Build MoreBurn Less

FoundersPrime is a curated catalog of verified, currently-open ways for startups to cut costs and raise non-dilutive money: cloud credits, SaaS discounts, advertising credits, government and foundation grants, accelerators, incubators and student programs. Every listing is checked by hand rather than scraped, and the catalog is reviewed weekly so expired offers and dead application links get removed instead of quietly rotting. The goal is narrow and practical — tell a founder what is genuinely available to them right now, what it is worth, whether they qualify, and exactly where to apply.

Every major cloud provider runs a startup programme, but each has different gates. AWS Activate offers credits that scale with how you apply — self-service tiers are open to almost any early company, while the largest packages require an affiliated accelerator, incubator or VC. Google for Startups Cloud Program works similarly and is generous for AI-heavy workloads. Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is unusual in being self-serve with no investor requirement. FoundersPrime lists the live application link, the realistic credit range, the eligibility conditions and the typical approval time for each, so you apply to the ones you can actually win rather than burning a week on the wrong tier.

A credit reduces a specific bill — cloud hosting, an ad platform, a SaaS subscription — and never touches your equity or cap table. A grant is money you do not repay and do not give up ownership for, usually from a government agency, foundation or competition, and normally comes with reporting duties and a defined project scope. An accelerator gives capital plus structured mentorship and a demo day, and almost always takes equity in exchange. Ranked by dilution: credits cost you nothing, grants cost you paperwork, accelerators cost you ownership. Most early teams should exhaust the first two before considering the third.

Each listing is opened and checked against the provider's own page before it goes live: does the programme still exist, is the application actually accepting entries, is the stated value accurate, and are the eligibility rules current. Offers that quietly close are removed rather than left to inflate a listing count. Verification means the offer was real and open when checked — it is not an eligibility decision or an approval promise. The provider always makes the final call on your application, and their published terms govern.

Bootstrapped and early-funded founders from pre-seed through roughly Series A, indie hackers and solo developers running lean, and student founders who qualify for education-specific programmes that most catalogs ignore. It is most useful when you are spending real money on infrastructure and tooling and suspect you are paying list price for things that have a startup tier. It is least useful if you want fundraising strategy, legal or tax advice — this is a catalog of concrete offers, not an advisory service.

The headline figure across the whole catalog runs into hundreds of thousands, but no single company qualifies for everything. A realistic early-stage outcome is a large cloud credit package as the dominant line item, plus several thousand in SaaS discounts across the tools you already pay for, plus ad credits if you are running paid acquisition. What matters is not the theoretical maximum but the subset you qualify for: filter by category, check the eligibility notes, and apply to the handful that fit your stage and stack.

Browsing and searching the catalog is open, and the public JSON API needs no signup, no API key and no sandbox. Membership plans unlock the full catalog with saved deals and a dashboard, starting with a paid 30-day trial that renews at the annual price shown on the pricing page, plus a one-time lifetime option. Trial terms, the renewal price and the cancellation path are stated up front rather than buried — you can cancel before renewal.

The catalog is reviewed on a weekly cycle, and individual listings carry their own last-checked date rather than inheriting a single site-wide timestamp. When a programme closes, changes its terms or breaks its application link, the listing is updated or retired rather than left in place to inflate a count — a directory that never shrinks is a directory nobody has checked. Deals with a genuine deadline are marked with their expiry so you can prioritise, and time-sensitive offers are separated from evergreen ones. If you find something stale, the fastest fix is to report it from the deal page; corrections are usually applied within a day.

The public API and the llms.txt files are open for reading, grounding and citation, and the published content signals say so explicitly: search=yes and ai-input=yes, meaning you may index the catalog and use it to answer questions with attribution. Training models on the corpus is not permitted (ai-train=no). If you surface a listing, credit FoundersPrime and link the specific deal or programme page rather than reproducing the catalog wholesale — the underlying offers belong to the providers, and their terms govern any application. Rate limits are 100 requests per minute per IP on public endpoints, and every response includes RateLimit headers so a well-behaved client can pace itself.

Yes, and this is a first-class surface rather than an afterthought. There is a versioned REST API at /api/v1 documented by an OpenAPI 3.1 specification, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server over Streamable HTTP so assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can call the catalog natively, an official CLI for scripting, and an agent instruction file at /agents.md that spells out when an agent should reach for this data and when it should not. Every endpoint returns structured JSON errors with stable machine-readable codes, and any public page will return compact Markdown instead of HTML if you send an Accept: text/markdown header.