Google Cloud

The Google for Startups Cloud Program has three tiers. Start gives $2,000 to young pre-funded startups with a working MVP. Scale gives up to $200,000 over 2 years and Scale AI up to $350,000 over 2 years, both for startups with verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A funding.

For AI startups, year 1 covers 100% of usage up to $250,000 and year 2 covers 20% of usage up to another $100,000. For other startups, year 1 covers 100% up to $100,000 and year 2 covers 20% up to another $100,000. Using all of year 2 needs $500,000 of usage.

Yes, for Google's own models on Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI), such as Gemini 3.5 Flash at $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $9.00 per 1M output tokens. Third-party models in Model Garden, Marketplace purchases and subscription-billed products are not covered.

Google excludes companies that have IPO'd or been acquired, agencies, dev shops, consultancies, nonprofits, educational and government bodies, personal blogs and crypto mining. Non-venture funding such as grants, bank loans or crowdfunding does not qualify for the Scale tier.

Google says most applicants get an email within 5 to 7 days. Applications with missing information can take 10 days or more. Your email domain must match your website, and you need your 18-character billing account ID.

Any new customer gets the $300 Free Trial for 90 days plus the Always Free tier, which includes one e2-micro VM a month in selected US regions, 2 million Cloud Run requests and 1 TiB of BigQuery queries a month.