The credits and programmes, 2026

By the end of this chapter you will have a short list of the startup programmes your company qualifies for, an application for each that is a page you have already published, and a file where every answer is recorded with its date. The table is the one the newsroom printed in A locked-down desktop for an agent, by the minute, is still hard to rent, and every amount and criterion in it was read from each programme's own page on 7 October 2026. Programmes change; check before applying. That sentence is part of the table, not a disclaimer, and it is why this chapter sits in a part that is dated and renewed each year.

The table, as of 7 October 2026

Each one is applied for on the provider's own startup page; the article carries the links. Two more belong here, from The key is the billing system, read on 12 October 2026, because a product that transcribes or speaks needs them: ElevenLabs' Grants, twelve months and 33 million characters, for companies under 25 people with a monetised use, whose characters cannot be exchanged or resold; and AssemblyAI's startup programme, twelve months of recurring credits.

Two that look like startup programmes are not, for a company. MacStadium's open-source programme gives a free Mac mini to unpaid maintainers; a commercial product does not qualify, and should not be dressed up as one. Hetzner's referral credit could not be confirmed from an official page on the day.

The proposal that reshaped this book called that table the only one of startup cloud credits, and named AWS, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic; it carries more than those four. The first edition left a draft on AWS. This is its answer, and the date on it is the point.

The rule: apply with the work

What matters more than the table is how it is used, and the method is the workflow.

1. Check every criterion against yourself before you write a word. Your company's age, how it is funded, whether it has customers, whether you have used the product before. Apply only where every criterion is met; the desktop article says it in one line, "we apply only where they are met." A programme for open-source maintainers is not for your product, however good the Mac mini looks.
2. The application is a page you have already published. The desktop article's plan was to apply with the article itself as the description of what the credits would do: the nine properties of an agent desktop, the products against them, and the measurements that could not be made without hours on the machines. You have the same thing if you have followed Your own newsroom and inbox: a page that says what you are building and what you would test. Send that, not a form filled in from nothing.
3. Offer the provider the result. The offer in the desktop article was to run the same tasks on their product next to the others, measured rather than read, and to publish the results, including the gaps. A provider that funds an evaluation wants the evaluation. Say what you will publish, and when.
4. Ask what the pages do not say. Before relying on any credit: what services it covers, when it expires, and whether a monthly fee is paid from it. The article's three open questions were exactly those: whether Scaleway's credits cover Apple silicon Mac minis, whether an AWS award covers EC2 Mac Dedicated Hosts, and when E2B's credits expire and whether its $150 monthly Pro fee comes out of them. Yours will be different; the shape is the same.
5. Write to them the way the billing article's brief does. Principles first, the ones every message carries; then the ask, one sentence, the same to each; then the research already done, attached. "A provider that can see the research already done tends to answer the question that was actually asked." The agents draft; you send. Nothing goes out in your name that you have not read.
6. Record every answer as an issue, with its date. In the repository or the vault the company works from, so the map can be updated as a new version rather than a new article. A year from now several rows of the table above will be wrong, and your record of what each provider said to you is the only version that was ever true for you.