May 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 6 negative changes versus 1 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
Cloudflare replaced its four startup tiers with three. In the Internet Archive's capture of 2026-05-11, cloudflare.com/forstartups offered $5K, $25K, $100K and $250K tiers. In the capture of 2026-05-12, cloudflare.com/startups offers Tier 3 at $10k (bootstrapped or self-funded, under $1M raised), Tier 2 at $100k ($1M+ raised, funded by an affiliated partner) and Tier 1 at $350k ($5M+ raised, funded by an affiliated partner), to startups founded within the last 10 years whose most recent round was within the last 12 months. Source ↗
Cloudflare's startup programme stopped covering AI Gateway. The Internet Archive's capture of cloudflare.com/startups on 2026-05-25 lists "$250 on AI Gateway"; the capture of 2026-05-28 says "AI Gateway: Temporarily not covered by credits". The same capture changed Tier 2's criterion from "$1M+ raised" to "Under $5M raised". Source ↗
DigitalOcean (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
As of 2026-05-13, DigitalOcean's startup credits exclude Dedicated and Serverless Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines, Cloudways and Bare Metal GPUs as well as GPU Droplets and H100 GPU products, the two exclusions its page stated before. The page also now puts the monthly credit limit at $10,000; its April capture mentioned a monthly limit without an amount. Source ↗
fivenines.io removed its Free plan (5 monitors, 1 team member, 1 month of data retention) between the archived copies of its site from 2026-05-13 and 2026-05-15. Paid plans now start at €19 a month, with a 14-day free trial. Source ↗
Between the Internet Archive's captures of nx.dev/nx-cloud of 2026-04-23 and 2026-05-04, Nx Cloud's free Hobby plan began listing "5 complimentary contributors"; on 2026-04-23 the contributor allowance was listed on the Team plan only. Its 50,000 monthly credits did not change. Source ↗
Between 2026-05-15 and 2026-05-23, Cerebras renamed its Free tier Free Trial and cut it from 30 to 5 requests a minute and from 60K-64K to 30K tokens a minute on gpt-oss-120b, Llama 3.1 8B and Qwen 3 235B. The 1M tokens a day did not change. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Google (1 positive change)
Google added a Google AI Ultra plan at $99.99 a month with $40 a month in Google Cloud credits, and cut the top AI Ultra plan from $249.99 to $199.99 a month; the top plan keeps $100 a month in credits. Source ↗
Deprecations and Other Changes
Changes counted as neither negative nor positive, such as products and models retired or closed to new users
OpenAI (product deprecated 2026-05-12)
dall-e-2 and dall-e-3 were removed from the OpenAI API on 2026-05-12. OpenAI names gpt-image-2, gpt-image-1 or gpt-image-1-mini as substitutes, and gpt-image-1 itself shuts down on 2026-10-23. Source ↗
OpenAI (product deprecated 2026-05-12)
The Realtime API beta was removed on 2026-05-12; OpenAI's generally available Realtime API replaces it. Source ↗
Google Maps (product deprecated 2026-05-31)
Google Maps Platform client ID authentication reached its announced end date on May 31, 2026 and is being phased out: Google periodically blocks client ID requests ahead of a final termination date it has not published. API keys replace it. Source ↗