OpenAI

OpenAI API pricing is pay-per-use based on tokens processed. GPT-4o costs approximately $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. GPT-3.5 Turbo costs $0.50/$1.50 per million tokens. For most early-stage AI startups, monthly API costs range from $100–$1,000 depending on usage volume and model selection.

Yes. OpenAI startup credits cover fine-tuning jobs, which involve training a custom version of GPT-3.5 Turbo or GPT-4 on your specific data. Fine-tuning costs depend on dataset size — typically $50–$500 for a training run on 1,000–10,000 examples. The resulting fine-tuned model also has per-token inference costs covered by credits.

Yes. The OpenAI startup credit program does not require venture capital funding. Bootstrapped founders, solo developers, and self-funded startups are eligible. The requirement is a demonstrable AI-powered product or prototype — not a funding round.

Credits cover all OpenAI API models: GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL-E 3 (image generation), Whisper (speech-to-text), text-embedding-ada-002 (embeddings), and any new models released during the credit period. There are no model restrictions.

OpenAI startup credits typically last 12 months from activation or until the credit balance is exhausted, whichever comes first. At typical early-stage usage ($200–$500/month in API calls), $2,500 in credits covers 5–12 months of development and production usage.

Yes. OpenAI and Anthropic are separate companies with independent startup programs. You can claim credits from both and use each for different workloads — OpenAI for features that benefit from GPT-4o and Anthropic for features that benefit from Claude. Many AI startups use both APIs in production.