page). Sign-up with a school email. One account per person.
How to claim
Open the Azure for Students page, click 'Start free' or 'Sign up', and register with a school email address. Developer tools are then reached through the Azure Education Hub.
Expiry
Credit usable within 12 months. The offer can be renewed each year while the user remains a student. The page does not say what happens to unused credit at 12 months.
Gotchas
'Full-time university students' is narrower than students in general. If the credit runs out and the user does not switch to pay-as-you-go, the subscription and products are disabled. 'Azure for Students Starter' is mentioned but not described.
GitHub Student Developer Pack (partner offers) high confidence
Bundle of free or discounted partner tools. Values named on the page: Azure $100 credit; MongoDB $50 Atlas credits; Heroku $13/month for 24 months; Datadog Pro for two years at no cost; Appwrite Education plan for six months; DataCamp three free months when subscribing with a student GitHub account; Sentry offer with a 1-year limit that can be renewed; JetBrains free subscription 'to be renewed annually'. GitHub Copilot Student is limited to verified students.
Eligibility
Students who register for the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Many offers last only while the user remains a student. Age varies by offer: the main Azure offer is for students 18+, and a separate Azure offer covers ages 13 to 17. Verification steps are not described on the page.
How to claim
Use the 'Sign up for Student Developer Pack' link, which points to github.com/settings/education/benefits.
Expiry
No pack-wide rule. Each partner sets its own term (for example 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, or while still a student).
Gotchas
Terms differ per partner and can change. The page gives no single rule for the pack as a whole.
Up to $200 in credits: $100 immediately at sign-up, plus up to $100 more for exploring key services, usable over up to 6 months. The page says 30+ AWS services are always free within monthly usage limits on both the Free and Paid plans; it does not list those services or their limits.
Eligibility
New customers. Promotional credits do not qualify for the Free plan.
How to claim
Click 'Create a free account' on the AWS Free Tier page. The page gives no step-by-step sign-up requirements.
Expiry
The Free plan account closes 6 months after opening, or when credits run out, whichever comes first. The always-free services have no stated end date.
Gotchas
The 6-month closure is shorter than free-for.dev's 12-month floor for time-bucketed tiers, so only the always-free services fit that list. The page says the Free plan covers over 90 services, but its comparison table limits the Free plan to a subset. No charges unless the user upgrades to a Paid plan or activates paid-only services.
Google Cloud Free Trial and Free Tier high confidence
$300 credit for new customers, valid 90 days from sign-up. Free Tier includes one non-preemptible e2-micro VM per month hosted in Oregon, Iowa or South Carolina; usage is tracked in hours across e2-micro instances.
Eligibility
New customers. Free Tier use requires a Cloud Billing account, which the Free Trial sign-up can provide.
How to claim
Sign up for the Free Trial from cloud.google.com/free. The sign-up can create the billing account that Free Tier use requires.
Expiry
The $300 credit is valid for 90 days from sign-up. The Free Tier has no set expiration, but Google can change or remove its limits with 30 days' warning.
Gotchas
Only the credit and the e2-micro figures were verified here. Limits for Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, BigQuery and Firestore were not confirmed. The 90-day credit is time-bucketed and fails free-for.dev's 12-month floor.
Always Free compute: OCI Ampere A1 instances, no more than 2 OCPUs and 12 GB memory in total across all A1 instances, as stated in the fetched summary. Storage allowances are on a linked Always Free resources page that was not retrieved. Separate $300 trial credit valid for up to 30 days.
Eligibility
Most users need a mobile phone number and a credit card to create an account. The card is not charged unless the account is upgraded.
How to claim
Create an Oracle Cloud account (phone number and card needed for most users) and keep resources within the Always Free limits.
Expiry
Always Free resources never expire. The $300 trial credit is valid for up to 30 days.
Gotchas
Instances over the Always Free limit are disabled and then deleted after 30 days unless the account is upgraded. Always Free Autonomous AI Databases and compute instances can be provisioned only in the home region chosen at sign-up. The A1 figure should be re-checked on the live page: it differs from the 4 OCPU / 24 GB figure this assistant recalls.
Workers: 100,000 requests/day; 10 ms CPU time per invocation. Workers KV: 100,000 reads/day, 1,000 writes/day, 1,000 deletes/day, 1,000 lists/day, 1 GB storage. D1: 5 million rows read/day, 100,000 rows written/day, 5 GB total storage. R2: 10 GB-month storage, 1 million Class A and 10 million Class B operations per month. Durable Objects (SQLite-backed only on Free): 100,000 requests/day, 13,000 GB-s/day duration, 5 million rows read/day, 100,000 rows written/day, 5 GB storage.
Eligibility
Any developer on the default Free plan. The page names no student or startup condition.
How to claim
No separate claim step is described on the pricing page; the Free plan is the default.
Expiry
None stated. The page presents the Free plan without a time limit but does not call it permanent.
Gotchas
KV and D1 daily allowances reset at 00:00 UTC. The 10 ms CPU limit applies per invocation.
