How to pay for Claude with AWS credits

Four programs at a glance

There are four programs worth knowing. Two are run by AWS and two by Anthropic. The amounts below are the ones each company publishes as of October 2026.

Every figure here is a maximum or a published amount, not a promise. AWS and Anthropic review each application and decide who is approved and for how much.

Where each credit works

A credit is a discount on one company's invoice. That single fact explains everything else in this guide. The same Claude model can answer your request through two doors, and each door sends the bill to a different company.

• Through the Anthropic API, Anthropic bills you. Claude for Startups credits apply. AWS credits do not.
• Through Amazon Bedrock, AWS bills you. Activate credits apply. Anthropic credits do not.

AWS says this directly: Activate credits can be used for third-party models available on Amazon Bedrock, and it names Anthropic among the providers. Anthropic is equally direct: its credits apply only to the first-party Claude API through Claude Console, and not on Amazon Bedrock or Google Cloud.

AWS Activate: amounts and rules

The rules that decide how much the credits are really worth are in the small print.

• Credits apply automatically to new charges on eligible services, before AWS charges your card. You cannot choose which service they go to.
• They do not cover past bills. Usage from before the credits arrived stays on your invoice.
• They usually expire within one to two years, depending on the package.
• A few services are excluded, among them Amazon Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, AWS Professional Services and AWS Training and Certification.
• AWS says a decision takes about 7 to 10 business days, and approved credits appear in the Billing console 3 to 4 hours later.
• You can apply more than once. If you later qualify for a larger package, AWS grants the difference, so taking Founders first does not block Portfolio.

Claude for Startups: amounts and rules

Anthropic's program is smaller at the base tier and much faster to get.

• $1,000 in Claude API credits.
• One year of Claude Team for up to five Premium seats, for companies new to Claude Team.
• Up to $45,000 in partner offers, higher API rate limits and office hours with Anthropic's Applied AI team.
• Up to $100,000 in additional API credits for startups backed by a venture firm in the Anthropic partner network. These are claimed through the investor, not through the public form.

To qualify you need a company founded in the last five years or funded in the last two, a Claude Console account, a company email on the same domain as your website, and a short description of what you are building. Venture funding is not required: bootstrapped and pre-seed companies are accepted.

Anthropic says most applications are decided within minutes, and the rest go to a manual review that usually takes two to three business days.

Spend them in the right order

Because the two clocks are so different, the order matters more than the amounts.

1. Start on the Anthropic API

   Use the Claude for Startups credits first. They expire soonest, and the first-party API has every feature.

2. Apply to AWS Activate in parallel

   The decision takes up to two weeks, and Portfolio has a 12-month window after your funding round. Do not wait until the Anthropic credits are gone.

3. Move the heaviest workload to Bedrock

   When the Anthropic credits run out or expire, send the workload that burns the most tokens through Bedrock, where the AWS credits pay for it.

4. Measure from day one

   Credits hide waste. Track tokens per workload now, so the bill is already lean when the credits end.

This is the calculation founders skip. A $200,000 grant sounds like two years of free inference. At $3,000 a month you will use $72,000 of it, and the rest expires. The practical lesson is to move real workloads onto the credits early and not to treat the headline as money in the bank.

For a sense of scale, take a product that makes 1,000 requests a day, each with 8,000 input tokens and 800 output tokens, on a model priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. One request costs 2.4 cents. That is $24 a day, so $1,000 in credits lasts about six weeks.

What changes when you move to Bedrock

The request body keeps the same Messages API shape. In code, three things change: the client, the login and the model ID.

// Before: Anthropic API, paid with Claude for Startups credits
import Anthropic from '@anthropic-ai/sdk'
const client = new Anthropic() // reads ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
const model = 'claude-opus-5-5'

// After: Amazon Bedrock, paid with AWS Activate credits
import { AnthropicBedrockMantle } from '@anthropic-ai/bedrock-sdk'
const client = new AnthropicBedrockMantle({ awsRegion: 'us-east-1' }) // uses AWS credentials
const model = 'anthropic.claude-opus-5-5'

// The call itself is identical
const message = await client.messages.create({
  model,
  max_tokens: 1024,
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello, Claude' }],
})

The feature list is where moves go wrong. Check every row before you migrate a workload.

• Endpoints. The global endpoint routes across regions and has no price premium. A regional endpoint keeps traffic in one AWS region and costs 10% more. Choose regional only if you need data residency.
• Limits. The default quota is 2 million input tokens per minute. You can ask AWS for more.
• Access. Some models are open to every Bedrock customer and others have their own criteria. Check the model access page in the AWS console for the model you plan to use.
• Prices. AWS sets Bedrock prices. Compare them with what you pay today before you move a large workload.

Before you apply: a checklist

• A live company website that says what the product does.
• An email address on the same domain as that website.
• Your founding date and the date of your latest funding round.
• For Activate Portfolio: the Organizational ID from your investor or accelerator.
• An AWS account and a Claude Console account, both in the company's name.
• Two or three sentences on what you are building and how you use Claude.

Mistakes that cost founders credits

• Starting the six-month Anthropic clock before there is traffic to spend the credits on.
• Letting the 12-month window after a funding round pass without applying for Portfolio.
• Expecting credits to cover last month's invoice. They apply to new usage only.
• Moving a workload to Bedrock that depends on structured outputs, batches or web search, and finding out in production.
• Paying 10% extra for a regional endpoint that nobody asked for.
• Not measuring. When the credits end, the full bill arrives, including every wasted token the credits were hiding.