A grey market has emerged among Indian startup founders and student builders who attended Y Combinator’s recent Startup School program in India, where participants were given AI-related credits worth nearly $25,000. These credits—meant to support early-stage innovation—are now being resold through informal channels for quick financial gain.
The credits were originally distributed by Y Combinator during its first-ever Startup School event in Bengaluru, aimed at encouraging AI-focused entrepreneurship. The package included cloud and API access from major platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The intent was to help founders experiment, build prototypes, and reduce early infrastructure costs.
However, reports suggest that several participants who did not immediately require the credits have begun selling or exchanging access codes through WhatsApp groups, Reddit threads, and informal startup networks. In some cases, sellers are offering large-value credits at heavily discounted prices, sometimes as low as 60–80% of their original value.
The practice has created an informal secondary market, where AI infrastructure credits are treated almost like tradable assets. While some founders justify it to recover unused value, others argue it undermines the purpose of such startup support programs. There are also concerns that this may violate the terms and conditions of the original credit providers.
Operational challenges have further contributed to the trend. Some participants reportedly faced difficulties activating the credits due to eligibility requirements such as business registration, domain ownership, or verification steps required by cloud providers. These barriers pushed certain users to either abandon the credits or attempt to monetize them instead.
Industry observers note that this situation highlights a broader gap in early-stage startup ecosystems, where access to high-value digital infrastructure does not always translate into effective utilization. It also raises questions about how accelerator programs can better monitor usage and ensure that support is directed toward genuine product development rather than short-term financial arbitrage.
Despite the controversy, the development underscores the growing intensity of India’s AI startup ecosystem, where even access to developer credits has become a sought-after and tradable resource amid rising demand for compute power and AI tooling.
