How Tier Zero works
Where the numbers come from, how they stay current, and what the labels mean.
1. Typed from the vendor
Every offer was read off the vendor's own pricing, free-tier or docs page, with the sentence it came from kept as a quote. Where the page does not say whether a card is needed, it says "not stated".
2. Checked every week
Each Thursday a check fetches every source page and compares the sentences that state terms. Unchanged: the offer is marked checked that day. Changed: a model reads the new terms, and the difference joins the timeline as Unverified.
3. Reviewed by hand
Unverified changes and reader corrections are reviewed before an offer's numbers change. Links always go to the vendor: no affiliate links, no sponsored placement.
Offer types
No end date: a free plan or monthly allowance that stays free within its limits.
A dollar amount of usage, one-off or monthly, spent on the vendor's paid services.
Full or near-full access for a fixed number of days, usually with starting credits.
Free credits or plans for enrolled students, usually verified with a school email.
Credits for startups, applied for and granted by the vendor or a partner investor.
Sources
29 official sites, fetched directly.
Questions
What is Tier Zero?
A board of the free tiers, trials, credits, student offers and startup programs across data, AI and cloud: Snowflake, Databricks, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Gemini, MongoDB Atlas, Supabase, Neon, Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub Copilot and more. Every offer shows what you get, for how long, whether a card is needed, and links to the vendor's own sign-up and docs.
How much is the Snowflake free trial?
A Snowflake trial account comes with $400 of free usage and lasts 30 days, or until the credits run out. Sign-up needs only an email address; AI features stay off until a card is added.
Which cloud gives the most free credits?
For new accounts: Google Cloud gives $300 for 90 days, Oracle Cloud US$300 for 30 days, AWS up to $200 over a 6-month Free plan, and Azure $200 for 30 days. Startup programs go much higher: up to $350,000 from Google for Startups, $200,000 from AWS Activate and $150,000 from Microsoft for Startups.
Is there a free LLM API?
Yes. The Gemini API free tier makes Flash models free of charge within rate limits (free-tier content is used to improve Google products), Groq has a Free plan with per-model limits, Cloudflare Workers AI gives 10,000 Neurons a day, and Hugging Face gives every free account $0.10 of Inference Providers credit a month.
Which free tiers need no credit card?
Use the "No card" filter on the board. Among them: the Snowflake trial, Neon, Turso, Firebase Spark, Cloudflare Workers, the Gemini API free tier, Google Colab and Azure for Students. Offers whose page does not say are marked "not stated" rather than guessed.
How current is this?
Every offer shows the date it was last checked against the vendor's page. A weekly check reads each source page, and when the text changes, the difference is added to the changes timeline, marked Unverified until reviewed. The vendor's page is always the final word.
Offers change often; the vendor's page is the final word. Links go straight to the vendor, no affiliate links. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.
Data for machines: llms.txt, /api/offers (JSON), changes RSS.