DeepStart

This dated editorial record includes superseded conditions. Use the current facts above for eligibility and access.

Verified 2026-09-19. Amount verbatim from deepinfra.com/deepstart: "1,000,000,000 free tokens*" with the footnote "* at DeepSeek V3.1 prices", and the page's own framing "Get access to up to 1B tokens for free inference" — so this is a ceiling, published as "up to". Eligibility verbatim: "Have raised between 250K and 10M USD" and "Founded in the last 2 years"; the page's application dialog adds "DeepStart applications can only be submitted by a team admin or from an account that is not part of a team" and requires email verification. CARD REQUIREMENT IS VERBATIM, NOT DEDUCED (the V26 lesson): deepinfra.com/pricing states "You have to add a card or pre-pay or you won't be able to use our services." — re-confirmed independently on a second fetch today. NOT SOURCED, so not published: any validity window or expiry for the tokens (DeepInfra publishes none); any USD value (the footnote pegs the count to one model's prices rather than giving a dollar figure); any per-model breakdown. ALSO ESTABLISHED TODAY, as a negative: DeepInfra publishes no general free tier or signup credit — "free" appears nowhere on its pricing page and a grep of docs.deepinfra.com/llms.txt for "free" returned zero matches. That negative is worth keeping: it is the answer to the common assumption that DeepInfra has a free tier. ADVERSARIALLY RE-VERIFIED 2026-09-19, and it changed this record. An independent pass re-found every numeric figure verbatim on DeepInfra's rendered pages and confirmed the negatives (no expiry, no region restriction, no exclusion list, no "subject to change" caveat, no USD equivalent). It also established that the complete rendered DeepStart offer block is exactly seven lines: "DeepStart / 1,000,000,000 free tokens* / To qualify your startup needs to meet the following / Have raised between 250K and 10M USD / Founded in the last 2 years / * at DeepSeek V3.1 prices / Apply now". REMOVED as a result: an earlier draft of this record carried two further eligibility conditions (that only a team admin may apply, and that the account email must be verified first). Those strings exist ONLY inside an embedded i18n JSON bundle that never reaches the rendered DOM — and that bundle was shown to be unreliable as a source of live terms, because it is shipped byte-identically to every page and still contains a dead "10 USD free per month" pricing subtitle that the live pricing page contradicts and never renders. Payload-only strings are not published terms. (Contrast the NVIDIA record, where the figures ARE in a payload but are the values the page actually renders — the test is whether the string reaches the user, not where it is stored.) Re-verified 2026-10-10: MATERIALLY CHANGED. The rendered DeepStart offer block on deepinfra.com/deepstart now reads exactly "DeepStart / ~50,000,000,000 free tokens* / To qualify your startup needs to meet the following / Have raised between 250K and 10M USD / Founded in the last 2 years / * at DeepSeek V4 Flash prices / Credits expire 1 year after approval / Apply now" (SSR body, not the bundle; independent WebFetch pass identical; meta description: "Get access to up to 50B tokens for free inference."). So the amount went from 1,000,000,000 at DeepSeek V3.1 prices to ~50,000,000,000 at DeepSeek V4 Flash prices, and an expiry is now published ("Credits expire 1 year after approval"), retiring September's 'publishes no expiry' negative. Corroborated on deepinfra.com/nvidia-inception: "Approved Inception startups also receive the standard DeepStart grant — ~50,000,000,000 free tokens at DeepSeek V4 Flash prices, usable on any model". Card unchanged and rendered on deepinfra.com/pricing: "You have to add a card or pre-pay or you won't be able to use our services." REMOVED: "DeepInfra states it reviews every application" — on the DeepStart page that sentence exists only in the application_dialog i18n string ("We review every application. Credits are valid for 1 year from approval."), not in the rendered DOM (ADR-0035). NEW, separate offer seen (not part of this record): DeepStart x NVIDIA Inception at deepinfra.com/nvidia-inception — "10,000,000,000 free tokens*" on the Nemotron family, "Your grant is $1,000 in credits", "Valid for 12 months from approval", for Inception members "Founded in the last 5 years". ADVERSARIALLY RE-VERIFIED 2026-10-10: UPHELD. The figure is a visible SSR element ('~50,000,000,000 free tokens*') and a literal in the page's own live chunk (deepstart-31deacb408f024be.js), not a dead bundle string; the footnote and expiry render as visible spans. Lagging source noted, not followed: DeepInfra's blog post 'GLM-5.3 Is Now Available on DeepInfra' (2026-10-03) still says 'up to 1 billion free tokens' — the programme page is the source of record (ADR-0023: a marketing post does not outrank the offer's own page). Re-verified 2026-10-21 in the audit-remediation source sweep: current primary offer page and the material eligibility, validity, unit and payment evidence recorded in SOURCE-VERIFICATION.csv. Historical notes above are retained as history, not current terms. No account was created and no claim was submitted.

Dated change log and sources