Unlimited private repositories (with a limited feature set), unlimited collaborators, 2,000 Actions minutes per month, 500 MB GitHub Packages storage, 120 Codespaces core hours per month, 15 GB Codespaces storage per month. Organizations on the Free plan also get unlimited collaborators and 2,000 Actions minutes per month.
Eligibility
Personal accounts and organizations. The page names no student or startup condition.
How to claim
Create a GitHub account. The plans page describes no separate claim step.
Expiry
No time limit named for the plan. The Actions and Codespaces allowances are monthly.
Gotchas
Private repositories come with a limited feature set. The page gives no period for the 500 MB Packages storage.
Free plan for personal projects. Included: 100 GB fast data transfer; 10 GB fast origin transfer; 1,000,000 CDN requests; 1,000,000 function invocations; 4 CPU-hours active CPU; 360 GB-hours provisioned memory; 5,000 image transformations; 50,000 web analytics events per month; 200 projects; 100 deployments per day; 50 domains per project; 300 s maximum function duration.
Eligibility
Personal, non-commercial use only. The page says this follows Vercel's fair use guidelines.
How to claim
Create a personal Vercel account; Hobby is the free plan. Pro is the paid upgrade, reached from the dashboard under Settings then Billing.
Expiry
No time limit. If usage limits are exceeded, the feature is paused until 30 days have passed; there is no billing cycle.
Gotchas
Not for commercial use: a startup's production product needs Pro, which the page prices at $20 per developer seat per month. Web analytics collection pauses after the grace period and can resume after 7 days. Runtime logs are limited to 1 hour.
MongoDB Atlas free shared cluster (M0) high confidence
0.5 GB total storage (fixed, does not auto-scale); 100 operations per second (excess throttled); 500 connections; 10 GB in and 10 GB out per rolling seven days (excess throttled); 100 databases and 500 collections; one Free cluster per project; 32 MB in-memory sort limit; 50 stages per aggregation pipeline.
Eligibility
Any Atlas account holder. The page names no student or startup condition.
How to claim
Create an Atlas account and deploy a Free (M0) cluster. The docs page describes no separate claim step.
Expiry
The page does not say whether the tier is permanent. Idle clusters are paused after 30 days with zero connections and may be deactivated under the Terms of Service.
Gotchas
Unsupported: server-side JavaScript (the $where operator and map-reduce), private endpoints, network peering, Performance Advisor, log downloads. Authentication is limited to SCRAM-SHA1, X.509 and AWS IAM. The GitHub Student Developer Pack adds $50 in Atlas credits.
Render Free tier (web services and Postgres) high confidence
Free web services: 750 free instance hours per workspace per calendar month; spin down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic; about one minute to spin back up. Free Postgres: one active database per workspace, 1 GB fixed storage, no backups, no hosted connection pooling.
Eligibility
Any Render workspace. The docs name no student or startup condition.
How to claim
Choose the Free instance type when creating a web service or Postgres database. The docs describe no separate sign-up step.
Expiry
Free Postgres expires 30 days after creation; after a 14-day grace period the database and its data are deleted unless upgraded. Free web services have no stated end date.
Gotchas
Filesystem changes are lost on redeploy, restart or spin-down; no persistent disks; free services are suspended when the monthly hours run out; Render may restart free services at any time; the docs say not to use free services for production.
Start on the Developer plan from sentry.io/pricing. The page describes no separate claim step.
Expiry
None. The page says 'Start free on the Developer plan forever.'
Gotchas
Email-only alerts; no API or third-party integrations; no SAML, SCIM, BAA or Relay; no spend cap. The GitHub pack lists a separate Sentry partner offer with a 1-year limit that can be renewed; that offer was not checked on Sentry's own site.
Firestore: 1 GiB stored; 10 GiB/month egress; 50,000 reads/day; 20,000 writes/day; 20,000 deletes/day. Realtime Database: 100 connections; 1 GB stored; 10 GB/month downloaded; one database per project. Authentication: 50,000 MAUs for non-phone services and 50 MAUs for SAML/OIDC. Hosting: 10 GB storage and 360 MB/day transfer. Quotas apply per project.
Eligibility
Any user. No payment method is needed.
How to claim
Create a Firebase project on the Spark plan. No payment method is needed, per the page.
Expiry
No end date is given for Spark. SQL Connect's Spark allowances apply only during a 3-month trial.
Gotchas
Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions and App Hosting are marked 'Not applicable' on Spark; their free allowances sit under the Blaze plan. Phone authentication has no Spark allowance.
100 CU-hours per project; autoscaling capped at 2 CU (8 GB RAM); 1 GB database storage per project and 20 GB across the account; 5 GB object storage per project; up to 100 projects with up to 10 branches each.
Eligibility
Any user. The page names the audience as prototypes, side projects and small teams, and states no commercial-use restriction.
How to claim
Sign up at neon.com and create a project on the Free plan. The page says no credit card is needed.
Expiry
None. The page calls the plan 'permanent (not a trial)'. When the 100 CU-hours are used up, compute pauses until the next billing cycle.
Gotchas
Idle compute pauses after 5 minutes and cannot be turned off on the Free plan.
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.