Yandex Cloud Startup Credits ($5,000 / $20,000)
Source: https://yandex.cloud/en/cloud-credits-for-trial
Description
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+ 1 Yandex Cloud's startup program offers tiered grants gated by Technology Readiness Level (TRL): $5,000 for 6 months for early-stage teams (Start tier, TRL up to ~6 / pre-seed) or $20,000 for 12 months for scaling startups (Develop tier, seed to Series A). Credits cover the full Yandex Cloud platform including Compute Cloud, VPC, Object Storage, DataSphere, SpeechKit, and the YandexGPT 5 / Foundation Models lineup. The Russian/CIS/Turkish market is the obvious fit, but the program operates in English with 24/7 support.
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+ 3 Heads-up for Western founders: Yandex Cloud is a Russian provider. Sanctions, payment friction, and data-residency concerns mean this is mostly relevant if you target Russia, CIS, Turkey, or the Middle East. If you don't, AWS Activate / Azure for Startups / GCP for Startups will be a far smoother path.
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+ 9 TierCreditDurationFunding stageTRL
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+ 10 Start$5,0006 monthsPre-seedTRL 1–7 (concept → demo)
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+ 11 Develop$20,00012 monthsSeed to Series ATRL up to 6 (some docs say up to 7)
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+ 13 Above TRL 6–7 (i.e. commercially deployed product, TRL 8–9) you are no longer eligible for the free program and are pointed at standard pay-as-you-go pricing instead. The original discovery entry's claim that TRL 8–9 startups get the $20K tier is incorrect — Yandex's official pages flip this: the more mature you are, the less likely you qualify.
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+ 19 To qualify for either tier you must:
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+ 21 • Be a technology company — nonprofits, educational institutions, and agencies are excluded.
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+ 22 • Not have IPO'd or been acquired.
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+ 23 • Match the funding-stage band for the tier (Pre-seed for Start; Seed to Series A for Develop).
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+ 24 • Have a TRL of 6 or lower (concept through technology demonstration). Higher-TRL teams get pointed at standard pricing.
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+ 25 • Apply with a business email matching your application details (no gmail/personal addresses).
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+ 26 • Create a Yandex ID account.
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+ 32 1. Go to yandex.cloud/en/cloud-credits-for-trial and click the application CTA.
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+ 33 2. Create a Yandex ID if you don't have one (uses the same login as Yandex Mail / Maps / Disk). Phone verification required.
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+ 34 3. Fill out the application form: company name, business email, website, team size, TRL self-assessment, funding stage, intended use case (which Yandex Cloud services and roughly what workload).
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+ 35 4. Wait for personalised consultation — a Yandex Cloud expert reviews your application and reaches out (typically within a few business days).
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+ 36 5. Solution design call with Yandex Cloud architects to scope which services fit your workload.
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+ 37 6. Create a billing account in the Yandex Cloud console once approved (a card is required for billing-account creation, even though you spend credits).
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+ 38 7. Credits are applied to your billing account. The 6- or 12-month clock starts at activation.
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+ 39
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+ 40 Caveats:
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+ 41 • The form is in English, but expect occasional Russian-only screens deeper in the console.
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+ 42 • Yandex aggressively gates pages with CAPTCHA and may demand a Russian/CIS phone number for verification — expect friction from EU/US numbers.
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+ 43 • A billing account requires a payment method on file. Once credits run out the account silently transitions to paid usage — set budget alerts.
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+ 49 Yandex enforces a service-class spending split:
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+ 50
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+ 51 • Up to ~25% of the grant can be spent on the "core platform" services: Compute Cloud, VPC, Object Storage, Network Load Balancer, Cloud Marketplace, Monitoring, DataSphere, SpeechKit, Translate, Vision, and Foundation Models (YandexGPT, YandexART, embeddings).
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+ 52 • The remaining ~75% must be used on other Yandex Cloud services. Cloud Interconnect is excluded entirely.
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+ 53
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+ 54 This split is unusual — it pushes startups toward consuming the broader platform (managed databases, K8s, queues, etc.) rather than burning the entire grant on raw VMs or one expensive AI service.
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+ 60 Yandex's AI lineup is now consolidated under Yandex AI Studio (model gallery) and Yandex Foundation Models.
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+ 61
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+ 63 • YandexGPT 5 Pro — flagship model for complex tasks, 32K context, strong on Russian and English.
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+ 64 • YandexGPT 5.1 Pro — newer business-tier flagship (opened to business access Aug 2025).
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+ 65 • YandexGPT 5 Lite (8B) — fast/real-time, 32K context, available as open weights on Hugging Face.
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+ 66 • Alice AI LLM — next-gen model, leader on the SLAVA Russian benchmark, tuned for dialogue.
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+ 67
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+ 69 • YandexART — cascaded-diffusion text-to-image.
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+ 72 • SpeechKit — STT and TTS, integrated with YandexGPT for voice agents.
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+ 75 • DataSphere — managed Jupyter / training environment with GPU.
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+ 76 • Vision — OCR, classification, face detection.
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+ 77 • Translate — NMT API.
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+ 78 • Embeddings — via Foundation Models for RAG/search.
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+ 79
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+ 80 Source for the latest model list: Yandex AI Studio model gallery and the Foundation Models pricing page.
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+ 86 • TRL too high (8–9, already at scale) — you're directed to standard pay-as-you-go pricing. The separate 60-day Free Trial grant (yandex.cloud/en/docs/getting-started/free-trial) is still available to any new billing account.
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+ 87 • VC- or accelerator-backed but not a direct applicant — ask your VC/accelerator if they're a partner under the Yandex Cloud Boost collaboration program. Partners can refer portfolio companies for similar credits.
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+ 88 • Maps / Weather / Ads APIs — the broader Yandex Startup Program (yandex.com.tr/project/startups/en) bundles free access to those APIs alongside Cloud credits.
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+ 94 • Region: Yandex Cloud's primary regions are in Russia, with newer expansion into Turkey/CIS and Middle East partner zones. Data residency is effectively Russia/CIS — do not use this for workloads with EU GDPR data subjects unless you have a very specific reason.
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+ 95 • Sanctions / payment risk: since 2022, Visa/Mastercard issued outside Russia/CIS often fail at billing-account creation. Founders without a regional card or legal entity will struggle to even sign up. If you have a Turkish / Kazakh / Armenian / UAE entity this is much easier.
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+ 96 • English support is real — the marketing page advertises 24/7 English, and the console is largely localized, but documentation depth in English lags Russian.
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+ 97 • Foundation Models pricing is in roubles — the $5K/$20K is converted at the prevailing rate. Don't be surprised by exchange-rate drift.
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+ 98 • Set budget alerts the moment credits land. There is no auto-cutoff when the grant expires.
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+ 101
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+ 102 Sources:
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+ 103 • Yandex Cloud — Cloud Credits for Trial
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+ 104 • Yandex Startup Program (yandex.com.tr/project/startups/en)
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+ 105 • Yandex Cloud Boost (collaboration with VCs / accelerators)
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+ 106 • Yandex Cloud 60-Day Free Trial Quickstart
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+ 107 • YandexGPT 5 — service page
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+ 108 • Yandex Foundation Models pricing
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+ 109 • YandexGPT-5-Lite-8B (Hugging Face open weights)
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