Business
Indian founders flip Y Combinator’s $25,000 AI tokens for quick bucks
“Hey, are you willing to buy AWS credits? I have $10,000 worth of credits, can give it for $2,000-3,000,” read one message reviewed by ET. Another said, “Willing to sell Azure credits, want to buy?”
Such messages, offering AI credits that startups and builders use to access expensive compute power and developer tools, are increasingly appearing across developer WhatsApp groups and Reddit threads.
These messages are from founders, engineers and student builders who attended Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator’s first Startup School in India in Bengaluru on April 18.
Y Combinator (YC), on its first visit to India, had selected around 2,000 participants for the programme and distributed free API tokens, compute power and developer tool credits worth $25,000 (roughly Rs 21 lakh).
For early-stage AI startups, which burn through a massive amount of money just to test, train, and run models, these credits or tokens help cover initial backend costs.
Several participants with little immediate need for their credits resorted to selling them at discounted rates, effectively creating a grey market for AI credits.
“About 8-10 people have approached me and friends to sell these credits at a 20-40% discount, but not many are buying. They are just shooting in the dark in case they can make some quick money,” said one 16-year old developer who attended the programme.
An AI startup founder from Bengaluru said it is similar to “LinkedIn premium accounts or other builder tools being sold at discounted prices in the grey market.”
However, some attendees told ET that some credits either did not work as expected, or came with activation restrictions, prompting them to sell them.
Y Combinator did not respond to ET’s queries sent on Friday until press time on Monday.
Also Read: Y Combinator comes to India with Startup School, draws a crowd, faces some teething troubles
How does it work?
The YC AI Stack package included cloud credits worth $10,000 each from AWS and Azure, along with AI application programming interface (API) credits such as $2,500 from OpenAI, $500 from Anthropic and $720 from Cursor. Participants also received access to developer tools from YC-backed companies including Supabase, Razorpay, Fireworks AI, Coinbase and Bolna AI, among others.
Users have to generate an access code to redeem their credit. This access code is being sold or shared to others.
Also Read: Large AI firms hoovering maximum funding, not enough for smaller startups: Y Combinator’s Ankit Gupta
Access issues
Yash Kumar, founding engineer at TruCommerce startup, said he received $500 worth credits for Supabase, an open-source platform that provides foundational tools needed to build a web or mobile app.
“While the code for ChatGPT and Claude didn’t work for me, the Supabase code did. I have a bill of $35 per month for Supabase, so this will get me free access for over a year,” he said.
Several student attendees also ran into operational hurdles while trying to activate the credits for popular tools like OpenAI and Anthropic. Some even wrote to YC but said the turnaround time has been slow.
To redeem benefits from large cloud providers such as AWS and Azure through the YC portal, users were required to provide company details, including a registered business name, custom domain and professional email address. Some students had to buy cheap domain names to create company email IDs solely to activate the offers.
“I don’t think the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem is as mature as people think,” said 19-year-old Surya Maddula, founder of WhisperWave, a startup building active noise control technology for open environments. “A lot of people who technically classify as founders don’t really have the founder mindset.”
During the event, YC brought together accelerator-backed founders such as Harshil Mathur (Razorpay), Vidit Aatrey (Meesho), Mukund Jha (Emergent) and Aadit Palicha (Zepto) alongside senior YC partners.
Speaking to ET on the sidelines of the event, Jared Friedman, managing director and general partner of YC, said, “We decided to do Startup School in India for the first time because we believe that we are at the dawn of the second wave of Indian startups, with AI-native companies like Emergent and Giga ML targeting world markets, not just India.